ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the lasting significance of the disagreement between Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Jonathan Edwards in terms of its influence on American Romanticism. It provides an account of the legacy of both Coleridge and Edwards in the minds of the American Romantics as the nation moved toward this clash of theological hubris. The chapter deals with how Coleridge comes to affect that negotiation, and focuses on Nathaniel Hawthorne's understanding and portrayal of Providence, which is the closest that he ever comes to making an explicit statement on theological determinism and the free will problem. According to Joan Richardson, "to reading all facts, as signs of continuing Divine Providence," is in fact the foundation of the characteristic "thinking language" of American Pragmatism exemplified by Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William and Henry James, Wallace Stevens, and Gertrude Stein. In David Robinson's view, for Emerson, fate is "a part of the pattern of natural forces that also include human power.
