ABSTRACT
Shaftesbury’s description of the poet as “a just Prometheus under Jove”, on the other hand, is one that bears witness to the really creative nature of the artistic imagination. The Neo-Platonic belief that the natural world is symbolic of the thought of God and that such thought cannot be fully apprehended by conceptual statement can be developed by analogy into a profound theory of aesthetics. There is more in Coleridge’s, S. T theory, however, than his distinction between the associative faculty of the fancy and the creative power of the imagination. Having made this initial distinction he proceeds to distinguish between what he calls the ‘primary imagination’ and the ‘secondary imagination’. Just as the mechanistic interpretation of nature bore fruit in an associationist psychology, so Shaftesbury’s interpretation produced its own characteristic theory of the mental processes involved in art.
