TOK Conference 2014

Coleridge and the Romantic Imagination

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPrlL_MpTRo

Romanticism1789 - 1832

Coleridge defined:•Fancy•Primary Imagination•Secondary Imagination

Fancy

Imagination

The IMAGINATION then, I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.

IMAGINATION•living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception

IMAGINATION•repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.

Eighteenth-century empiricism:

• The mind as a tabula rasa• Perception is passive• Ideas are derived from sense

impressions

‘Intimations of Immortality’by William Wordsworth

Children are born: ‘trailing clouds of glory…’

BUT

‘shades of the prison-house begin to close…’

A creative genius also has

The Secondary Imagination:“an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.”

The Gospel of St. JohnIn the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…

T E HulmeRomanticism is:

spilt religion(‘Romanticism and Classicism’ 1911)