RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY

We now come to that part of our subject which is the most difficult to handle—Shelley’s religion. There are so many seeming contradictions in his utterances on this subject that it would appear impossible at first sight to reconcile them and bring out of them a consistent form of belief. Before he went to Oxford he had attacked Christianity, still on his entrance to that university he made the required profession of belief in the doctrines of the Church of England as by law established. How are we going to reconcile this with his love for truth? One cannot get away from the difficulty by saying that this profession was a mere formality. Thousands of non-conformists throughout the land denied themselves the benefits of a university education because they scorned to play the hypocrite.

Shelley’s views were fairly orthodox up to the time of his going to Oxford. Zastrozzi, printed in 1810, contains a bitter attack on atheism: and in a letter to Stockdale Shelley disclaims any intention of advocating atheism in The Wandering Jew. He, no doubt, was unorthodox in his views regarding the nature of God; but his belief in the immortality of the soul and in the existence of a First Cause is clearly shown in a letter to Hogg dated January 3, 1811. He writes: “I may not be able to adduce proofs, but I think that the leaf of a tree, the meanest insect on which we trample, are in themselves arguments more conclusive than any which can be advanced, that some vast intellect animates infinity. If we disbelieve this, the strongest argument in support of the existence of a future state instantly becomes annihilated.... Love, love, infinite in extent, eternal in duration, yet allowing your theory in that point, perfectible, should be the reward; but can we suppose that this reward will arise, spontaneously, as a necessary appendage to our nature, or that our nature itself could be without cause—a God? When do we see effects arise without causes?” From this point a rapid change takes place in his opinions. This is the work of the sceptic Hogg, who sported with him, now arguing for, now against Christianity, with the result that Shelley himself became sceptical. His disbelief is due also to the influence of the works of Godwin and the French materialists, Helvetius, Holbach, Condorcet and Rousseau.

In his System of Nature Helvetius makes an eloquent plea for atheism. He denies that any kind of spiritual substance exists. In the universe there is nothing but matter and motion. Man is the result of certain combinations of matter; his activities are matter in motion. God, the soul, and immortality are the inventions of impostors to lash men into obedience and submission. In Queen Mab Shelley represents God and religion as the cause of evil, and scoffs at the idea of creation.

From an eternity of idleness
I, God, awoke.[115]

A blasphemous caricature of our Savior and of the doctrine of redemption is also there exhibited. Later on he grew to love Christ, although he declaimed against Christianity as long as he lived. In Prometheus Unbound he treats our Savior more reverently than he did in Queen Mab. He is there in sympathy with the spirit of Christ, and denounces Christianity only in so far as it has abandoned “the faith he kindled.” This change, no doubt, is due to the influence of his residence in Italy and of his love for the New Testament. Regarding the character of Christ he writes: “They (the evangelists) have left sufficiently clear indications of the genuine character of Jesus Christ to rescue it forever from the imputations cast upon it by their ignorance and fanatacism. We discover that He is the enemy of oppression and falsehood”;[116] that He was just, truthful, and merciful; “that He was a man of meek and majestic demeanor; of natural and simple thought and habits; beloved by all, unmoved, solemn and serene.”

One of the greatest obstacles that prevented Shelley from understanding Christianity was his belief in Godwin’s doctrine that sin is but an error of judgment. His wife writes that “he believed mankind had only to will that there should be no evil and there would be none.” To one believing that mediation is superflous in the work of sanctification, Christianity is almost meaningless. Three months before his death Shelley expressed his views with regard to Christianity as follows: “I differ with Moore in thinking Christianity useful to the world; no man of sense can think it true.... I agree with him that the doctrines of the French and material philosophy are as false as they are pernicious; but still they are better than Christianity, inasmuch as anarchy is better than despotism; for this reason, that the former is for a season, and the latter is eternal.”[117]

