time to read Spinoza--an author with whom he would have found himself
largely in sympathy--he might have learned that nothing is evil in
itself, and that what is evil in things is not due to any accident in
creation, nor to groundless malice in man. Evil is an inevitable
aspect which things put on when they are struggling to preserve
themselves in the same habitat, in which there is not room or matter
enough for them to prosper equally side by side. Under these
circumstances the partial success of any creature--say, the
cancer-microbe--is an evil from the point of view of those other
creatures--say, men--to whom that success is a defeat. Shelley
sometimes half perceived this inevitable tragedy. So he says of the
fair lady in the _Sensitive Plant_:

"All killing insects and gnawing worms,
And things of obscene and unlovely forms,
She bore in a basket of Indian woof,
Into the rough woods far aloof--
In a basket of grasses and wild flowers full,
The freshest her gentle hands could pull
For the poor banished insects, whose intent,
Although they did ill, was innocent."

Now it is all very well to ask cancer-microbes to be reasonable, and
go feed on oak-leaves, if the oak-leaves do not object; oak-leaves
might be poison for them, and in any case cancer-microbes cannot
listen to reason; they must go on propagating where they are, unless
they are quickly and utterly exterminated. And fundamentally men are
subject to the same fatality exactly; they cannot listen to reason
unless they are reasonable; and it is unreasonable to expect that,
being animals, they should be reasonable exclusively. Imagination is
indeed at work in them, and makes them capable of sacrificing
themselves for any idea that appeals to them, for their children,
perhaps, or for their religion. But they are not more capable of
sacrificing themselves to what does not interest them than the
cancer-microbes are of sacrificing themselves to men.

When Shelley marvels at the perversity of the world, he shows his
ignorance of the world. The illusion he suffers from is
constitutional, and such as larks and sensitive plants are possibly
subject to in their way: what he is marvelling at is really that
anything should exist at all not a creature of his own moral
disposition. Consequently the more he misunderstands the world and
bids it change its nature, the more he expresses his own nature: so
that all is not vanity in his il