European thought had come through the scientific revolution concerning heaven (astronomy) and earth (physics), and emerged, full of optimism about man's power of cognition, into the Age of Reason or Enlightenment.
As William Godwin stated succinctly about the age, "the human mind… is nothing but a faculty of perception," that all knowledge "comes from impression," and the mind starts with "absolute ignorance."
This very real experience created a growing unease and doubt in Western philosophy regarding the reliability of sense-experience as the basis for knowledge: did what was perceived bear any true relationship to what was or was perception simply at best a representation of reality and at worst an illusion.
The materialist position was combatted initially by the works of the Cambridge Platonists, notably More and Cudworth, who set out to show how Nature, Man and the Divine were connected through a 'plastic power' that was accessible to the mind if it were approached rightly.
The German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, whose ancestors came from the same part of Scotland as Reid, set out to rescue scientific knowledge from the idealism of Hume.
His own experience of creative powers of the mind, as experienced in and through poetry in particular, led him to seek out the role of imagination in human thought, and necessarily to distinguish it from fancy.
Coleridge came to realize that the mind was not an associative faculty governed by blind, mechanical laws, as Hartley's doctrine of mechanical association presented it, but rather was essentially a product of a creative shaping power (imagination) that ruled perception and governed our mentation but could also in its higher form be used to create new "things", resulting in the evolution of consciousness and mind itself.
For Coleridge, the creative capacity of the imagination, the "prime agent of all human perception," was the key to connecting to the essence of things outside of ourselves and overcoming the apparent split between self and object occasioned by man's self-consciousness.
The driving force of that connection and the activation of the creative imagination to get at the inherent essence of external objects was love, a deep desire to know other than ourselves.
As Dorothy Emmet (1952) noted, the entire basis of Coleridge's new approach to knowing nature was that "we should be able not only to look, but to love as we look"[2] making philosophy and science a romantic endeavour.
This capacity for seeing in a new light required a new capacity, and just as 'all the organs of sense are framed for a corresponding world of sense' so 'all the organs of spirit are framed for a correspondent world of spirit' so that the first principle of a true philosophy is 'to render the mind intuitive of the spiritual in man' that is, that which lies on the other side of our natural awareness from sense-experience.
'[4] This world beyond the confines of space and time involved an 'ethereal element' by means of which individual entities, at base non-material, could communicate via 'the tremulous reciprocations of which propagate themselves to the inmost of the soul'.
“... the principium essendi does not stand to the principlum cognoscende in the relation of cause to effect, but both the one and the other are co-inherent and identical.” (Biographia Literaria) Self-conscious, being a self-contained principle, can then be made into a pure thought, containing a polarity, "with two opposite and counteracting forces," which is the minimum needed for motion (“life”), that then leads to self-discovery and "the fullness of the human intelligence."
This involves a "preconception" a "leading Thought" - Bacon's 'forethoughtful inquiry' or 'dry light' (lumens siccum) - and a"progressive transition" not "a mere dead arrangement."
The goal of philosophy is to make systematic and conscious that which otherwise happens naturally, but unconsciously, namely access to the higher realm of Idea and Law (what Coleridge termed revelation), so as to then unfold through reason the various principles of application.
(Biographia Literaria) This dynamic polarity produces motion, acts throughout all of creation, and via the power of the creative imagination, leads to the evolution of mind and consciousness.
The entire process of nature is this progressive unfolding of principle into matter, and then the increasing tendency to move inward that which was previously external, that is, to individuate forms.
Coleridge also sees that the instincts - hunger, thirst, mating - motivate growth and evolve into higher powers, the most important being that of desire which 'has something of the quality of the concept of imagination".
The emotions, if contemplated and “recollected in tranquility” produce objective, as opposed to subjective, feeling that can then be expressed aesthetically via symbols (Suzanne Langer).
For Romantic medicine, in particular, Andreas Röschlaub and Samuel Hahnemann, the art of remediation, to achieve a true health for the individual, was an evocative art, Heilkunde and Heilkunst, that sought, as in the ancient Greek idea of education, to educe, to elicit or draw out of the suffering individual what was potential (state of health) into actuality.
“Communication by the symbolic use of the Understanding is the function of Queen Imagination on behalf of Noetic Ideation.”[2] In contrast, fancy is static and idealising, creating nothing real, but it does, as Colerdige notes, provide a “drapery” for the body of thought.
It is the fact of reason's presence in nature that allows us to speak of it becoming apparent or "present to" the intellect, such that we have an ulterior consciousness that is behind the natural awareness (the "unconscious") of all animals, one that is self-reflective or "philosophic" though there is a purely 'mental' philosophy that Coleridge termed 'psilosophy' and that which involves also the noetic capacity of mind (the nous rather than just the mens) which is true philosophy in the Greek sense of 'love of wisdom' — philia "love", sophia "wisdom."
If we make passive understanding (intellection)- the power of abstraction - an end in itself, we become according to Coleridge "a race of animals, in whom the presence of reason is manifested solely by the absence of instinct."
"[4] Without reason, we are but animals and commit existential suicide, submitting, as earlier Sophists, "all positions alike, however heterogeneous, to the criterion of the mere [intellect].
"[4] By shutting out reason we end up in a world of opinions, authority-based law, instruction, material science, and the death of spirit and soul.
Abstraction turned back on itself, becomes dependent on the senses and the outer appearances, or the despotism of the eye and "leads to a science of delusion" as Coleridge stated.
However, detachment can lead to existential despair without the 'light of reason' to provide a new attachment or relationship to nature and God, one based on individual sovereignty.
This then allows for “speculation,” which is the Baconian realisation of the natural idea out of natura naturata, or the outer appearances of things, guided by the forethoughtful inquiry (lumens siccum) coming from what Coleridge termed the more inmost part of the mind, the noetic capacity or nous.
"[4] To go from the indirect moonlight of mere intellect (mirrored through sense experience) to the direct sunlight of active understanding (irradiated by reason) is to go from exterior perception (of appearances) to a universal ulterior appercetion of phenomena (phenomenology); "it is to pass on from fancy's business of arranging and re-arranging the 'products of destruction, the cadavera rerum,' to imagination's business with 'the existence of absolute life,' or Being, which is the 'correlative of truth.'"
At the core of the idea of romanticism is romantic cognosis, or 'co-gnosis', the dynamic interplay of masculine and feminine forces and energies in the mind and imagination, involving a dyadic unit of consciousness right from the beginning (Genesis: 'male and female made he them').