The question whether Shelley was an atheist or not must not be decided on one or two extracts from his writings or even on any one work. True he argued against theism, but to call him an atheist on that account would be as logical as to say St. Thomas was an atheist because he advanced objections against the existence of God. One reason for the opinion that he was an atheist lies in the fact that he had a conception of the Deity which differed from the Puritanical one then in vogue. When he attempted to show the nonexistence of God his negation was directed against the notions of God which exhibited Him as a Being with human passions, as an autocratic tyrant. In his letter to Lord Ellenborough he writes: “To attribute moral qualities to the spirit of the universe ... is to degrade God into man.” He denied the existence of the God represented as “a venerable old man, seated on a throne of clouds, His breast the theater of various passions analogous to those of humanity, His will changeable and uncertain as that of an earthly king.”[118] Even in Queen Mab we find a vague picture of his conception of God:

Spirit of Nature! all sufficing power
Necessity! thou mother of the world!
Unlike the God of human error, thou
Requirest no prayers or praise, the caprice
Of man’s weak will belongs no more to thee
Than do the changeful passions of his breast
To thy unvarying harmony.[119]But in the next canto does he not say explicitly, “There is no God”? In a note, though, he explains that “this negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit coeternal with the universe remains unshaken.” Elsewhere he writes: “The thoughts which the word ‘God’ suggest to the human mind are susceptible of as many variations as human minds themselves. The stoic, the platonist, and the epicurean, the polytheist, the dualist, and the trinitarian differ entirely in their conceptions of its meaning. They agree only in considering it the most awful and most venerable of names, as a common term to express all of mystery, or majesty, or power which the invisible world contains. And not only has every sect distinct conceptions of the application of this name, but scarcely two individuals of the same sect, which exercise in any degree the freedom of their judgment, or yield themselves with any candor of feeling to the influences of the visible, find perfect coincidence of opinion to exist between them.... God is neither the Jupiter who sends rain upon the earth; nor the Venus through whom all living things are produced; nor the Vulcan who presides over the terrestrial element of fire; nor the Vesta that preserves the light which is enshrined in the sun, the moon, and the stars. He is neither the Proteus, nor the Pan of the material world. But the word ‘God’ unites all the attributes which these denominations contain and is the (inter-point) and over-ruling spirit of all the energy and wisdom included within the circle of existing things.”[120]

But did he not write The Necessity of Atheism for which he was expelled from Oxford? Even if he did, this does not prove that he was an atheist. We saw already that he loved to advance objections and propound difficulties to people who thought they knew everything that can be known about a subject. Many stoutly maintained that a valid a priori proof (usually called the ontological) can be advanced for the existence of God and it was against these that Shelley directed his artillery. “Why,” Trelawny asked him once, “do you call yourself an atheist?” “It is a word of abuse,” Shelley replied, “to stop discussion; a painted devil to frighten the foolish; a threat to intimidate the wise and good. I used it to express my abhorrence of superstition. I took up the word as a knight took up a gauntlet in defiance of injustice.”[121]

Leigh Hunt said that Shelley “did himself injustice with the public in using the popular name of the Supreme Being inconsiderately. He identified it solely with the most vulgar and tyrannical notions of a God made after the worst human fashion.” Southey told him also that he ought not to call himself an athiest, since in reality he believed that the universe is God.[122] “I love to doubt and to discuss,” Shelley writes, and it is for this reason that he adopted the arguments of Locke, Hume, and Holbach. He does not doubt the existence of God; he simply doubts that it is capable of proof. In January 12, 1811, it seemed to him that he had hit upon the long-sought-for-proof. In a letter to Hogg he writes: “Stay, I have an idea. I think I can prove the existence of a Deity—a First Cause. I will ask a materialist, how came this universe at first? He will answer by chance. What chance? I will answer in the words of Spinoza: ‘An infinite number of atoms had been floating from all eternity in space, till at last one of them fortuitously diverged from its track, which dragging with it another, formed the principle of gravitation and in consequence the universe.’ What cause produced this change, this chance. For where do we know that causes arise without their corresponding effects; at least we must here, on so abstract a subject, reason analogically. Was not this then a cause; was it not a first cause? Was not this first cause a Deity? Now nothing remains but to prove that this Deity has a care or rather that its only employment consists in regulating the present and future happiness of its creation.... Oh that this Deity were the soul of the universe, the spirit of universal, imperishable love! Indeed, I believe it is.” “The Deity must be judged by us from attributes analogical to our situation.” In a letter of June 11, 1811, he says God is “the existing power of existence.” It is another word for the essence of the universe. True he makes use of expressions which would seem to contradict the above, but it seems to me that these should always be interpreted in the light of his more explicit utterances as already explained.There was a kind of discrepancy between his interior thought and his exterior attitude. Apostle of reason though he was, he felt the necessity of appealing to other sources to quench the thirst for higher things. His fidelity to the doctrine of Locke, that all knowledge originates in the senses, did not allow him to proclaim this necessity. “Negateur d’un Dieu personnel dont les attributs seraient des reflets des pauvres attributs humains, il desirait pourtant pouvoir les supporter et les croire, mais cette obscure tendance, il ne sut on n’osa la traduire publiquement.”[123] In his poetry where he lays bare his soul his belief in God is manifest. It is only when he argues that he would seem to be an atheist. This discrepancy looks like deceit, but it is not. It is honesty rather than duplicity. He advanced only those statements which he thought he could prove, which he could demonstrate by the aid of reason. “It does not,” he writes, “prove the nonexistence of a thing that it is not discoverable by reason; feeling here affords us sufficient proof.... Those who really feel the being of a God, have the best right to believe it.”[124] (True he goes on to say that he does not feel the being of God, and must be content with reason; but by this he may mean that he does not feel the existence of the God of the Christians.)

