important questions about the extent to which either "matter'' or "mind" can be described as primary and originative, and invites a reassessment of the familiar division between "historicist" and "transcendentalist" positions' (17). This is a claim to rejoin what' s in effect a Cartesian controversy, relating hazily to a recurrent interpretative one. Wouldn't it be though to set an edifice called 'Coleridge' s thought' (in which Vallins says he doesn't believe) against a brute materialism nobody much ever believed in? Vallins' book is full of sharp insights, and each in a series of little arguments for Coleridge' s conviction of the priority of the aesthetic to the rational is patiently made and, though the series does not build to the conclusion Vallins claims in his response to Clark, fortunately the pleasures of his own book do not depend on assenting to such a grand narrative of Romanticism. The best chapter teases out the progress of Priestley' s version of Hartleian 'optimism' via Godwin and eventually Schelling within Coleridge' s idea of evolution, raising the problem of where humanity, invested with a soul, fits in to biological categorisation (102-40). Although, like the final chapter, this argument seems tangential to the central thesis, the founding paradox in the biological account of a process which must always be a progress is brilliantly described in something like Coleridge' s own circular idiom: 'The soul, effectively, must pre-exist its own emergence in the generative scale of nature, and it can only do so by being akin to God, the source of what it consummates' (138). We need not ascribe divinity to Coleridge or his readers in order to wish sometimes to stand outside this circle and to be more like the ecstatic viewers in 'Kubla Khan' than the sublime figure they view.
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