ABSTRACT
In Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Herman Melville found a persuasive insistence on the supernatural will, but in Jonathan Edwards, he found an appealing rationalism that resonated both with pantheistic visions of theological determinism and scientific notions of a world governed by natural law. When considered alongside Melville's caricature of Edwards, as well as his skeptical invocations of determinism and his suggestion of pantheism. The difficulty is that of forcing the normal into the abnormal—of impelling that whose originality, and therefore whose rightful condition, to take upon itself the wrongful condition of Many. In this sense, to Poe individual identity is a kind of evil in and of itself, though it is an evil that is willed by the divine volition. "Intensity in thought, action, or speech, was possibly, in her, a result, of that gigantic volition which, during our long intercourse, failed to give other and more immediate evidence of its existence".
