On Timothy J. Corrigan's Biographia Literaria and the Language of Science

Biographia Literaria is Samuel Taylor Coleridge's autobiography, although not straightforwardly so. It is a meditative work, focusing more on philosophy and less on structure and linearity, although it does contain autobiographical elements.

Coleridge, at the time of the work's creation, was actively involved in a medico-philosophical controversy which debated materialistic theory of nature versus vital theory of nature. The growing challenge of science to his philosophy led to the need to validate his philosophical beliefs with scientific evidence. This, in turn, led to the creation of Theory of Life - Coleridge's 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. Biographia Literaria is a recount of his literary life, but it also employs much of the scientific language used in Theory of Life and implicitly derives many of its critical models from the scientific models sketched in that work. Coleridge transfered scientific discourse which suffused his intellectual life at the time to another discourse, literary criticism. His work was the result of many years of reading and thinking about science. While at Christ's Hospital, he dabbled in biology and chemistry, and meeting in Humphry Davy in 1799 marked the beginning of a friendship that inspired him to seek metaphors for his poetry and solutions to his own metaphysical problems in scientific research. Their friendship was mutually productive friendship: Coleridge shared much of Davy's scientific reading and he searched for the laws within the impalpable within poems, while Davy was searching out laws of substances hitherto unknown by revealing that beneath the static appearance of the stone, or the powder.. there may be the flame, the loud bang, the explosive energy. Coleridge's and Davy's descriptions of the poet and the scientist respectively are strikingly similar. The affinities between Coleridge and Davy are based on Davy's work around 1902, 10 years before the waning of their intellectual friendship. Misunderstandings between them were in part a product of general rift in England between science and poetry in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Coleridge belonged to the poetic school of spirit and imagination and Davy was inclined towards progressive science which was becoming increasingly mechanistic and materialistic. Their different views created difficulty in sharing and discussing philosophies. Scientists stated that the poetic vision was a fantastic way of knowing, with little relevance to the scientific laws of nature. Coleridge regarded as intolerable the fact that they saw the differences between science and poetry as a conflict. If scientific validity of imaginative perception could not be maintained, the moral principles founded on that imaginative perception would be in danger of dissipating as ethereal musings. The visions of science and poetry must remain parallel and complementary ways of seeing, both supporting a dynamic and spiritual conception of life. In Theory of Life Coleridge defends Hunter's and Abernethy's vitalism, and tries to prove that Life itself is not a thing a self-subservient hypostasis but an act and a process. He mentions three forces that have an impact upon the evolution of life: magnetism, electricity and chemical affinity. Each of the forces plays an important role in Biographia Literaria.

Caused by the fact that the then modern scientists were no longer content with the traditional definition of their role, they started specializing in thought and language, often isolating themselves in their laboratories in order to fashion their own specialized vocabulary. The misunderstandings between Coleridge and Davy become more and more pronounced as Coleridge accuses Davy of abandoning traditional thought in order to mold himself upon the Age, while Davy replies that Coleridge fails to adjust to the exigencies of modern science and his philosophical language lacks the order, precision and regularity to deal with the problems of contemporary science. To better defend his views, Coleridge had to learn the scientists' new language, this leading to the major project to translate his own views of science into a modern scientific idiom. T. Corrigan's aim in the article was to discuss practical criticism and the way scientific language permeates literary definitions, but also the value of theory in investigative research. Coleridge's principles of thought and method were not based on theory or supposed objectivity, but on law, a method derived, at least in part, from Kant. Coleridge states that a scientific definition should be neither a theory, nor a generalization, but should consist in the law of the thing.

According to J.R. de J. Jackson, a scientist apprehends truth through material evidence and must rely on the inexact method of theory which is primarily an educated guess based on prior research, while the poet apprehends intelligence by looking through the material substance to the essence of phenomena, discovering the law and then presenting the law in the language of the poem. The language used by Coleridge in Biographia Literaria is, however, a more powerful presence than the debate between theory versus law. In some places he makes use of medical terms which have little or no bearing on literature in a very ostensible way.

As previously stated, the three forces that Coleridge mentions, magnetism, electricity and chemical affinity, play an important role in Biographia Literaria. He discusses magnetism and electricity in terms of progressive individuation, associating magnetism with the form of life's progress and its tendency to progressive individuation. Magnetic polarity describes the form, while the electrical force describes the imagination. As such, progressive individuation embraces two counteracting tendencies in nature, that of detachment from the universal life and that of attachment or reduction into it, both of which reappear in the Biographia.

As all three powers are bound together in a single organism, the third one, chemical affinity, is also to be mentioned. It corresponds to the intellectual energy and reason behind a poem. As illustrated by Coleridge's Theory of Life, chemical affinity adds the dimension of depth to an organism when it unites with length and breadth, magnetism and electricity, and Coleridge associates chemical affinity with sensibility.

What I see as the main purpose of the article and of Biographia Literaria is to demonstrate the fact that poetry and science are to be considered counterparts, for the scientist, as well as the artist, adds dimensions to the poem, in order to create the perfect balance for a complex object that can be compared to man itself. Coleridge states in Theory of Life that life is not one of the three powers separately, but the copula of all three: length, surface and depth. And Coleridge's fight for his belief was to make a poem have a scientific meaning, to show that scientific truths do not solely belong to the scientists and that poetry can hold its own against modern science.

Serban Boboc, First Year, Japanese-English