justice and mercy to one's neighbour.(638)

The influence of the spirit of Paine lingered in some strata of our
population far into the present century: by means of the views of
Owen,(639) the founder of English socialism, which essentially reproduce
the visionary political reforms which belonged to the philosophy and to
the doubt of the last century.

Being desirous to improve the condition of the industrial classes, Owen
speculated on the causes of evil; and, approaching the subject from the
extreme sensational point of view, regarded the power of circumstances to
be so great, that he was led to regard action as the obedience to the
strongest motive. He thus introduced the idea of physical causation into
the human will; and made the rule of right to be each one's own pleasures
and pains. Founding political inferences on this ethical theory of
circumstantial fatalism, he proposed the system called socialism, which
aimed at modifying temptations and removing two great classes of
temptations, by facilitating divorce, and proposing equality of property.
The system is now obsolete both in idea and in history, yet it has an
interest from the circumstance that until recently it deceived the minds
and corrupted the religious faith of many of the manufacturing population.

The history of the influence of French infidelity on the course of English
thought closes with names of greater note.(640) If Owen, though belonging
to the present century, represents the political tone of the past, we must
also refer to the same period, morally though not chronologically, the
spirit of unbelief which animated literature in the poetry of Byron and
Shelley.

Saddened by blighted hopes, political and personal, Byron affords a type
of the unbelief which is marked by despair.(641) If compared with the two
exiles of the Leman lake, whom the sympathy of a common scepticism and
common exile commended to his meditation, he stands in many respects
widely contrasted with them in tone and spirit. Allied rather to Gibbon in
seriousness, he nevertheless wholly lacked his moral purpose and resolute
spirit of perseverance. More nearly resembling Voltaire in the nature of
his unbelief, he nevertheless differed in the features of gloom by which
his mind was characterized. His unbelief was a remnant of the philosophic
atheism of France; but it received a tinge in passing through the wounded
mind of the poet.

His brother poet, of a still loftier genius,