Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge is trying to rescue “general principles” from the Enlightenment-era suspicion that they’re airy abstractions floating above real life. His metaphor makes them bodily: principles aren’t ornaments you tack onto facts after the fact, they’re the hidden infrastructure that makes facts intelligible in the first place. A tree’s leaves are the visible evidence of life, but they’re also disposable, seasonal, easily torn off. Roots and sap are the ongoing, mostly unseen work that lets anything green happen at all. That’s the quiet provocation: if you fetishize “facts” without the animating system beneath them, you end up with a pile of leaves - data that can be cataloged yet never truly understood.

The subtext is Romantic and slightly combative. Coleridge spent his career arguing that the imagination and the shaping powers of mind are not enemies of truth but conditions for perceiving it. The tree image flatters empiricism (yes, leaves matter; they’re real), while insisting that empiricism alone is superficial. Principles, for Coleridge, are living: they circulate, nourish, organize. That’s a jab at the dead, mechanical generalizations he associated with reductive rationalism; his “principles” are closer to organic laws than to slogans.

In context, this fits a poet-philosopher writing against a culture that was newly confident in measurement, taxonomy, and “fact” as a moral posture. He’s reminding readers that interpretation is unavoidable - and that good interpretation, like good sap, is what keeps the whole system from drying into mere description.