Biographia Literaria and the language of science.

When Coleridge began dictating his Biographia Literaria in 1815, he was at the same time becoming actively involved in a medico-philosophical controversy that was then drawing the attention of many medical men and philosophers in England. The fundamental issue behind the quarrel, a materialistic versus a vitalist theory of nature, was one Coleridge had argued in one form or another throughout his career.1 Yet, the challenge of modern science specifically had never been so strong nor had it so vociferously demanded his attention as it did in the years from 1814 to 1819. Coleridge's response is well documented: the revised and enlarged version of The Friend, his Lay Sermons, the "Theory of Life," and a series of philosophical letters written between November 1816 and January 1818 all testify to Coleridge's growing concern with the challenge of science to his philosophy and to his need to validate his philosophical beliefs with scientific evidence. Disciplines Film and Media Studies | Literature in English, British Isles | Literature in English, North America This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/cims_papers/6 BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA AND THE LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE BY TIMOTHY J. CORRIGAN As far as words go, I have become a formidable chemist. Coleridge, Letter to Humphry Davy, 1801 When Coleridge began dictating his Biographia Literaria in 1815, he was at the same time becoming actively involved in a medico-philosophical controversy that was then drawing the attention of many medical men and philosophers in England. The fundamental issue behind the quarrel, a materialistic versus a vitalist theory of nature, was one Coleridge had argued in one form or another throughout his career.1 Yet, the challenge of modern science specifically had never been so strong nor had it so vociferously demanded his attention as it did in the years from 1814 to 1819. Coleridge's response is well documented: the revised and enlarged version of The Friend, his Lay Sermons, the "Theory of Life," and a series of philosophical letters written between November 1816 and January 1818 all testify to Coleridge's growing concern with the challenge of science to his philosophy and to his need to validate his philosophical beliefs with scientific evidence. In one of his letters to C. A. Tulk, Coleridge prefaces a long account of the forces of nature with these remarks: "In my literary Life you will find a sketch of the subjective Pole of the Dynamic Philosophy. ... In the third volume of the Friend, now in the Press, you will find the great results of this Philosophy in its relation to Ethics and Theology-while the enclosed Scrawl contains a very, very rude and fragmentary delineation of the Objective Pole, or the Science of the Construction of Nature." la The enclosed scrawl is in fact an abstract of Coleridge's "Theory of Life," his most detailed and comprehensive scientific treatise and a work which refers explicitly to John Abernethy and other major figures in the then current medical controversy. The literary life is of course the Biographia Literaria, roughly contemporaneous with the posthumously published "Theory of Life" and likewise in the orbit of the scientific debates. That the Biographia Literaria also refers to scientists involved in the medical debate is only tangentially significant; that the Biographia Literaria employs much of the scientific language used in the "Theory of Life" and implicitly derives many of its critical models See, e.g., Walter Jackson Bates' Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York, 1968). la Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs (London, 1956-59), IV, 767.