d. It rejected
ordinary education, because it was incapable of assimilating it.
Education is suitable to those few animals whose faculties are not
completely innate, animals that, like most men, may be perfected by
experience because they are born with various imperfect alternative
instincts rooted equally in their system. But most animals, and a few
men, are not of this sort. They cannot be educated, because they are
born complete. Full of predeterminate intuitions, they are without
intelligence, which is the power of seeing things as they are. Endowed
with a specific, unshakable faith, they are impervious to experience:
and as they burst the womb they bring ready-made with them their final
and only possible system of philosophy.

Shelley was one of these spokesmen of the _a priori_, one of these
nurslings of the womb, like a bee or a butterfly; a dogmatic,
inspired, perfect, and incorrigible creature. He was innocent and
cruel, swift and wayward, illuminated and blind. Being a finished
child of nature, not a joint product, like most of us, of nature,
history, and society, he abounded miraculously in his own clear sense,
but was obtuse to the droll, miscellaneous lessons of fortune. The
cannonade of hard, inexplicable facts that knocks into most of us what
little wisdom we have left Shelley dazed and sore, perhaps, but
uninstructed. When the storm was over, he began chirping again his own
natural note. If the world continued to confine and obsess him, he
hated the world, and gasped for freedom. Being incapable of
understanding reality, he revelled in creating world after world in
idea. For his nature was not merely predetermined and obdurate, it
was also sensitive, vehement, and fertile. With the soul of a bird, he
had the senses of a man-child; the instinct of the butterfly was
united in him with the instinct of the brooding fowl and of the
pelican. This winged spirit had a heart. It darted swiftly on its
appointed course, neither expecting nor understanding opposition; but
when it met opposition it did not merely flutter and collapse; it was
inwardly outraged, it protested proudly against fate, it cried aloud
for liberty and justice.

The consequence was that Shelley, having a nature preformed but at the
same time tender, passionate, and moral, was exposed to early and
continual suffering. When the world violated the ideal which lay so
clear before his eyes, that violation filled him with horror. If to
the irrepre