The Radicalism of Shelley and Its Sources Part 8

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 a.s.sociation 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 princ.i.p.al idea. "Whatever be the state of the soul, we always find it to result from some one prevailing sentiment, or idea, which determines the a.s.sociation 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, Sh.e.l.ley 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 pa.s.sions, its intensity is purely proportionate to the degrees of excitement."[136] There is no certainty that Sh.e.l.ley 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," Sh.e.l.ley 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 a.s.sumed to be something essentially distinct from all others and exempt from subjection to those laws from which no other substance is exempt." To Sh.e.l.ley everything was G.o.d.

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. G.o.d 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 G.o.d. By body is meant the mode which expresses the essence of G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, 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 const.i.tuted 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 const.i.tution 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]

Sh.e.l.ley 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. .h.i.tchener, 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 ma.s.s of organized animation."

Southey told Sh.e.l.ley 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 G.o.d." "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 Sh.e.l.ley gives to nature the attributes of G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d and nature and necessity."

There is another difference between the pantheism of Sh.e.l.ley and that of Spinoza. Sh.e.l.ley 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.

Sh.e.l.ley 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 p.r.o.nne donc que ce n'est pas hors de la nature que nous devons chercher la Divinite. Quand nous voudrons en avoir une idee, disons que la nature est Dieu."

A characteristic of his later pantheism is that it identifies G.o.d 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, G.o.d, King, Father."[144]

Plato mounts up from sensuous love to intellectual love, and so does Sh.e.l.ley. 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 G.o.d. "This intellectual love of G.o.d is the highest kind of virtue and it not only makes man free, but it confers immortality."[145]

Sh.e.l.ly 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 partic.i.p.ation 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 G.o.d.

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 const.i.tute 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d.

Since then Sh.e.l.ley'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 G.o.d," it is doubtful that Sh.e.l.ley was an atheist in the strict sense of the term. His poetry at least will tend to imbue us with a realization of G.o.d'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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.ses now into my mind," replies Panthea. To Sh.e.l.ley 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 G.o.d. 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 a.n.a.logy 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] Sh.e.l.ley 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 const.i.tuent 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 princ.i.p.ally from G.o.dwin. "Every human being," says G.o.dwin, "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, pa.s.s Unrecognized, or unforeseen by thee, Soul of the Universe![162]

In his notes to _Queen Mab_, Sh.e.l.ley 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 G.o.d is the author of good He is also the author of evil.

Sh.e.l.ley soon broke away from the teaching of G.o.dwin 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. G.o.dwin held that freedom from external restraints leads to freedom of the mind, whereas Sh.e.l.ley 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. Sh.e.l.ley says in the introduction to _Prometheus Unbound_ that Sh.e.l.ley 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 Sh.e.l.ley, "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 circ.u.mstances 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.

Sh.e.l.ley 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 G.o.d 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 Sh.e.l.ley'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. Sh.e.l.ley 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.