Influence of George Berkeley :: This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison Philosopher Essays

The Influence of George Berkeley George Berkeley (1685-1753) was an Irish clergyman and philosopher who studied and taught at Trinity College in Ireland, where he perfect some of his best known works on the immateriality of point (believing that all matter was composed of ideas of perception and therefore did not last if it was not being perceived). Coleridge himself acknowledge the influence of Berkeley on his work, in contingent his poem This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison when he wrote a letter to Robert Southey in July 1797, in which the poem was included, with the following note, You remember, I am a Berkleian. We raise see the influence of Berkeleyin This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison in three important ways perceptions of light, the idea of a divine spirit in everything soon enough still separate and itself, and the idea that there are as umteen minima visibilia in an enclosed space as out in the lawless spaces.According to Stephen Prickett, one of the main ideas that Berkele y had hoped to prove was that all reality is mental, save the idea that truly came through in his works is that each individual does not perceive object, but instead qualities (like color, form, sent, and sound), and each person perceives these qualities differently. Prickett goes hike up to claim that the effect of this idea on Coleridge was to make him intensely certain of light (12). We can see this obsession with light and they way it plays on different object throughout This Lime-Tree Bower My PrisonPale infra the blazeHung the transparent foliage and I watchd roughly broad and sunny leaf, and lovd to seeThe shadow of the leaf and ascendent aboveDappling its sunshine And that walnut-treeWas richly tingd, and a deep refulgence layFull on the ancient ivy, which usurpsThose fronting elms, and now, with blackest massMakes their dark branches gleaming a lighter hueThrough the late twilightColeridges preoccupation with light and the way in which it changes the perception of the object is what relate this passage with the ideas of Berkeley. Even though Coleridge and many other Romantics (such as Wordsworth) apply the came to different conclusions about perception than Berkeley, his theories about light pointed to the why in which such phenomena of light as the rainbow could be used as a scientific model for the imagination as a perceptual kinship between man and nature (Prickett 13).