After all, this position with regard to the proof of God’s existence is not so very different from that of Newman. “Logic,” says Newman, “does not really prove.” It enables us to join issues with others ... it verifies negatively.[125] Newman, contrary to Locke, would inject an element of volition into logic. “He does not, indeed, deny the possibility of demonstration; he often asserts it; but he holds that the demonstration will not in fact convince.”[126] We have really to desert a logical ground and to take our stand upon instinct.

According to Shelley anything that could not be demonstrated should not be given to others as gospel truth.[127] Now, feelings cannot be demonstrated, and hence it is that one may feel one thing and at the same time see that the senses and even unaided reason show that the contrary is true. “Feelings do not look so well as reasonings on black and white.” Later on he said that materialism “allows its disciples to talk and dispenses them from thinking.”[128] The opposition which Shelley experienced forced him to argue.

When Shelley wrote The Necessity of Atheism he was at most only an agnostic. This word was first used by Huxley in 1859 and if it had been in use in 1811 it may be that Shelley’s pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism would have had for its title “The Necessity of Agnosticism.” No doubt agnostics are often atheists, but they are not necessarily so. “A man may be an agnostic simply or an agnostic who is also an atheist. He may be a scientific materialist and no more, or he may combine atheism with his materialism; consequently while it would be unjust to class agnostics, materialists or pantheists as necessarily also atheists, it cannot be denied that atheism is clearly perceived to be implied in certain phases of all these systems. There are so many shades and gradations of thought by which one form of a philosophy merges into another, so much that is opinionative and personal woven into the various individual expositions of systems, that, to be impartially fair, each individual must be classed by himself as atheist or theist. Indeed more upon his own assertion or direct teaching than by reason of any supposed implication in the system he advocates must this classification be made. The agnostic may be a theist if he admits the existence of a being behind and beyond nature even while he asserts that such a being is both unprovable and unknowable.”[129]

With regard to the sources of Shelley’s views on religion there is considerable difference of opinion. S. Bernthsen maintains that nothing contributed so much to the development of his genius and of his world-view as Spinoza’s philosophy.[130] Professor Dowden, on the other hand, holds that although Shelley worked at a translation of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico Politicus several times, still “we find no evidence that he received in youth any adequate or profound impression, as Goethe did, from the purest and loveliest spirit among philosophical seekers after God. Of far greater influence with Shelley than Spinoza or Kant were those arrogant thinkers who prepared the soil of France for the ploughshare of revolution.”[131] And Helen Richter in two articles in English Studies, vol. 30, shows that some of the quotations from Shelley used by Miss Bernthsen may be traced to other sources besides Spinoza.

