In a letter to the Reverend John Dawes, S. T. Coleridge writes about his son, (David) Hartley Coleridge, that

This is an amazing, and a little heartbreaking, appraisal of a son by his father. Coleridge denies his son any claims to a ‘moral’ character. Hartley's ‘mortal sickness’ is that he has little or no ‘Will’, no ‘self-acting principle of Volition’. Not unlike the characterless characters of Walter Scott, Hartley is thought most often to bend to the sway of his passions, to the expectations of others, to external circumstances. Even since ‘earliest Childhood’ his ‘character’ has been defined by its ‘moral Idiocy’. Up to this point it seems that Coleridge is only talking about Hartley's ‘character’ in a moral sense. But one could also draw from this letter that – as far as his father is concerned – Hartley has no character in the constitutive sense of the word either. He has, in fact, no actual ‘Self’ to which character traits can be ascribed. At the same time, however, Hartley is called ‘selfish’ – but only in the way that a ‘Beast’ is selfish.