Abstract

By defining the symbol so as to conflate certain logically distinct categories--meaning and being, signifier and signified, art and nature--the Romantic writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge and a number of his German contemporaries were able to claim that everything existing possesses symbolic meaning, whether or not it seems to do so. Their concept of the symbol may therefore be understood as an attempt to reverse the disillusionment following from the post-Copernican infinitization of space, which deprived the universe of its human significance by making all positions within it purely contingent. Because this argument implies that earlier attempts to reverse that disillusionment were unsuccessful, particular attention is paid to the development and reception of Enlightenment ideas about a plurality of inhabited worlds and about "the sublime". Although the Romantic reaction against modern scientific thought has been called a reversion to or secularization of Christian theology, close examination of Coleridge's use of theological language reveals that his concept of the symbol is, in its cosmological implications, not only distinctly modern but fundamentally incompatible with Christian orthodoxy