Letter from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Highgate, to Joseph Henry Green, 1817 December 13 : autograph manuscript signed.

Thanking Green for a transcript of his recent lecture on the principles of experimental philosophy; saying that the lecture went off well and that he felt he had expressed certain thoughts better in it than in an "Essay on the Science of Method for the Encyc. Met."; promising, however, to send Green a copy of the essay; telling him that "Time passes happily with me under your Roof" and he will soon avail himself of their invitation; sending his respects to Anne Green and a "Hebrew Dirge with my free Translation, of which I will, as soon as it is printed, send her the Music"; commenting that he thinks a dozen such compositions would gain him more credit with the public than "twice the number of Poems twice as good as the Ancient Mariner, the Christabel, the Destiny of Nations, or the Ode to the Departing Year"; saying that his opinion of German philosophers is by and large that of Green's; explaining several points regarding ethics and religion where he disagrees with Kant; praising him overall as "the only Philosopher, for all men who have the power of thinking"; describing Fichte as just a caricature of Kant; writing on "Dynamic Philosophy" and the "Natur-philosophen" and saying that he thinks very highly of some parts of their system, "as being sound and scientific Metaphysics of Quality, not less evident to my reason than the Metaphysics of Quantity -- i.e. Geometry &c; of the rest and larger part, as tentative, experimental, and highly useful to a chemist, Zoologist, and Physiologist as unfettering the mind and exciting it's inventive Powers"; saying that these observations concern only the works of Schelling and Steffens; giving his opinion of Schelling and his contributions; saying that he knows very little of other philosophers: "As my opinions were formed before I was acquainted with the Schools of Fichte and Schelling, so do they remain independent of them: tho' I con- and pro-fess great obligations to them in the development of my Thoughts -- and yet seem to feel, that I should have been more useful, had I been left to evolve them myself, without knowledge of their coincidence"; criticizing their mutual friend Ludwig Tieck's Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen; mentioning that he has only looked into Jean Paul's Vorschule der Aesthetik and found in it a sentence exactly like one he himself had written in an essay on the supernatural many years ago, "viz. that the presence of a Ghost is the terror, not what he does -- a principle which Southey too often overlooks in his Thalaba and Kehama--"; mentioning in a postscript that his son Hartley is expected that day from Oxford.