kevis goodman they do, that “interpenetration” of passion and will, spontaneous impulse and voluntary purpose, will transfer itself to the reading process: The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution, but by the pleasureable activity of the mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power; or like the path of sound through the air, at every step he pauses and half recedes, and from the retrogressive movement collects the force which again carries him onward “Precipitandus est liber spiritus” says Petronius Arbiter most happily (BL, vol ii, p 14, emphasis original) “The free spirit must be hurried onward”: Coleridge’s happy or, at the least, wishful model of a partial regression that acts as forward propulsion seeks an alternative to tautological circularity – to such “unmeaning repetitions” that, the Biographia comments suspiciously, can resemble the place-keeping and face-saving antics of a poor play-actor who “in the scanty companies of a country stage pops backwards and forward, in order to prevent the appearance of empty spaces, in the procession of Macbeth, or Henry VIII” (BL, vol ii, p 57) Turning back to earlier eighteenth-century art criticism – to Hogarth (whose Analysis of Beauty is the source for the serpent analogy) and to Kames, whose Elements of Criticism (1762) praised “undulating motion, as of waves, of a flame, of a ship under sail” because “such motion is more free” – Coleridge would restore to reading the pleasures of travel – the tour, the freely chosen trip to the resort.24 That possibility, however, rests on the premise that meter and the poetic motions it seeks to induce are a “voluntary act” and not mere “mechanical impulse,” nor – recall the classification of nostalgia – a disease of volition Coleridge may here protest too much First of all, he may be protesting against more than Wordsworth, or at least a different opponent All the insistence on “voluntary purpose,” “traces of volition,” and interpenetration of the will might remind us that the main or at least the first antagonist of the Biographia Literaria is Hartley – and, under the rubric of “Hartley,” much of the associationist psychology and materialist brain science that negotiated disease as disordered bodily motion, including Erasmus Darwin From the point of view of the Biographia, the problem with physiological schemes like Hartley’s and Darwin’s is that they take all “traces of volition” out of the free spirit’s happy forward precipitance, rendering us all subject to spontaneous impulses and external stimuli The image that Coleridge chooses for the life of the will in such a system where “ideas are themselves nothing more than their appropriate configurative vibrations” may be resonant by this point: 210 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008