Since then Shelley’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 God,” it is doubtful that Shelley was an atheist in the strict sense of the term. His poetry at least will tend to imbue us with a realization of God’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 Shelley 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 God 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 pass 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 passes now into my mind,” replies Panthea. To Shelley 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 God. 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 analogy 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] Shelley 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 constituent 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 Shelley 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 principally from Godwin. “Every human being,” says Godwin, “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]