g at
all, can absorb, or as psychologists say, "apperceive" anything
whatever. Nothing comes out of nothing, and nothing can be added to
nothing.

Godwin and his school set out to show that the human mind is not
necessarily fettered for all time by the prejudices and institutions in
which it has clothed itself. When he had done stripping us, it was a
nice question whether even our nakedness remained. He treated our
prejudices and our effete institutions as though they were something
external to us, which had come out of nowhere and could be flung into
the void from whence they came. When you have called opinion a
prejudice, or traced an institution to false reasoning, you have, after
all, only exhibited an interesting zoological fact about human beings.
We are exactly the sort of creature which evolves such prejudices.
Godwin in unwary moments would talk as though aristocracy and positive
law had come to us from without, by a sort of diabolic revelation. This,
however, is not a criticism which destroys the value of his thinking.
His positions required restatement in terms of the idea of development.
If he did not anticipate the notion of evolution, he was the apostle of
the idea of progress. We may still retain from his reasonings the
hopeful conclusion that the human mind is a raw material capable of
almost unlimited variation, and, therefore, of some advance towards
"perfection." We owe an inestimable debt to the school which proclaimed
this belief in enthusiastic paradoxes.

Godwin's influence as a thinker permeated the older generation of
"philosophic radicals" in England. The oddest fact about it is that it
had apparently no part in founding the later philosophic anarchism of
the Continent. None of its leaders seem to have read him; and _Political
Justice_ was not translated into German until long after it had ceased
to be read in England. Its really astonishing blindness to the
importance of the economic factor in social changes must have hastened
its decline. Godwin writes as though he had never seen a factory nor
heard of capital. In all his writing about crime and punishment, full as
it is of insight, sympathy and good sense, it is odd that a mind so
fertile nowhere anticipated the modern doctrine of the connection
between moral and physical degeneracy. He saw in crime only error, where
we see anaemia: he would have cured it with syllogisms, where we should
administer proteids. His entire psychology, both soc