ib. ii. p. 264. Elsewhere Dowden remarks on the
singular insensibility of Shelley's mind "to the wisdom or sentiment of
history" (i. p. 55).]

All the glittering fallacies of "Political Justice"--now sufficiently
tarnished--together with all its encouraging and stimulating truths,
may be found in the caput mortuum left when the critic has reduced the
poetry of the "Prometheus" to a series of doctrinaire statements.

The same dream inspired the final chorus of Hellas. Shelley was the poet
of perfectibility.

8.

The attraction of perfectibility reached beyond the ranks of men of
letters, and in Robert Owen, the benevolent millowner of Lanark, it
had an apostle who based upon it a very different theory from that of
Political Justice and became one of the founders of modern socialism.

The success of the idea of Progress has been promoted by its association
with socialism. [Footnote: The word was independently invented in
England and France. An article in the Poor Man's Guardian (a periodical
edited by H. Hetherington, afterwards by Bronterre O'Brien), Aug. 24,
1833, is signed "A Socialist"; and in 1834 socialisme is opposed to
individualism by P. Leroux in an article in the Revue Encyclopedique.
The word is used in the New Moral World, and from 1836 was applied to
the Owenites. See Dolleans, Robert Owen (1907), p. 305.] The first phase
of socialism, what has been called its sentimental phase, was originated
by Saint-Simon in France and Owen in England at about the same time;
Marx was to bring it down from the clouds and make it a force in
practical politics. But both in its earlier and in its later forms the
economical doctrines rest upon a theory of society depending on the
assumption, however disguised, that social institutions have been solely
responsible for the vice and misery which exist, and that institutions
and laws can be so changed as to abolish misery and vice. That is
pure eighteenth century doctrine; and it passed from the revolutionary
doctrinaires of that period to the constructive socialists of the
nineteenth century.

Owen learned it probably from Godwin, and he did not disguise it. His
numerous works enforce it ad nauseam. He began the propagation of his
gospel by his "New View of Society, or Essays on the formation of the
human character, preparatory to the development of a plan for gradually
ameliorating the condition of mankind," which he dedicated to the Prince
Regent. [Footnote: 3rd ed. 181