ABSTRACT
The general tendency of Coleridge's dissent from Schelling can be explained briefly. Schelling's System des transzendentalen Idealismus traces the stages whereby the Ich creates the entire world of objects through its knowledge of itself. Schelling justifies our certainty that there exists a real world by trying to prove that the proposition 'things exist' is ultimately identical with the proposition 'I am'. In short, although Coleridge incorporates parts of Schelling's explanation of the mind-world relation, he defines this relation in a substantially different way. He also avoids the dialectical logic whereby Schelling demonstrates the identity of the two propositions, an argument Elinor Stoneman Shaffer judges 'highly dubious'. Finally, Coleridge transforms Schelling's 'self-consciousness in general' to God. The consequences of that change are evident less in this local argument about things themselves than in the Biographia's larger concern with the nature and value of poetry.
