The Critical Principle of the Reconciliation of Opposites as Employed by Coleridge

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Ann Arbor Press, 1918 - 59 pages

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Page 31 - ... in all imitation two elements must coexist, and not only coexist, but must be perceived as coexisting. These two constituent elements are likeness and unlikeness, or sameness and difference. And in all genuine creations of art there must be a union of these disparates. The artist may take his point of view where he pleases, provided that the desired effect be perceptibly produced, — that there be likeness in the difference, difference in the likeness, and a reconcilement of both in one. If...
Page 28 - ... reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order...
Page 48 - It is thus well known that persons conversant with deeds of cruelty contrive to escape from conscience by connecting something of the ludicrous with them, and by inventing grotesque terms and a certain technical phraseology to disguise the horror of their practices.
Page 30 - This I would trace to the balance in the mind effected by that spontaneous effort which strives to hold in check the workings of passion.
Page 37 - ... society, as sense of ancestry and of sex, with a purity unassailable by sophistry, because it rests not in the analytic processes, but in that sane equipoise of the faculties, during which the feelings are representative of all past experience, — not of the individual only, but of all those by whom she has been educated, and their predecessors even up to the first mother that lived.
Page 10 - The intelligence in the one tends to objectize itself, and in the other to know itself in the object.
Page 52 - Hard to express that sense of the analogy or likeness of a Thing which enables a Symbol to represent it, so that we think of the Thing itself — and yet knowing that the Thing is not present to us.
Page 54 - In Shakspeare one sentence begets the next naturally ; the meaning is all inwoven. He goes on kindling like a meteor through the dark atmosphere ; yet, when the creation in its outline is once perfect, then he seems to rest from his labour, and to smile upon his work, and tell himself that it is very good. You see many scenes and parts of scenes which are simply Shakspeare's disporting himself in joyous triumph and vigorous fun after a great achievement of his highest genius.
Page 37 - ... shown in all of them as following the heart, which gives its results by a nice tact and happy intuition, without the intervention of the discursive faculty, sees all things in and by the light of the affections, and errs, if it ever err, in the exaggerations of love alone. In all the Shakspearian women there is essentially the same foundation and principle ; the distinct individuality and variety are merely the result of the modification of circumstances, whether in Miranda the maiden, in Imogen...
Page 53 - First, improbable as the conduct of Lear is in the first scene, yet it was an old story rooted in the popular faith...

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