on our minds
before we can resist or so much as suspect their malignity. Like the
barbarous directors of Eastern seraglios they deprive us of our
virility, and fit us for their despicable employment from the cradle. So
false is the opinion that has too generally prevailed that politics is
an affair with which ordinary men have little concern."

Here Godwin is introducing into English thinking an idea originally
French. English writers from Locke to Paine had spoken of government as
something purely negative, so little important that only when a man saw
his property threatened or his shores invaded, was he forced to
recollect that he had a country. Godwin saw its influence everywhere,
insinuating itself into our personal dispositions and insensibly
communicating its spirit to our private transactions. The idea in his
hands made for hope. Reform, or better still, abolish governments, and
to what heights of virtue might not men aspire? We need not say with
Rousseau that men are naturally virtuous. The child, as Helvetius
delighted to point out, will do that for a coral or a doll which he will
do at a mature age for a title or a sceptre. Men are rather the
infinitely malleable, variable stuff on which education and persuasion
can play.

The first essential dogma of perfectibility, the first presupposition of
progress is, then, that men's characters depend on external
circumstances. The second dogma, the second condition of hope is that
the voluntary actions of men originate in their opinions. It is an
orthodox Socratic position, but Godwin was not a student of Plato. He
laid down this dogma as the necessary basis of any reform by persuasion.
There is much virtue in the word "voluntary." In so far as actions are
voluntary, the doctrine is self-evident. A voluntary action is
accompanied by foresight, and the idea of certain consequences is its
motive. A judgment "this is good" or "this is desirable," has preceded
the action, and it originates therefore in an opinion however fugitive.
In moments of passion my attention is so engrossed by a particular view
of the subject that I forget considerations by which I am commonly
guided. Even in battles between reason and sense, he holds, the
contending forces assume a rational form. It is opinion contending with
opinion and judgment with judgment. At this point the modern reader will
become sceptical. These internal struggles assume a rational form only
when self-consciousness revie