Date: 1817

Milton in his "latter days" was "poor, sick, blind, slandered, persecuted [...] yet still listening to the music of his thoughts."

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

Date: 1817

"The poetic PSYCHE, in its process to full development, undergoes as many changes as its Greek name-sake, the butterfly."

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

Date: 1817

"My friend has drawn a masterly sketch of the branches with their poetic fruitage. I wish to add the trunk, and even the roots as far as they lift themselves above the ground, and are visible to the naked eye of our common consciousness."

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

Date: 1817

"In our perceptions we seem to ourselves merely passive to an external power, whether as a mirror reflecting the landscape, or as a blank canvas on which some unknown hand paints it."

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

Date: 1817

Mackintosh, following Hobbes and Hartley, analogizes mind and matter: "the law of association being that to the mind, which gravitation is to matter. "

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

Date: 1817

"The wise Stagyrite speaks of no successive particles propagating motion like billiard balls (as Hobbs;) nor of nervous or animal spirits, where inanimate and irrational solids are thawed down, and distilled, or filtrated by ascension, into living and intelligent fluids, that etch and re-etch eng...

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

Date: 1817

"Ah! when will the yoke of Custom--Custom, the blind tyrant, of which all the other tyrants make their slave--ah! when will that misery-perpetuating yoke be shaken off?--when, when will Reason be seated on her throne?"

— Bentham, Jeremy (1748-1832)

Date: 1817

"In this idea originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure...

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

Date: 1817

"Let us cross-examine Hartley's scheme under the guidance of this distinction; and we shall discover, that contemporaneity, (Leibnitz's Lex Continui) is the limit and condition of the laws of mind, itself being rather a law of matter, at least of phaenomena considered as material. At the utmost, ...

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

Date: 1817

"Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of act...

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)