Shelley’s notions on belief can be traced to Locke and not to Spinoza. In the first book of the Essay concerning the human understanding, Locke attempts to prove that there are no innate ideas. To the objection that the universal acceptance of certain principles is proof of their innateness, he replies that no principles are universally accepted. You cannot point to one principle of morality, he says, that is accepted by all peoples. Standards of morality differ in different nations and at different times. How then are our ideas acquired? The second book of the Essay is devoted to showing that they originate in experience. Experience, Locke teaches, is two-fold: Sensation, or the perception of external phenomena; and Refection, or the perception of the internal phenomena, that is, of the activity of the understanding itself. These two are the sources of all our ideas. In the Essay, II, 1-2, we read: “All ideas come from sensation and reflection.... Whence has it (mind) all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer in one word, from experience; on that all our knowledge is founded and from that it ultimately derives itself.” In Book IV, 2, Locke says: “Rational knowledge is the perception of the connection and agreement or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our ideas.... Probability is the appearance of agreement upon fallible proofs.... The entertainment the mind gives this sort of proposition is called belief, assent, or opinion.”

In his notes to Queen Mab, Shelley writes: “When a proposition is offered to the mind, it perceives the agreement or disagreement of the ideas of which it is composed. A perception of their agreement is termed belief.... Belief then is a passion the strength of which, like every other passion, is in precise proportion to the degrees of excitement. The degrees of excitement are three. The senses are the sources of all knowledge to the mind; consequently their evidence claims the strongest assent. The decision of the mind founded upon our experience, derived from these sources, claims the next degree. The experience of others which addresses itself to the former one, occupies the lowest degree.” This reminds one of Locke’s division of knowledge into three parts—intuitive, demonstrative, and sensitive.

In the same note to Queen Mab, Shelley says: “The mind is active in the investigation in order to perfect the state of perception of the relation which the component ideas of the proposition bear to each, which is passive.” And in Locke, II, 22, we read: “The mind in respect of its simple ideas is wholly passive and receives them all from the experience and operations of things.... The origin of mixed modes is, however, quite different. The mind often exercises an active power in making these several combinations called notions.”

According to Spinoza, judgment, perception, and volition are one and the same thing. “At singularis volitio et idea unum et idem sunt.”[132] Shelley, on the other hand, says that many falsely imagine “that belief is an act of volition in consequence of which it may be regulated by the mind.”[133] Here we find reflected the philosophical ideas of Sir William Drummond, in whose Academical Questions, Shelley writes, “the most clear and vigorous statement of the intellectual system is to be found.”[134]

According to Drummond, reasoning is entirely independent of volition. No man pretends that he can choose whether he shall feel or not. It is not because the mind previously wills it that one association of ideas gives place to another. It is because the new ideas excite that attention which the old no longer employ. Trains of ideas may be always referred to one principal idea. “Whatever be the state of the soul, we always find it to result from some one prevailing sentiment, or idea, which determines the association of our thoughts and directs for a time the course which they take.”[135] We are impelled to action by the influence of the stronger motive. In his letter to Lord Ellenborough, Shelley holds that “belief and disbelief are utterly distinct from and unconnected with volition. They are the apprehension of the agreement or disagreement of the ideas which compose any proposition. Belief is an involuntary operation of the mind, and, like other passions, its intensity is purely proportionate to the degrees of excitement.”[136] There is no certainty that Shelley was acquainted with the works of Spinoza when he wrote Queen Mab. It is likely that he obtained his Spinozan views from William Drummond.

“It is necessary to prove,” Shelley wrote, “that it (the universe) was created; until that is clearly demonstrated we may reasonably suppose that it has endured from all eternity.... It is easier to suppose that the universe has existed from all eternity than to conceive a being (beyond its limits) capable of creating it.”[137] Again in his Essay on a future state: “But let thought be considered as some peculiar substance which permeates, and is the cause of, the animation of living things. Why should that substance be assumed to be something essentially distinct from all others and exempt from subjection to those laws from which no other substance is exempt.” To Shelley everything was God.

