Coleridge's construction of newton

Summary

A self-conscious antagonism to Newtonian science is widely seen as characteristic of the Romantic movement, and Coleridge is routinely portrayed as one of the major representatives of this anti-Newtonian sentiment. Although such a view of Coleridge is correct, his hostility to Newton is puzzling. The attitudes that Coleridge objected to are often expressly denied in Newton's published writings, and Coleridge's own ‘dynamic’ philosophy was, in fact, remarkably like the conception of nature personally favoured by Newton. Coleridge, then, must have been objecting to something other than Newton's beliefs—to beliefs not in fact held by Newton, but by others. Commentators have noted Coleridge's distortion of Newton's philosophies, but have not explored this matter in any detail. The present paper attempts to redress this situation. As much of the historiography of Western philosophy presumes an unequivocal opposition between Romanticism and the Enlightenment, it is of importance to find that Coleridge and Newton held strikingly similar views about the nature of the universe.