This new collection enables students and general readers to appreciate Coleridge’s renewed relevance 250 years after his birth. An indispensable guide to his writing for twenty-first-century readers, it contains new perspectives that reframe his work in relation to slavery, race, war, post-traumatic stress disorder and ecological crisis. Through detailed engagement with Coleridge’s pioneering poetry, the reader is invited to explore fundamental questions on themes ranging from nature and trauma to gender and sexuality. Essays by leading Coleridge scholars analyse and render accessible his extraordinarily innovative thinking about dreams, psychoanalysis, genius and symbolism. Coleridge is often a direct and gripping writer, yet he is also elusive and diverse. This Companion’s great achievement is to offer a one-volume entry point into his incomparably rich and varied world.

Amid an Enlightened era, dissenting religious groups clamored for toleration and/or religious freedom, mobilizing their own campaigns and helping staff with those of the era’s other prominent movements. British Dissenters had long sought repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which limited their rights of office-holding and other honors – while American colonists bristled against official churches that had also taken hold in the colonies. The American Revolution led to an upsurge in favor of religious freedom in America that overturned almost all religious restrictions by the 1790s, though British Dissenters’ movements over the same years met reversals from a stronger Establishment.

Stressing that fully declared atheism was illegal throughout the Romantic period and beyond, the chapter gives a brief survey of some philosophical Enlightenment ‘isms’ which could sometimes be seen as connected to it, such as materialism, pantheism, necessitarianism, idealism, scepticism, and deism. It then moves from such abstractions into the world of active, sometimes dangerous debates about atheism itself, focusing on specific clashes between such figures as Joseph Priestley, Edward Gibbon, Thomas Paine, Richard Carlile, C. F. Volney, Erasmus Darwin, and their critics. The final section looks more closely at ways in which the atheism debate impinged on some of the period’s canonical poets, particularly the anxiously Christian Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the firmly atheist Percy Bysshe Shelley.

The previous themes reach into modern debates about freedom and necessity, which are still central in education and psychology today. Contributing to the rise of formal disciplines of developmental and child psychology, educational psychology, clinical psychology and cognitive psychology, as well as psychiatry, empirical approaches based on sense perception began in the mid-eighteenth century; but they are equally the outcome of broader religious and cultural influences. The book therefore concludes with an overview of the direct traces on the modern disciplines of the religious ideas discussed in earlier chapters: in Britain through David Hartley, Joseph Priestley and Francis Galton, and the nature-versus-nurture formula; and in France Hippolyte Taine, Alfred Binet (creator of the ‘mental age’ score, subsequently IQ measurement) and Jean Piaget himself.

This chapter traces the history of the Scottish school of common-sense philosophy from c.1720 to 1828. It begins by examining the teaching of George Turnbull and his fellow regents at Marischal College, Aberdeen, in order to shed light on the early philosophical development of the so-called founder of the school, Thomas Reid. It next analyses the evolution of Reid’s critique of Humean scepticism and the theory of ideas in the years preceding the publication of his An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense (1764). Reid’s appeal to common sense is then compared and contrasted with those of James Beattie and James Oswald, whose writings, along with Reid’s Inquiry, were attacked by Joseph Priestley and other critics in the 1770s. Following a consideration of Reid’s response to Priestley in his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), the chapter discusses Dugald Stewart’s reformulation of Reid’s conception of common sense and his genealogy of the Scottish school of philosophy. Lastly it charts the collapse of the common-sense school around the time of Stewart’s death in 1828.