Spirit of Nature! here!
In this interminable wilderness
Of worlds, at whose immensity
Even soaring fancy staggers
Here is thy flitting temple.
Yet not the slightest leaf
That quivers to the breeze
Is less instinct with thee;
Yet not the meanest worm
That lurks in graves and fattens on the dead
Less shares thy eternal breath.[138]With Spinoza, Drummond maintains that two substances having different attributes can have nothing in common between them; and that there cannot be two or more substances of the same nature. Infinite, immaterial, eternal, substance has nothing in common with substance which is material, finite, and perishable. How is it possible, then, that the former produced the latter? “An immaterial substance is necessarily without extension, or solidity, and never could have bestowed what it never possessed. God is infinite and consequently his substance is the sole, universal and eternal substance. Of this eternal substance there are two modifications—mind and extension. Human mind is part of the infinite mind of God. By body is meant the mode which expresses the essence of God, inasmuch as it is contemplated as extended substance, in a certain limited way, consequently though we do not call the Deity corporeal, as that would express what is finite, yet we say that all extended substance is contained in God, since extension and mind are the eternal attributes of his essence.”[139]

Matter moves and acts according to its own laws; it preserves what we term the fair order of the universe, and it guides the motions of those worlds that are constituted out of it, by the properties which are inherent in it. “Why then should we not say that it feels, thinks and reasons in man. Thoughts and sentiments proceed from peculiar distributions of atoms in the human brain.” The same necessity which gives us a peculiar form and constitution also gives us a peculiar disposition and character. From these observations we may conclude with certainty that all bodies are capable of being affected by attraction and repulsion, of making combinations, of suffering dissolution, and that they always strive to persevere in that state in which they are while it is suitable to them.”[140]

Shelley has the same thought:

Throughout this varied and eternal world
Soul is the only element; the block
That for uncounted ages has remained
The moveless pillar of a mountain’s weight
Is active living spirit. Every grain
Is sentient both in unity and part
And the minutest atom comprehends
A world of loves and hatreds.[141]

Again in a letter to Miss Hitchener, November 24, 1811: “Yet that flower has a soul; for what is soul but that which makes an organized being to be what it is?... I will say then that all nature is animated; that microscopic vision, as it has discovered to us millions of animated beings, so might it, if extended, find that nature itself was but a mass of organized animation.”

Southey told Shelley that he was a pantheist and not an atheist. He (Southey) says: “I ought not to call myself an atheist, since in reality I believe that the universe is God.” “Pantheism in its narrower and proper philosophic sense is any system which expressly (not merely by implication) regards the finite world as simply a mode, limitation, part or aspect of the one eternal being; and of such a nature, that from the standpoint of this Being no distinct existence can be attributed to it.”[142] In so far as Shelley gives to nature the attributes of God he is a pantheist. This he often does. Thus, in Julian and Maddalo, “sacred nature”; in The Revolt of Islam, V, II, “dread nature”; and in the Refutation of Deism he speaks of “divine nature.” Often though he distinguishes between God and Nature; and in this respect differs from Spinoza and those who are pantheists in the stricter use of the term. Thus in The Revolt of Islam, IX, 14, “by God and nature and necessity.”

There is another difference between the pantheism of Shelley and that of Spinoza. Shelley does not make any difference between men, animals and plants. They are all about on the same level. Spinoza on the other hand makes man the king and center of the Universe.

Shelley may have gotten his pantheistic views from Volney and Holbach as well as from Drummond. In the Systeme de la Nature, II, c. VI, we read: “Tout nous pronne donc que ce n’est pas hors de la nature que nous devons chercher la Divinite. Quand nous voudrons en avoir une idÉe, disons que la nature est Dieu.”

A characteristic of his later pantheism is that it identifies God with love. “Great Spirit, deepest love! Which rulest and dost move all things which live and are.”[143] Again, “O Power!... thou which interpenetratest all things and without which this glorious world were a blind and formless chaos. Love, author of good, God, King, Father.”[144]

Plato mounts up from sensuous love to intellectual love, and so does Shelley. In the Defence of Poetry, III, s. 125, he shows us how another great poet accomplished this. “His (Dante’s) apotheosis of Beatrice in Paradise and the gradations of his own love and her loveliness, by which as by steps he feigns himself to have ascended to the throne of the Supreme cause, is the most glorious imagination of modern poetry.” One would be in this highest stage, according to Spinoza, when one has attained the intellectual love of God. “This intellectual love of God is the highest kind of virtue and it not only makes man free, but it confers immortality.”[145]

Shelly makes all things love one another. Thus in Adonais:

All baser things pant with life’s sacred thirst;
Diffuse themselves; and spend in love’s delight,
The beauty and the joy of their renewed might (st. 19).

