Coleridge’s Theory of Imagination & the Burden of Unification
…the feeling that one is on the edge of many things: that there are many worlds from which we are separated by only a film; that a flick of the wrist, a turn of the body another way will bring us to a new world. – Theodore Roethke
Clearly, poets are liable to interpret their ideas as diagrammatic of the inner workings of the universe. In the words of poets, then, perhaps it is of some use searching for answers to some of the most important questions of our time – or any other time. At the end of the day, words are all that remain of any scientist or poet. That’s quite a bit, considering that while it is clear poets may simply be the recycling bins of ideas put forth by others, namely scientists and theologians, it is not immediately apparent that one or several ideas proposed by scientists and theologians were not hatched first in the meditations of a poet. This begs further investigation in that it generates some irony. Scientists seem bent to look for answers. But the case may be made that they might better spend time searching for the questions to the “answers” handed down to us in the concise terms of poetry.
In chapters 13, 14 & 15 of his Biographia Literaria, Samuel Taylor Coleridge puts forth a theory of the Imagination. Imagination with a capital “I”. It was this idea, coupled with the thinking of the German metaphysician, Kant, that constructed a bridge of Coleridge’s terms between physical reality and ultimate reality. Coleridge’s theory of Imagination represented unification in the terms of poetry. While today’s physicists concern themselves with Unification of the four fundamental forces of the universe, Coleridge’s work stands readymade – making statements even today that outline the thinking of some of the greatest minds of this century. Coleridge does this so enigmatically, in fact, that his poem The Eolian Harp seems more prophetic than poetic at times. In this poem’s second stanza, in lines 27-30, he writes,
“O! the one Life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere…”
Coleridge has stated here, in his own striking terms, what physicists some two hundred years after him have come to understand – based on their own theories; that light – the fundamental force in the creation and animation of life, is within each thing the same and at the same time the rhythm of force behind all thoughts – all things. This is incredibly prophetic visionary language, which he continues in the third and final stanza of the poem, lines 45-9,
“And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic harps diversely fram’d,
That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all?”
Coleridge is using a language which adequately describes several fundamental principles of what is called “M” Theory. His work to unify our material reality with the vast, untouchable intellect of God stands out prominently when examined under the lens of contemporary quantum physics – which seeks a unification of very nearly the same mechanisms: the fundamental building blocks of everything in our universe. And for our purposes here, we will leave out all that has been left out. (in the preservation of time, of course)
It could be that Coleridge senses things in the material world as they are somehow tied into the machinery of Ultimate Reality – but is otherwise unable to understand or identify the science involved or perhaps even interpret the ideas themselves in a wholly explicable manner. Or, perhaps the poet’s mind is prone to this sense. But it is clear that science, thus far, is little more than prone to this sense either. We have not advanced our knowledge, as a race or species, much further than where Einstein left us: Light is the key. Nothing travels faster. Nothing is more important. And as far as Einstein is concerned we are not much further along today than when Newton brought us calculations concerning gravity.
Here, we will examine text from two sources: Coleridge’s The Friend, published in 1818, as well as a letter Coleridge wrote to Thomas Poole and excerpts from the poet’s notebooks. In doing so, Coleridge will appear to line up next to Einstein with respect to the fact that both men seem to have had a beef with Newton – who, while discovering Gravity – could not ever have hoped to define its mechanisms. Einstein came much later and defined these mechanisms. But before him, as I will show here, Coleridge expended great energy to refute the validity of what Newton had accomplished. Coleridge, it seems, was displeased with what he felt was Newton’s intrusion into the things of Nature with nothing more than the cold sterile eyes of science – eyes unconcerned with the beauty he found in nature through Imagination:
“Monday, March 23, 1801
The more I understand of Sir Isaac Newton’s works, the more boldly I dare utter to my own mind, and therefore to you, that I believe the souls of five hundred Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare or a Milton. But if it please the Almighty to grant me health, hope, and a steady mind …, before my thirtieth year I will thoroughly understand the whole of Newton’s works.At present I must content myself with endeavouring to make myself entire master of his easier work, that on Optics. I am exceedingly delighted with the beauty and neatness of his experiments, and with the accuracy of his immediate deductions from them; but the opinions founded on these deductions, and indeed his whole [philosophical] theory is, I am persuaded, so exceedingly superficial as without impropriety to be deemed false. Newton was a mere materialist. Mind, in his system, is always passive,–a lazy Looker-on on an external world.” (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/letters/Poole_032301.html)
Today, physicists have sharpened their aim on the “rules” that govern large objects – like galaxies. They realized only recently that the rules which govern these extremely large mechanisms must be combined and integrated with the rules that govern extremely small objects – like subatomic particles. Einstein made copious notes regarding this, but not many actual steps toward a working hypothesis from his idea that one ‘unifying’ theory could be used to describe the laws of gravity and quantum physics; an equation which could be used to answer any question science asked – or was asked. This was deemed absurd in the early 1900’s. Today, what was absurd in Einstein’s time has become common ground for String Theory – now “M” Theory, in that it has been seen from five different vantage points and thought to be valid from each. It would seem that relativity is no joke. But what about tying everything together?
