All moral
life and moral judgment have this deeply romantic character; they
venture to assert a private ideal in the face of an intractable and
omnipotent world. Some moralists begin by feeling the attraction of
untasted and ideal perfection. These, like Plato, excel in elevation,
and they are apt to despise rather than to reform the world. Other
moralists begin by a revolt against the actual, at some point where
they find the actual particularly galling. These excel in sincerity;
their purblind conscience is urgent, and they are reformers in intent
and sometimes even in action. But the ideals they frame are
fragmentary and shallow, often mere provisional vague watchwords, like
liberty, equality, and fraternity; they possess no positive visions or
plans for moral life as a whole, like Plato's _Republic_. The Utopian
or visionary moralists are often rather dazed by this wicked world;
being well-intentioned but impotent, they often take comfort in
fancying that the ideal they pine for is already actually embodied on
earth, or is about to be embodied on earth in a decade or two, or at
least is embodied eternally in a sphere immediately above the earth,
to which we shall presently climb, and be happy for ever.
Lovers of the ideal who thus hastily believe in its reality are called
idealists, and Shelley was an idealist in almost every sense of that
hard-used word.
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