Coleridge's Philosophy

My system, if I may venture to give it so fine a name, is the only attempt, / I know, ever made to reduce all knowledges into harmony. It opposes no / other system, but shows what was true in each; and how that which was true / in the particular, in each of them became error, _because_ it was only half / the truth. I have endeavoured to unite the insulated fragments of truth, / and therewith to frame a perfect mirror. I show to each system that I fully / understand and rightfully appreciate what that system means; but then I / lift up that system to a higher point of view, from which I enable it to / see its former position, where it was, indeed, but under another light and / with different relations; -- so that the fragment of truth is not only / acknowledged, but explained. Thus the old astronomers discovered and / maintained much that was true; but, because they were placed on a false / ground, and looked from a wrong point of view, they never did, they never / could, discover the truth -- that is, the whole truth. As soon as they left / the earth, their false centre, and took their stand in the sun, immediately / they saw the whole system in its true light, and their former station / remaining, but remaining as a part of the prospect. I wish, in short, to / connect by a moral _copula_ natural history with political history; or, in / other words, to make history scientific, and science historical -- to take / from history its accidentality, and from science its fatalism.

I never from a boy could, under any circumstances, feel the slightest dread / of death as such. In all my illnesses I have ever had the most intense / desire to be released from this life, unchecked by any but one wish, / namely, to be able to finish my work on Philosophy. Not that I have any / author's vanity on the subject: God knows that I should be absolutely glad, / if I could hear that the thing had already been done before me.