ial and individual,
is vitiated by a naive and headstrong intellectualism. Life is rather a
battle between narrow interests and the social affections than a debate
between sound and fallacious reasoning. He saw among mankind only
sophists and philosophers, where we see predatory egoists and their
starved and stunted victims. But we have advanced far enough on our own
lines of thinking to derive a new stimulus from Godwin's one-sided
intellectualism. Our danger to-day is that we may succumb to an economic
and physiological determinism. We are obsessed by financiers and
bacilli; it is salutary that our attention should be directed from time
to time to the older bogeys of the revolution, to kings and priests,
authority and superstition, to prejudice and political subjection. "The
greatest part of the people of Europe," wrote Helvetius, "honour virtue
in speculation; this is an effect of their education. They despise it in
practice; that is an effect of the form of their governments." We think
that we have got beyond that epigram to-day. But have we quite exhausted
its meaning?

Precisely because of its revolutionary _naivete_, its unscientific
innocence, there is in Godwin's democratic anarchism a stimulus
peculiarly tonic to the modern mind. No man has developed more firmly
the ideal of universal enlightenment, which has escaped feudalism, only
to be threatened by the sociological expert. No writer is better fitted
to remind us that society and government are not the same thing, and
that the State must not be confounded with the social organism. No
moralist has written a more eloquent page on the evil of coercion and
the unreason of force. _Political Justice_ is often an imposing system.
It is sometimes an instructive fallacy. It is always an inspiring
sermon. Godwin hoped to "make it a work from the perusal of which no man
should rise without being strengthened in habits of sincerity, fortitude
and justice." There he succeeded.

CHAPTER VI

GODWIN AND SHELLEY

In a letter written in 1811 Shelley records how he suddenly heard with
"inconceivable emotion" that Godwin was still alive. He "had enrolled
his name on the list of the honourable dead." Godwin, to quote Hazlitt's
rather cruel phrase, had "sunk below the horizon," in his later years,
and enjoyed "the serene twilight of a doubtful immortality." Serene
unfortunately it was not. With a lonely home and two little girls to
care for, Godwin thought once more