THE CONTRIBUTION OF RALPH CUDWORTH TO THE NEOPLATONIC BACKGROUND OF S.T. COLERIDGE’S “RELIGIOUS MUSINGS”

Against the widely accepted proposition that the source of Coleridge’s concept of symbol is to be found in German Idealism, it is our contention here that the romantic was firstly influenced by a group of British Neoplatonic philosophers, the Cambridge Platonists, who gave him the bases upon which Coleridge would build his symbolic Poetics. In this paper we will examine Coleridge’s readings of Ralph Cudworth’s The True Intellectual System in 1795-6 and how the ideas in this massive work contributed to the ideological background of Religious Musings (1794-1796).