Coleridge's early poetical ambitions owed much to contemporary speculations in natural philosophy and metaphysics. Hartley's vibratiuncles, Priestley's dynamic monism and Erasmus Darwin's pantheistic poetry all seemed to converge into a central vision of organising "myriads" providentially at work within the universe. Yet Coleridge soon distanced himself from "materialistic" science, for both philosophical and poetical reasons : he saw the will to see-and to image forth-the -primary causes of things as a species of idolatry, leading to poetry of an artificial kind. His subsequent dismissal of "allegorical machinery" was an important moment in the "divorce" between science and poetry that would later be associated with Romanticism.