Friday 11 March 2011

Seen Perspectively by Finitude

Coleridge was rather fond of his own formulation ('I thought I exprest my Thoughts well when I said...'): 'Religion is only Reason, seen perspectively by a finite Intellect' [543 in Perry's Notebooks: Selections -- this dates from 'Feb 23rd 1816']. Of course it's possible that it is all the things that Coleridge loves in his faith that will disappear when the (mortal) Mercator's projection is folded back into (infintite) reality; that Greenland will shrink to being a relatively small, unimportant, barren island and not the heavenly Île verte of human fantasy.

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