196 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



Hopes of high talk with the departed dead. 



I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed, 



I was not heard — I saw them not — 



When musing deeply on the lot 

 Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing 



All vital things that wake to bring 



News of birds and blossoming, — 

 Sudden, th}^ shadow fell on me; 

 I gihrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy." 



This was the shadow of Intellectual Beauty; but it is an anticipation 

 by many years to ascribe this dignified conception to this early period 

 of his development. The shadow that fell upon him was projected from 

 the grosser theories of the French philosophers and their English inter- 

 preter, Godwin. Here Shelley found a temporary repose for his rest- 

 less fancies. Here was an intellectual theory of the universe that 

 afforded the solution to the riddle by the mere evasion of first principles. 

 And if it be objected that so gloomy a philosophy affords but scanty 

 nourishment to the aspirations of a poet, we can answer that the theory 

 of material progress and human perfectibility, which is a constant 

 element in that philosophy, offered a boundless horizon of hope in which 

 enthusiasm might expand without restraint. Shelley, early in his brief 

 career, rejected the materialist theory as at once false and pernicious, 

 but never did an unbounded faith in the ultimate perfection of the race 

 cease to inspire and sustain his verse. 



When Godwin's once famous book made its first appeal to Shelley, 

 the poet's mind was in that condition peculiar and perhaps proper to 

 youth when relative truth is rejected as a timid evasion of the great 

 reality, and when truth absolute alone has power to command our intel- 

 lect and our enthusiasms. It is either truth absolute, inflexible, dog- 

 matic that we discover in Godwin, or his book is nothing to the purpose. 

 Analysis would be tedious, but reference to some of the more striking 

 theories will not be superfluous to show how Shelley's conduct and his 

 early opinions conform themselves to the precepts of this pernicious 

 ijook. 



Broadly speaking, the philosophy rests upon the already enunciated 

 theory of Helvétius, that the laws of a country are responsible for the 

 crimes and errors of individuals. Godwin constitutes in his ideal 

 speculations an abstraction which he terms reason. Virtue is con- 

 formity with individual judgment, vice is the mere neglect to apprehend 

 4;he just relations of things. Morality is therefore a mere calculation 

 of consequences, and truth and reason properly displa3^ed to a criminal 



