*

        Coleridge, though long Wordsworth's friend, is in many ways the anti-Wordsworth. Where Wordsworth favored experience, Coleridge favored imagination. Where Wordsworth preferred to learn from nature, Coleridge preferred to learn from books. Wordsworth favored the personal--Coleridge favored tradition. Wordsworth privileged emotion, while Coleridge preferred intellection.
        Coleridge works with the Platonic Categories: particular/universal; temporal/eternal; phenomenal/noumenal. For Coleridge, only imagination--which he divides into Primary and Secondary categories--can reconcile these oppositions.
        For Coleridge, the Beautiful "is that in which the many . . . becomes one." He defines beauty as "multeity in unity." The multeity is comprised of disparate elements, while the unity represents the reconciliation of those elements into an organized whole.
        Coleridge follows Kant's idea of beauty being that which has "purposiveness without purpose": "That which is not pleasing for its own sake, but by connection or association with some other thing, separate or separable from it, is neither beautiful, nor capable of being a component part of beauty."
        Beauty is distinguished from the good or the useful, following Kant's notion of disinterested satisfaction: "The sense of beauty subsists in simultaneous intuition of the relation of parts, each to each, and of all to a whole: exciting an immediate and absolute complacency, without interference, therefore of any interest, sensual [Kant's category of the pleasant] or intellectual [Kant's category of the good]."
        The good is "discursive," and can be argued for, even imposed, through reason. The beautiful is "intuitive," and cannot be imposed.
        Coleridge divides imagination--his reconciling force--into Primary and Secondary categories. Primary imagination is "the living power and prime agent of all human perception . . . a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am." The secondary imagination is "an echo of the [primary], coexisting with the conscious will . . . indentical with the primary in the kind of its agency . . . differing only in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate."