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.

filled with a swarm of ideas, fancies, thoughts, streaming on without his volition, without plan or order; he might be pardoned for fancying that they were all; he could not see the outward world for them, their giddy passage occupied him till he forgot himself."

This doctrine he derived from the writings of Berkeley and Hume, though he differs from each of these philosophers from Berkeley in denying the existence of individual minds, from Hume in admitting the existence of something besides sensations, — universal mind. Yet this mind is neither personal, nor the ultimate cause of things. It is not a cause at all, for "it cannot create: it can only perceive." And he adds, "It is extremely improbable that the cause of mind, that is, of existence, is similar to mind." 1

These ideas are mainly negative; but to them Shelley added a positive conception derived from Plato, viz. : that these sensations, with which alone we are acquainted in this world, are imperfect shadows of a higher world into which, perhaps, we may pass at death, where exist in perfection the archetypes of all we dimly perceive here. He did not bring this conception into logical connection with his other theories. Logic had nothing to do with his acceptance of it. He was brought to it by his persistent discontent with the actual and by his yearning for ideals that would completely satisfy the cravings of his nature. "I seek in what I see," he said, "the manifestation of something beyond the present and tangible object."

One of these archetypes plays a very important rôle in Shelley's poetry, the archetype of beauty. About this conception some of those feelings cluster which, in the case of the majority of men, connect themselves with the idea of a personal god. Upon this conception of an all-sufficing

1 On Life, in Prose Works, Vol. II, p. 263.

2 See the concluding stanzas of the Adonais, and notes thereon.

beauty which but faintly manifests itself in the various forms of beauty known in this world, the poet dwells with extraordinary fondness and enthusiasm in the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, the Prometheus, and elsewhere; and the intense passion which permeates the lines in which he speaks of it, is one of the most extraordinary of Shelley's peculiarities. Sometimes, in his impatient yearning for that perfect rapture which should gratify at once every complex need of his nature, he hoped to find, even in this world, the incarnation of this ideal in female form. The consequent experience, the inevitable disappointment is enshrined in Alastor and Epipsychidion. As the desire for the ideal, — in other words, beauty, was his strongest motive, he sometimes conceives this beauty as the moving force of the universe, - the ultimate spirit which works toward good in the mind of man and in the external world. This is Shelley's nearest approach to the conception of the divine, and it receives its most adequate poetic expression in the Adonais. But, though there spoken of as a 'spirit,' it is a spirit without personal attributes, a blind power which impels all that is highest and best in the world, something as vague and impersonal as the modern conception of force, one and indestructible, though manifesting itself in various forms and in countless phenomena.

Poetry whose substance consists of philosophical and abstract ideas labors under a twofold disadvantage. In the first place, such themes lack interest for ordinary readers and lend themselves but little to emotional treatment. In the second place, there is less of permanence in the results attained by the abstract reason than in the direct results of observation. The pictures of human life by a Homer or a Shakespeare are always fresh; the theories of one generation of philosophic thinkers become inadequate and childish to another. Shelley was not even a pro