ABSTRACT
In beginning now to expound Coleridge's theory of the Imagination, the author proposes to start where he himself in the Biographia really started: that is, with a theory of the act of knowledge, or of consciousness, or, as he called it, 'the coincidence or coalescence of an Object with a Subject'. Coleridge supposes that these successive levels, as it were, of the operation of the Inner Sense are stages that can be attained with practice by the right people. Coleridge made acute remarks in several places about the pernicious effect of the 'despotism of the eye' under which 'we are restless because invisible things are not the objects of vision'. His subject-object machinery introduces no such split between the ingredients of the mind. It is for him an instrument for noting, and insisting, that nothing of which we are in any way conscious is given to the mind.
