Philippe > Books: biography‎ (165)

There are therefore many Coleridges. (...) First the poet (but known chiefly for only three miraculous poems and about three others); then the literary critic, without whom the history of English literary criticism as we know it is inconceivable; the critic of science, the ‘so-so chemist’ as he called himself, whose rôle in sharing the struggle of Davy and others over the concepts and terminology of modern chemistry and biology is just beginning to be appreciated; the logician, whose hitherto unpublished Logic, edited by Professor Robin Jackson, is in the hands of the printers; the journalist, the top leader-writer of his day in the Morning Post and the Courier, whose three volumes of newspaper contributions will reappear any day now; the social and political critic, who wrote the first analysis in English of a post-war economic depression at the close of the Napoleonic wars, a work admired by Maynard Keynes; the psychologist, who grasped the notion of a subconscious mental life and of varying levels of consciousness, who coined the words psycho-analytical and psycho-somatic (as well as hundreds of other words now in our dictionaries), who anticipated the twentieth century on dreams; the educationist, who believed in cultivating the initiative in children and attacked the conventional negative controls by punishment; in theology the ‘higher critic,’ who ploughed methodically through dozens of the heavy German volumes of Eichhorn, Michaelis, and their ilk, and advocated an historical approach to Judaism and Christianity, denouncing what he called the ‘superstitious’ reading of the Scriptures; and one of the most influential of all Coleridges, the analyst of the church as both a spiritual and a temporal society, and of the obligations of both church and state to the national culture; and there is Coleridge the Englishman who was a determined ‘cosmopolite’ (to use another word he coined), who drew up a plan for a league of nations (admittedly with a proviso – although the Napoleonic wars were over–that no Frenchman be allowed to settle outside France or her colonies). And I see I had almost forgotten the philosopher! Yet he delivered possibly the first course of public lectures by an Englishman on the history of that subject – for money (not much money)."