ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the Shaftesburyan emphasis on the possibility of a “natural growth” towards artistic excellence under liberty, his doctrine on freedom and social development, and the relation between liberty and man’s “Promethean” creative potential. Both William Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s later praise of Shaftesbury is well known, and in Coleridge’s early writings it was exactly that Shaftesburyan ambitiousness in Akenside that attracted him to the poet. Despite the fragmented nature of the Characteristicks, and Shaftesbury’s determination to avoid being “systematic” in his thought, much of his theory on the state and the arts found a simple principle of unity in reference to patterns of untrammelled growth in the natural world, under conditions of freedom. Shaftesbury imbued the already hackneyed association of freedom and vigorous growth with a new form of intellectual vitality, and a profoundly enhanced polemical appeal.
