ABSTRACT
G. W. F. Hegel remained for Samuel Taylor Coleridge a baffling postscript to Schelling’s absolute idealism. Coleridge’s most persistent complaint is that Hegel’s system is theologically unsound. He attached undue significance to the dialectical triad, interpreting it as an attempted literal translation of the Christian trinity and thereby paving the way for his own and others’ serious misunderstanding of Hegel’s purpose. Hegel’s assertion that Being is the unity of determinateness and indeterminateness met with Coleridge’s approval because, he said, it concurs with the Platonist maxim that God is the “common measure of the Infinite and the Finite.” H. L. Mansel is interesting for the use he made of Hamilton’s interpretation of Kant’s philosophy to combat the Hegelian unity of thought and being. Mansel’s philosophically bolstered theological objections to German idealism represent the religiously motivated opposition to Hegel at its most cogent and discerning.
