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These passages are ones that some critics have taken as evidence of Wordsworth’s debt toColeridge’s ‘one life’ philosophy, or as early representations of his ‘creative imagination’ at work. 47While granting that the passages in the notebooks relate to personal experiences, I suggest they alsoprovide evidence that Wordsworth was formulating ideas that would explain his own cognitiveprocesses according to Stoic beliefs about cognition and epistemology. Such an interaction betweenmind and nature, a blending of human and divine, can be accounted for in terms of the Stoic belief thatmatter and mind, nature and ‘God’ are all composed of one material substance. Like Jane Worthington,I appreciate that Wordsworth’s experiences can be understood as a product of the ‘serene and blessedmood’ of his own mind, but I also suggest he was fitting his descriptions of those ‘moods’ into a Stoicsystem of thought he found amenable to his own experiences, and which he saw as offering a means ofunderstanding them.Other entries in the notebooks are more specific in their representation of Stoicism; oneproposes that by becoming attuned to the divinity in nature, we will naturally become sympathetic tothe needs of our fellow human beings – whom Wordsworth will later describe as all sharing in ‘onehuman heart.’Why is it that we feelSo little for each other, but for this,That we with nature have no sympathy,Or with such things as have no power to hold articulate language?And never for each other shall we feelAs we may feel, till we have sympathyWith nature in her forms inanimate,With objects such as have no power to holdArticulate language. In all forms of thingsThere is a mind (Alfoxden Notebook PW V p340)Since the Stoics believed the divinity could exist in the human mind as well as in nature it was possiblefor Wordsworth to draw the inference that there is a mind ‘in all forms of things’. This is not a purely‘mystical’ understanding, but a ‘philosophical’ one, according to the logic of the Stoics. Wordsworthwould famously describe this combination as, ‘a sense sublime’ a few months later, a concept blendingthe matter of the senses with the sublime power of the divinity, a power that ‘impels / All thinkingthings, all objects of all thought, / And rolls through all things’.In another notebook entry, Wordsworth relates how the mind, or here, the ‘eye’, has its owncreative power, a ‘godlike faculty’ that acts with ‘absolute essential energy’ as an autonomous power.The passage refers to the paradox of human consciousness – that we are, by nature, two-mindedbeings, capable of thinking, and also of thinking about our thinking. We are capable of reflecting onour own actions, from a higher vantage point, a godlike faculty, an ability to ‘reason’ about experiencethat is ‘divine’, something that distinguishes the human mind from that of other animals.47 Michael C. Jaye saw these notebook passages as evidence of Wordsworth’s ‘creative imagination’ at work:‘William Wordsworth’s Alfoxden Notebook: 1798’. The Evidence of the Imagination, Ed D.H. Reiman, et al.pp. 42-85242