This harmonizes with his earlier views concerning inanimate objects. We saw he believed that they all had life, that they were all possessed of the “Spirit of Nature.” In Prometheus Unbound he speaks of “this true, fair world of things a sea reflecting love.” Love draws man to man. It is the sine qua non of man’s existence. His love is founded in beauty as perceived by the senses. The Spirit of Beauty and the Spirit of Love are one.

Great Spirit, deepest Love!
Which rulest and dost move
All things which live and are
... Who sittest in thy star o’er Ocean’s western floor
Spirit of Beauty.[146]We love that which is beautiful. “Love is a going out of one’s own nature, or an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action or person not our own.”[147] The beauty of the world leads us step by step to the love of pure Beauty, Love itself. In the Symposium, Diotima explains how the love of beautiful objects leads on to the conception of perfect abstract beauty, “eternal unproduced, indestructible.... All other things are beautiful through a participation of it ... When any one ascending from the correct system of Love begins to contemplate this supreme beauty he already touches the consummation of his labor.”[148] The earth is not Beauty, Love, Divinity itself; it is but the shadow of God.

How glorious are thou, Earth! And if thou be
The shadow of some spirit lovelier still.[149]

Again

The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats unseen amongst us.[150]

This reminds us of platonism. The “Spirit” is the Idea, and the “shadow” is the earth. Plato’s Idea transcends the world of concrete existence. The two functions of the Idea are to cause things to be known and to constitute their reality. It is at the same time one and many.[151] It stood out most prominently in the mind of Plato as the Idea of Good or Beauty by which he meant God Himself. He says that the shadow of the power of intellectual Beauty inspires us and not intellectual Beauty itself. We could not endure that. Intellectual Beauty is God.

Since then Shelley’s Great Spirit, Spirit of Nature, Light, Beauty, Love, resembles the “Ideas” of Plato very closely, and since these Ideas have been identified by St. Augustine and other Christian platonists with the “mind of God,” it is doubtful that Shelley was an atheist in the strict sense of the term. His poetry at least will tend to imbue us with a realization of God’s Presence.

That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and move,
That Benediction which the eclipsing curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea.
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst; now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.[152]

In his later years Shelley became more and more of an idealist. Towards the beginning of 1812 he became acquainted with Berkeley’s writings at the instance of Southey. Ideas, according to Berkeley, are communicated to the mind through the immediate operation of the Deity without the intervention of any actual matter. All our ideas are words which God speaks to us. Matter is only a perception of the mind.

——this Whole
Of suns, and worlds, and men, and beasts, and flowers,
With all the silent or tempestuous workings
By which they have been, are, or cease to be,
Is but a vision; all that it inhabits
Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams;
Thought is its cradle and its grave, nor less
The future and the past are idle shadows
Of thoughts eternal flight—they have no being:
Nought is but that which feels itself to be.[153]

When Panthea, in Prometheus Unbound, describes to Asia a mysterious dream, suddenly Asia sees another shape pass between her and the “golden dew” which gleams through its substance. “What is it?” she asks. “It is mine other dream,” replies Panthea. “It disappears,” exclaims Asia. “It passes now into my mind,” replies Panthea. To Shelley dreams are as visible as the dreamers, and our minds are simply a collection of dreams. Reality is reduced to the unsubstantiality of a dream, and dreams are the only reality.

With regard to his belief in the immortality of the soul, we have the same difficulty and the same solution. All that we see or know, he says, perishes, and although life and thought differ from everything else, still this distinction does not afford us any proof that it survives that period beyond which we have no experience of its existence. The quotations, though, which can be twisted into an expression of disbelief in the immortality of the soul[154] are less numerous than those expressing disbelief in the existence of God. His writings teem with expressions of belief in existence after death. “You have witnessed one suspension of intellect in dreamless sleep ... you witness another in death. From the first, you well know that you cannot infer any diminution of intellectual force. How contrary then to all analogy to infer annihilation from death.”[155] Again, “Whatever may be his true and final destination there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothing and dissolution.”[156]

Plato claimed that the soul preexisted long before it was united to the body. In its supercelestial home “the soul enjoyed a clear and unclouded vision of ideas; and that, although it fell from that happy state and was steeped in the river of forgetfulness it still retains an indistinct memory of those heavenly intuitions of the truth.”[157] Shelley was so impressed with the truth of this theory that he once walked up to a woman who was carrying a child in her arms and asked her if her child would tell them anything about preexistence. He believed that after death the soul returns to Plato’s world of Ideas whence it came.

