ABSTRACT
This chapter explains transcendentalism on Mr I. A. Richards 'Coleridge on Imagination', published by Stephen Potter. The author believes that the average reader, knowing the gist of Mr Richard's Principles of Literary Criticism, its vocabulary, its points of attack and its admirable clarifications was prepared to be scandalised by his book on Coleridge. In describing Coleridge's 'poetical', or 'aesthetic' experience, his 'experience from nature', Mr Richards would help us to understand this experience, and Coleridge's account of it, by giving precision to the meaning of the most usefully indeterminate of all words 'Nature'. Mr Richards is momentarily using philosophy in the way Coleridge said that it should never be used 'to perplex our clearest notions and living moral instincts'. Mr Richards talks when Coleridge 'was writing as much from a memory of his thinking during this first creative period as from a renewed 'act of contemplation". 'Materialist and Idealist' are not alternative terms for Coleridge's 'Aristotelian and Platonist'.
