He early became an idealist after Berkeley's fashion,
in that he discredited the existence of matter and embraced a
psychological or (as it was called) intellectual system of the
universe. In his drama _Hellas_ he puts this view with evident
approval into the mouth of Ahasuerus:
"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 inherits
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 thought's eternal flight--they have no being:
Nought is but that which feels itself to be."
But Shelley was even more deeply and constantly an idealist after the
manner of Plato; for he regarded the good as a magnet (inexplicably
not working for the moment) that draws all life and motion after it;
and he looked on the types and ideals of things as on eternal
realities that subsist, beautiful and untarnished, when the
glimmerings that reveal them to our senses have died away. From the
infinite potentialities of beauty in the abstract, articulate mind
draws certain bright forms--the Platonic ideas--"the gathered rays
which are reality," as Shelley called them: and it is the light of
these ideals cast on objects of sense that lends to these objects some
degree of reality and value, making out of them "lovely apparitions,
dim at first, then radiant .
Pages:
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206