Whilst burning through the inmost veil of heaven
The soul of Adonais, like a star
Beacons from the abode where the eternal are.[158]

As to the nature of the soul his early views reflect the influence of Dr. G. Aberthney, who believed in a kind of universal animism. On January 6, 1811, he writes to Hogg: “I think we may not inaptly define soul as the most supreme, superior and distinguished abstract appendage to the nature of anything.” Again, “I conceive (and as is certainly capable of demonstration) that nothing can be annihilated, but that everything appertaining to nature, consisting of constituent parts infinitely divisible, is in a continual change, then do I suppose—and I think I have a right to draw this inference—that neither will soul perish.”[159]

In Queen Mab we find Shelley believing in the doctrine of necessity. There he denies the freedom of the will. Later on he exempted the will from the law of necessity, but not the intelligence or reason of man. His views on this subject were derived principally from Godwin. “Every human being,” says Godwin, “is irresistably impelled to act precisely as he does act. In the eternity which preceded his birth a chain of causes was generated, which, operating under the name of motives, make it impossible that any thought of his mind and any action of his life should be otherwise than it is.”[160]

The actions of every human being are determined by the dictates of reason; and, like the operations of nature, are subject to the law of necessity. This idea of necessity is obtained from our experience of the uniformity of the phenomena of nature. Similar causes invariably produce the same effect. In the material world an immense chain of causes and effects appears, the connection between which we cannot understand. The same thing is true of the moral world. There, motive is to voluntary action what cause is to effect in the physical order. A man cannot resist the strongest motive any more than a stone left unsuspended can remain in the air. Will is simply an act of the judgment determined by logical impressions. The murderer is no more responsible for his deed than the knife with which the crime was committed. Both were set in motion from without; the knife, by material impulse; the man, by inducement and persuasion. To hate a murderer, then, is as unreasonable as to hate his weapon. Educate him, but do not punish. In the material world

No atom of this turbulence fulfills
A vague and unnecessitated chance,
Or acts but as it must and ought to act.[161]

In the same way

Not a thought, a will, an act,
No working of the tyrant’s moody mind,
Nor one misgiving of the slaves who boast
Their servitude, to hide the shame they feel,
Nor the events enchaining every will,
That from the depths of unrecorded time
Have drawn all-influencing virtue, pass
Unrecognized, or unforeseen by thee,
Soul of the Universe![162]

In his notes to Queen Mab, Shelley admits that the doctrine of necessity tends to introduce a great change into the established notions of morality, and utterly to destroy Religion. It teaches that no event could happen but as it did happen; and that if God is the author of good He is also the author of evil.

Shelley soon broke away from the teaching of Godwin and Spinoza with regard to the freedom of the will. He maintained that the will is unrestrainedly free and that man is his own master. Thus, “Man whose will has power when all beside is gone” (The Revolt, VIII, 16). “Such intent as renovates the world a will omnipotent” (Ibid., II, 41). “Who if ye dared might not aspire less than ye conceive of power” (Ibid., XI, 16).

