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 completed some of his best known works on the immateriality of matter (believing that all matter was composed of ideas of perception and therefore did non exist if it was not being perceived). Coleridge himself acknowledge the influence of Berkeley on his work, in particular 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 can see the influence of Berkeleyin This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison in three main ways perceptions of devolve, the idea of a divine spirit in everything yet still separate and itself, and the idea that there are as many minima visibilia in an cover space as out in the wide-open spaces.According to Stephen Prickett, one of the main ideas that Berkeley had hoped to prove was that all reality is mental, but the idea that truly came through and through in his works is that each person does not perceive object, but instead qualities (like color, form, sent, and sound), and each person perceives these qualities differently. Prickett goes further to claim that the effect of this idea on Coleridge was to make him intensely conscious 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 beneath the blazeHung the transparent foliage and I watchdSome broad and sunny snap, and lovd to seeThe shadow of the leaf and stem aboveDappling its sunshine And that walnut-treeWas richly tingd, and a deep radiance layFull on the ancient ivy, which usurpsThose fronting elms, and now, with blackest massMakes their dark branches appear a lighter hueThrough the late twilightColeridges preoccupation with light and the way in which it changes the perception of the object is what li nks this charge with the ideas of Berkeley. Even though Coleridge and many other Romantics (such as Wordsworth) used 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 relationship between man and genius (Prickett 13).