One of the most significant features of Coleridge’s thought is the chiastic way in which it figures the relationship between ‘life’ and ‘thought’. While he developed vitalist theories about life in his ‘Essay on Scrofula’ and Theory of Life, he also insisted on the life of and in ideas. Coleridge’s philosophy of/as life thus reflects his twin aims: to idealize organic life and to enliven and ‘organicize’ thought. This philosophical chiasmus, however, harboured a volatile kernel, a void which Coleridge would have encountered in the form of Schelling’s ‘indivisible remainder’, an ‘incomprehensible base of reality in things’. This chapter argues that Coleridge’s term for this void was the ‘caput mortuum’, an ontological excess that threatened to erupt volcanically within his ‘living’ ideas. The essay concludes that the central problem of Coleridge’s ‘Life-Philosophy’ remains one of what to do with God’s waste.