How would you explain Coleridge's take on metaphysics in Chapter 12? Does he believe in a simple outlook based on the idea that what we see is real...

Coleridge does make a distinction between philosophers and everybody else. He says that not everyone can be or needs to be a philosopher, but philosophers do attempt to understand things differently. He says that the philosophic consciousness lies "behind the spontaneous consciousness natural to all reflecting beings." In other words, the philosopher goes deeper than the immediate perception of things. So, to most people, what we see is real, immediate, and understandable. For the philosopher,...

Coleridge does make a distinction between philosophers and everybody else. He says that not everyone can be or needs to be a philosopher, but philosophers do attempt to understand things differently. He says that the philosophic consciousness lies "behind the spontaneous consciousness natural to all reflecting beings." In other words, the philosopher goes deeper than the immediate perception of things. So, to most people, what we see is real, immediate, and understandable. For the philosopher, interested in the metaphysical and the transcendent, the outlook is not as simple. 

Coleridge also says that philosophy "is employed on objects of the inner SENSE, and cannot, like geometry, appropriate to every construction a correspondent outward intuition." The inner sense can not be dictated by the outward object. So, the philosopher/metaphysician must go more abstract, to the IDEA of what we see in the external world. In this way, Coleridge is giving a Romantic or Transcendentalist version of Platonic notions of Ideal Forms and ideas. 

Coleridge does explain that the knowledge of a thing does arise from the interaction of subject (consciousness) and object. So, there is a simplicity to the idea of this subject/object interaction. But there is definitely another process of understanding that the metaphysician undertakes, and this makes the interaction a bit more complex. We might call this "apperception" wherein the subject (or "self-conscious spirit") gets more into the idea of self-consciousness as a process or act of will which thinks beyond the simplicity of the subject/object interaction: 

Again the spirit (originally the identity of object and subject) must in some sense dissolve this identity, in order to be conscious of it; fit alter et idem.