Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer | Page 4

expression? Thus,
would philosophy, or one kind of philosophy in comparison with
another, have seemed to had been in such a diminished condition in
Britain about the year 1830, if critics had been in the habit of counting

Wordsworth in the philosophic list as well as Coleridge, Mackintosh,
Bentham, and James Mill? Was there not more of what you might call
Spinozaism in Wordsworth than even in Coleridge, who spoke more of
Spinoza? But that hardly needs all this justification, so far as Mr.
Tennyson is concerned, of our reckoning him in the present list. He that
would exclude In "Memoriam" (1850) and "Maud" (1855) from the
conspectus of the philosophical literature of our time, has yet to learn
what philosophy is. Whatever else "In Memoriam" may be, it is a
manual for many of the latest hints and questions in British
Metaphysics."
The soi-disant philosophers and classifiers of the sciences and arts who
will not permit such poets as Shelley and Tennyson to be put in the
category of philosophers, remind one very forcibly of the passage in
Macbeth: "The earth has bubbles, as the water has, and these are of
them!"
As a poet and not as a poet, as an acknowledged legislator for the race,
as a philosopher, (a searcher after, or lover of wisdom) and as a
political and social reformer, it is my intention to treat Shelley this
evening, and having finished my prefatory remarks, will now regard
him in those attributes which peculiarly should enshrine him in your
hearts and mine.
The philosophical theories of advanced thinkers are always tinged with
the reflex of that which called them forth, or impeded them in their
development, consequently social bondage and the "anarch custom"
being always present to Shelley, the great idea ever uppermost to him
was that true happiness is only attainable in perfect freedom: the
atrocious system of fagging, now almost extinct in the English Public
Schools and the tyrannical venality of ushers, deeply impressed
themselves on the mind of Shelley, and he tells us, in the beautiful lines
to his wife, of the remembrance of his endeavors to overthrow these
abominations having failed, of flying from "the harsh and grating strife
of tyrants and of foes" and of the high and noble resolves which
inspired him:
"And then I clasp'd my hands, and look'd around; But none were near

to mock my streaming eyes, Which pour'd their warm drops on the
sunny ground. So, without shame, I spake: 'I will be wise, And just, and
free, and mild, if in me lies Such power; for I grow weary to behold
The selfish and the strong still tyrannize Without reproach or check.' I
then controll'd My tears; my heart grew calm; and I was meek and bold.
"And from that hour did I, with earnest thought, Heap knowledge from
forbidden mines of lore; Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught, I
cared to learn; but from that secret store Wrought linked armor for my
soul, before It might walk forth, to war among mankind. Thus, power
and hope were strengthen'd more and more Within me, till there came
upon my mind A sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I pined."
The fruits born of this seed are discernible in every line of his works.
While having all reverence for his college companions, Aristotle,
Aeschylus, and Demosthenes, his mind instinctively turns towards the
deemed heretical works of the later French philosophers, D'Holbach,
Condillac, La Place, Rousseau, the encyclopaedists, and other members
of that school. His intellect he furbishes with stores of logic and of
chemistry, in which his greatest love was to experimentalize; of botany
and astronomy, in which he was more than a mere adept; from Hume,
too, whose essay on "Miracles," wrong as it is in the main on many
important points, was one of the alphas of his creed--and with deep
draughts from his great instructor, Plato, of whom he always spoke
with the greatest adoration, as, for instance, in the preface to the
Symposium:
"Plato is eminently the greatest among the Greek philosophers; and
from, or rather perhaps through him and his master, Socrates, have
proceeded those emanations of moral and metaphysical knowledge, on
which a long series and an incalculable variety of popular superstitions
have sheltered their absurdities from the slow contempt of mankind."
It is desirable to call attention to the great minds from whom the
student of the early part of this century could only cull his
knowledge--he had no Spencer and no Mill, at whose feet to sit--he had
in science none of the conclusions of Darwin, of Huxley, of Tyndall, of
Murchison, of Lyell, to refer to, and yet I think, that the careful reader

will, like myself, find prefigured in Shelley's works much of that of