Since the mid-nineties, there have been several major developments where String Theory is concerned. It turns out that there are five different theories – or five component theories which include five wholly unique ways of looking at the same thing. This is called “M” Theory, and it unites the five component string theories in an overarching framework containing what appears to be eleven space-time dimensions. M Theory burdens itself with what physicists have labeled “Unification”. This to mean that all four major forces of nature; the electromagnetic force, the gravitational force, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force will one day be described and understood by means of one “simple” equation. Einstein was no cook.
Coleridge seems to have had a downright eerie perception of things transpiring in the other dimensions predicted by M Theory. His words, published in The Friend in 1818, draw sharp focus on two of the most important (and strongest) forces in the universe:
“In what shall we seek the cause of this contrast between the rapid progress of electricity and the stationary condition of magnetism? As many theories, as many hypotheses, have been advanced in the latter science as in the former. But the theories and fictions of the electricians contained an idea, and all the same idea, … On the contrary, the assumptions of the magnetists (as for instance, the hypothesis that the planet itself is one vast magnet, or that an immence magnet is concealed within it; or that of a concentric globe within the earth, revolving on its own independent axis) are but repetitions of the same fact or phænomenon looked at through a magnifying glass; the reiteration of the problem, not its solution. The naturalist, who cannot or will not see, that one fact is often worth a thousand, as including them all in itself, and that it first makes all the others facts; who has not the head to comprehend, the soul to reverence, a central experiment or observation (what the Greeks would perhaps have called a protophænomon); will never receive an auspicious answer from the oracle of nature.”
(http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/phil_theo/Friend.html#law)
Coleridge asked questions in 1818 that physicists, beginning in 1995, deemed critical to understanding the way the universe works. His concern with reverence, with his fundamental appreciation of what “drives” nature is an obvious departure from science, but this is Coleridge. He seems genuinely disgusted by the fact that science rears its head again and again over the centuries to simply rethink and regurgitate fundamental questions concerning the nature of reality. He is irritated with scientists in his time who poke their noses where he doesn’t feel they belong, and surge ahead without the slightest reverence for what he considers to be the obvious answer their questions: An Almighty Creator. Nature. Ultimate Reality.
In what seems a genuine capacity to understand something of the inner workings of the universe, Coleridge turns time and again to God – rather than science to explain what he finds. What he supplies us, then, seems nothing short of informed criticism of the future – of time itself. He understands what drives men to know. He lives in a time when many begin to look toward writers as the speakers of truth and justice. His time is not all that different that time which has passed before him. Indeed, to look closely is to see that he describes time immemorial as well as what time has yet to come:
“The first man of science was he who looked into a thing, not to learn whether it could furnish him with food, or shelter, or weapons, or tools, or ornaments, or playwiths, but who sought to know it for the gratification of knowing; while he that first sought to know in order to be was the first philosopher. I have read of two rivers passing through the same lake, yet all the way preserving their streams visibly distinct … In a far finer distinction, yet in a subtler union, such, for the contemplative mind, are the streams of knowing and being. … and up this lake the philosopher sails on the junction-line of the constituent streams, still pushing upward and sounding as he goes, towards the common fountain-head of both, the mysterious source whose being is knowledge, whose knowledge is being–the adorable I AM IN THAT I AM.”
(http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/phil_theo/Notebooks.html)
Coleridge and Einstein are kindred spirits. Both men put forward thinking which changed the way we understand the nature of time – of history itself. It was Einstein who said that “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” One can almost hear Coleridge applaud. Coleridge’s image of two rivers passing “visibly distinct” through a lake is one of the most striking reflections on the perception of extra-dimensional time in Romantic literature. In the future we may come to clearly understand how two visibly distinct universes exist side by side as we begin to grasp the vastness of Creation and the magnitude of that which we are a part. A unifying theory has yet to be put forward, however. Our best minds work at it day and night. For now the forces and laws of the universe remain separated by trembling membranes of energy, strings, vibrating at frequencies we have yet to be able to detect; the “sound-like power in light, rhythm in all thought.”