The subject of Coleridge and the ‘natural’ seems to divide itself naturally into two parts: Coleridge and the inner world of human nature, and Coleridge on the external world, physical nature. His views on both subjects, which are deeply connected, developed and changed dramatically, and his final thoughts are sometimes startlingly at odds with the Coleridge familiar in anthology selections.

‘Nature’ and ‘natural’ are words too common in familiar usage to expect that Coleridge, or anybody else, would always employ them in a precise or consistent way. Just as our spontaneous oaths and damnations are usually bare of theological implication, despite the actual meaning of the words we use, so Coleridge had no theory of human nature in mind when, in an early Preface, he announced that ‘By a law of our Nature, he who labors under strong feeling, is impelled to seek for sympathy’ (PW, ii, p. 1144), or when in a late newspaper essay he marvelled at ‘those prudent youths, in whom money is an innate idea, and the dull shrewdness by which it is amassed, an instinct of nature’ (EOT, ii, p. 469), or when he later said that ‘instead of human nature’, materialistic philosophy was giving us ‘a French nature’ (P Lects, p. 349).

At twenty-five he recalled that as a young child his ‘memory and understanding [had been] forced into an almost unnatural ripeness’, and he remarked of Wordsworth, ‘It is his practice and almost his nature to convey all the truth he knows without any attack on what he supposes falsehood’ (CL, i, pp. 347–8, 410).