For from my early reading of fairy tales and genii, etc., etc., my mind had been habituated to the Vast, and I never regarded my senses in any was as the criteria of my belief. I regulated all my creeds by my conceptions, not by my sight, even at that age. Should children be permitted to read romances, and relations of giants and magicians and genii? I know all that has been said against it; but I have formed my faith in the affirmative. I know no other way of giving the mind a love of the Great and the Whole.
Those who have been led to the same truths step by step, through the constant testimony of their senses, seem to me to want a sense which I possess. They contemplate nothing but parts, and all parts are necessarily little. And the universe to them is but a mass of little things. It is true, that the mind may become credulous and prone to superstition by the former methods; but are not the experimentalists credulous even to madness in believing any absurdity, rather than believe the grandest truths, if they have not the testimony of their own senses in their favour? I have known some who have been rationally educated, as it is styled. They were marked by a microscopic acuteness, but when they looked at great things, all become a blank and they saw nothing, and denied (very illogically) that anything could be seen, and uniformly put the negations of a power for the possession of a power, and called the want of imagination and judgement and the never being moved to rapture philosophy!
(from a letter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Thomas Poole Oct.16th. 1797)
John Locke was the man who ‘said against it’ in ‘Some Thoughts Concerning Education’ (1695)
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