to the unfolding of theories and generalizations concerning it. Other poets have done the same thing, but philosophical poetry has been cold. It is Shelley's unique distinction that he is able to infuse intense emotion into such themes, and to clothe them with all that passion and beauty which usually gather about more tangible objects. The philosophical poet, in his anxiety to give a complete exposition of his views, becomes purely intellectual and prosaic. Whereas Shelley's emotional nature so far predominates, that he subordinates exposition to the expression of feeling; and his poetry becomes a series of lyrical outbursts about abstract ideas which he only vaguely indicates. By far the best illustration of his philosophical poetry is the Prometheus Unbound. It is the most complete single embodiment of Shelley's views as to the constitution of the universe, the past history of mankind, the principles which should at present guide the wise and good, the future of the world if these principles are followed. The poem does not take the form of an exposition → a form so fatal to the poetic spirit; nor, though a drama, does it attempt the delineation of human life, — an attempt which must, in the face of Shelley's limitations, have been unsatisfactory. The stage is occupied with personifications, and the great movements of human development presented through symbolic situations. These personifications win something of reality and life from Shelley's earnestness; and, in monologue and song, give utterance to the varying moods which agitate the poet's soul as he contemplates the condition and prospects of the race. If their significance is somewhat vague and the plot incoherent, this is the natural outcome of lack of clearness and connectedness in the poet's thinking. The particular philosophic ideas imbedded in Shelley's poetry bear markedly the impress of his time. He grew to maturity while society about him was under the influence of a revulsion of feeling produced by the excesses of the French

Revolution and whilst the national energies were concentrated in resisting the aggressions of Napoleon. The intense conservatism and the political narrowness of this era, the repressive measures, the encroachments on individual liberty, the wrongs perpetrated in political prosecutions under the name of justice aroused, in turn, a desire for change and the spirit of resistance in a growing minority. With this minority Shelley was led to sympathize by the predominating characteristics of his intellect and temperament. He had a disposition to quarrel with authority, sufficiently evident in his private life, a sensitiveness to evil which made him overlook the good in existing institutions, a youthful inexperience and impetuosity which undervalued slow developments, a tendency to depend upon abstract reasoning and individual thinking rather than on the gradually evolved results of the experience of the race. Every one of these peculiarities made congenial to him the radical and doctrinaire philosophy which is associated with the French Revolution. He became the disciple of Godwin and Condorcet; and, although, in time, the imaginative and mystic elements in his nature induced him to add to the teachings of such men, doctrines borrowed from philosophers as unlike them as Berkeley and Plato, certain fundamental principles of the French school were retained by him throughout life and continue to color his writings. These were especially such as bore upon the political and social conditions of men, the belief in the natural goodness of human nature; the idea that evil is the result of defective social, national, and religious institutions; the dislike of accepted doctrines and of established organizations; the love of liberty for its own sake; unlimited confidence in democracy. For a more minute statement of Shelley's views on these matters the reader is referred to the Prometheus and to the notes on that poem in this volume.

In his religious views and in his theories as to the ultimate nature of the universe, he was not, in his riper years at least, in such complete sympathy with eighteenth-century scepticism. It is true that at first in the notes to Queen Mab, for instance he adopted the tone and principles of this school, and regarded all religions, Christianity among them, as hateful systems of imposture. That Christianity had prescription of its side, and that, as practically realized in the community in which he lived, it was full of defects, - these were sufficient grounds to prejudice Shelley against it. Subsequently, however, Shelley abandoned the purely hostile attitude, and came to acknowledge the charm of the personality of Jesus as revealed in the gospels. In Prometheus and in Hellas he regards the founder of Christianity as a great ethical teacher and a martyr in the cause of good. In the more systematic treatment of the Essay on Christianity he contrasts what he conceives to have been the teachings and practice of Jesus himself with those of the Christian churches much to the disadvantage of the latter. But the supernatural in Christianity he consistently rejected, and continued to regard religion, like government, as an evil influence among men. Shelley was, indeed, naturally nonreligious. The two fundamental religious emotions, the feeling of awe and reverence and the feeling of sin, he almost entirely lacked. There was no holy ground for him; the sacred and the awful served merely to titillate his inquisitive intellect, to excite it to the work of investigation and analysis. And so, too, acting, as he so uniformly did, on impulse, he knew little of the conflict between the natural man and the higher law, which begets in spirits such as Paul or Bunyan, the sense of personal unworthiness, the need of dependence on some higher power. Hence, Shelley easily adopted atheism in his college days; and later, when his nature mellowed, he never felt the need, in the emotional

sphere, of an infinite being to love and reverence; any more than in the intellectual sphere he perceived any necessity for some central, personal force to account for the phenomena of the universe.

The sense of personality was extraordinarily weak in Shelley. Mr. Bagehot says: "It is a received opinion in metaphysics that the idea of personality is identical with the idea of will. . . . If this theory be true and doubtless it is an approximation to the truth-it is evident that a mind ordinarily moved by simple impulse will have little distinct consciousness of personality. While thrust forward by such impulse it is a mere instrument; outward things set it in motion; it goes where they bid; it exerts no will upon them; it is, to speak expressively, a mere conducting thing. When such a mind is free from such impulse there is even less will; thoughts, feelings, ideas, emotions pass before it in a sort of dream; for the time it is a mere perceiving thing. In neither case is there any trace of voluntary character." Accordingly, personality and will, and even mind, were rejected in Shelley's earlier philosophy, enunciated in the text and notes of Queen Mab. There he appears as a believer in crude materialism; the world is the result of a fortuitous concourse of atoms. As he grew maturer this most unpoetical of philosophical systems was abandoned; from a materialist he became a kind of idealist. He denied, following Hume, any essential difference between thoughts and things, and reduced them both to sensations. "Nothing exists but as it is perceived.” He now admitted the existence of mind; not, however, of individual minds, but of mind in general, of universal mind- whatever that may mean. The very vagueness and impalpableness of this philosophy commended it to his perception. In his Essay on Life, conjecturally dated 1815, he writes: "Let us recollect our sensations as children. We less habitually dis

tinguished all that we saw and felt, from ourselves. They seemed, as it were, to constitute one mass. There are some persons who, in this respect, are always children. Those who are subject to the state called reverie feel as if their nature were dissolved into the surrounding universe, or as if the surrounding universe were absorbed into their being. They are conscious of no distinction. And these are states which precede or accompany or follow an unusually intense and vivid apprehension of life. . . . The view of life presented by the most refined deductions of intellectual philosphy, is that of unity. Nothing exists but as it is perceived. The difference is merely nominal between those two classes of thought, which are vulgarly distinguished by the names of ideas and of external objects. Pursuing the same thread of reasoning, the existence of individual minds, similar to that which is employed in now questioning its own nature, is likewise found to be a delusion. The words I, you, they are not signs of any actual difference subsisting between the assemblage of thoughts thus indicated, but are merely marks employed to denote the different modifications of the one mind. Let it not be supposed that this doctrine conducts to the monstrous presumption that I, the person who now write and think, am that one mind. I am but a portion of it. The words I, you, and they are grammatical devices invented simply for arrangement, and totally devoid of, the intense and exclusive sense usually attached to them. It is difficult to find terms adequate to express so subtle a conception as that to which the Intellectual Philosophy has conducted us. We are on that verge where words abandon us, and what wonder if we grow dizzy to look down the dark abyss of how little we know."1

"This doctrine was," says Mr. Bagehot, "a better description of his universe than of most people's; his mind was

1 Prose Works (Forman's ed.), Vol. II, pp. 261, 262.