The Romantics as Religious and Philosophic Revolutionaries The Romantics followed on the heels of the Enlightenment with its main tenet of objective truth; however, where the Enlightenment thinkers practiced objectivity, the Romantics tended towards subjectivity. There was emerging a new idea about perception and the imagination. Another key belief of the Enlightenment was Locke’s tabula rasa often translated as “blank slate,” which states that all humans are born “blank” and that what is gained through the senses is the sole source of knowledge and that originality is solely the recombination of existing ideas (Stewart). Newton popularized Deism or natural religion with his belief that God was only actively present in the universe during its creation and the creation of its laws. This philosophic idea of the “clockwork universe” concludes with the religious one that God can only be reached through the medium of the universe using sense experience (Stewart). Christian ideology, with a …show more content…
Coleridge has the idea of a primary Imagination that he believes “to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception,” which challenges the validity of objective truth because objectivity cannot exist if everything is filtered through the imagination (Romantics). Coleridge further says “Mental Things are alone Real; what is Calld Corporeal Nobody Knows of its dwelling Place; it is in Fallacy & its Existence an Imposture. Where is the Existence Out of Mind or Thought?” (Romantics). This is completely contrary to the idea of objective truth as well as the tabula rasa because the mind must have something other than sense experience available to it if it has Imagination, which distorts the sense experience. This is revolutionary in its overturn of the dominant ideology of objectivity for subjectivity among the