Man can obtain freedom if he really desires it. Godwin held that freedom from external restraints leads to freedom of the mind, whereas Shelley sees in external political freedom the blossoming forth of already obtained freedom of the soul. The interior freedom is obtained through self-abnegation and the determination of the will. Mrs. Shelley says in the introduction to Prometheus Unbound that Shelley believed mankind had only to will that there should be no evil and there would be none. Evil is not something inherent in creation, but an accident that may be expelled. “But we are taught,” writes Shelley, “by the doctrine of necessity, that there is neither good nor evil in the universe, otherwise than as the events to which we apply these epithets have relation to our own peculiar mode of being.”[163]

This view is very similar to that of Drummond. He held that order and disorder have no place but in our own imagination, and are the modes in which we survey the eternal and necessary series of things. Ideas of right and wrong depend upon the circumstances in which people are placed. They vary so much that we do not find the standard of morality to be precisely the same in any two countries of the world. Good and evil are modes of thinking; and what appears good to one person may appear bad to another, and neither good nor bad to a third. This is Spinoza’s doctrine: “Bonum et malum quod attinet, nihil etiam positivum in rebus, in se scilicet consideratis, indicant, nec aliud sunt praeter cogitandi modos, seu motiones, quas formamus ex eo, quod res ad invicem comparamus nam una eademque res potest eodem tempore bona et mala, et etiam indiffereus esse.” Ethics, IV.

Shelley has two versions of the origin of good and evil. The first is manichean and represents them as twin genii of balanced power and opposite tendencies ruling the world. “This much is certain: that Jesus Christ represents God as the fountain of all goodness, the eternal enemy of pain and evil.... According to Jesus Christ, and according to the indisputable facts of the case, some evil spirit has dominion in this imperfect world.”[164] Good is represented by the morning star and evil by a comet. According to the second version, which is Shelley’s own view, evil has not the same power that good has, and came later into the world. Evil is strong because man permits it to exist, and must disappear as soon as man wills this. Since it could be entirely eliminated, it is not an integral part of the world.

Man is naturally good. His vices are the result of bad education. They are nothing but errors of judgment. Let truth prevail; educate men properly, and then vice will entirely disappear. Shelley also writes:

Let priest-led slaves cease to proclaim that man
Inherits vice and misery, when force
And falsehood hang even over the cradled babe
Stifling with rudest grasp all natural good.

Godwin thinks that the influence of the emotions and passions has been overestimated. It is not true that they can force one to act in opposition to the dictates of one’s reason. They maintain their hold on men but by the ornaments with which they are decked out; and these are the things which compel a man to yield. Reduce sensual acts to their true nakedness and they would be despised. Whatever power the passions have to incline men to act will, in future, be offset by consideration of justice and self-interest. Many have overcome the influence of pain and pleasure in the past by the energies of intellectual resolution, and what these accomplished can be done by all. Reason and truth, then, are sufficient to change the whole complexion of society. They will ultimately prevail; and then all will be wise and good. The following from Shelley is an echo of this.

And when reason’s voice
Loud as the voice of nature shall have waked
The nations; and mankind perceive that vice
Is discord, war, and misery; that virtue
Is peace and happiness and harmony
XX
How sweet a scene will earth become!
Of purest spirits a pure dwelling-place,
Symphonious with the planetary spheres.

Godwin went so far as to say that eventually all sickness would disappear; and even in this Shelley follows his master. Shelley finds this view of evil in the teaching of Christ. “According to Jesus Christ,” he writes, “some evil spirit has dominion in this imperfect world. But there will come a time when the human mind shall be visited exclusively by the influence of the benignant power.”[165]

All the philosophists who influenced Shelley agreed in this that virtue leads to happiness. The purpose of virtuous conduct, says Godwin, “is the production of happiness.” So with Shelley “virtue is peace, and happiness, and harmony.” Virtue, says Godwin, is the offspring of the understanding; and vice is always the result of narrow views. “Selfishness,” writes Shelley, “is the offspring of ignorance and mistake;... disinterested benevolence is the product of a cultivated imagination, and has an intimate connection with all the arts which add ornament or dignity or power, or stability to the social state of man.”[166]

Shelley does not believe in the existence of hell. He thinks that this doctrine is incompatible with the goodness of God. “Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, that ye may be the sons of your Heavenly Father, Who makes the sun to shine on the good and the evil, and the rain to fall on the just and unjust.” How monstrous a calumny have not impostors dared to advance against the mild and gentle author of this just sentiment, and against the whole tenor of his doctrines and his life overflowing with benevolence and forbearance and compassion.”[167] God, he says, would only be gratifying his revenge under pretence of satisfying justice were he to inflict pain upon another for no better reason than that he deserved it.