Abstract
In a letter to the Reverend John Dawes, S. T. Coleridge writes about his son, (David) Hartley Coleridge, that
the absence of a Self . . . the want or torpor of Will . . . is the mortal sickness of Hartley’s being, and has been for good & for evil, his character – his moral Idiocy – from earliest Childhood. . . . . He has neither the resentment, the ambition, nor the Self-love of a man – and for this very reason he is all too often as selfish as a Beast – and as unwitting of his own selfishness. With this