Romantic Physiology and the Work of Romantic Imagination: Hypothesis and Speculation in Science and Coleridge

Abstract

The imagination was often pathologized within Romantic-period medicine. Although this pathologizing of the imagination made it the source of delusion, it actually set into motion a disciplining of the imagination that was scientifically useful. Through careful discipline in the form of a scientific method, the imagination bracketed its discoveries as appearances, something yet to be proven. I show how, within the physiology of the time, speculation, hypothesis, and imagination are entangled, so that speculations come to have value in relation to what they explain and the experiments they inspire. I then consider why Coleridge praises the work of physiologist Richard Saumarez on his way to developing his famous definition of imagination, and I show how physiological method provides a new understanding of Coleridge's methods in the Biographia.

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