rce, and that it reveals
the laws to which mankind will ultimately conform. The revolutionary
doctrine of the 'rights of man' expressed one form of this doctrine, and
showed in the most striking way a strength and weakness, which are the
converse of those exhibited by its antagonist. It was strong as
appealing to the loftier motives of justice and sympathy; and weak as
defying the appeal to experience. The most striking example in English
literature is in Godwin's 'Political Justice.' The existing social order
is to be calmly abolished because founded upon blind prejudice; the
constituent atoms called men are to be rearranged in an ideal order as
in a mathematical diagram. Shelley gives the translation of this theory
into poetry. The 'Revolt of Islam' or the 'Prometheus Unbound,' with all
its unearthly beauty, wearies the imagination which tries to soar into
the thin air of Shelley's dreamworld; just as the intellect, trying to
apply the abstract formulae of political metaphysics to any concrete
problem, feels as though it were under an exhausted receiver. In both
cases we seem to have got entirely out of the region of real human
passions and senses into a world, beautiful perhaps, but certainly
impalpable.

The great aim of moral philosophy is to unite the disjoined element, to
end the divorce between reason and experience, and to escape from the
alternative of dealing with empty but symmetrical formulae or concrete
and chaotic facts. No hint can be given here as to the direction in
which a final solution must be sought. Whatever the true method,
Wordsworth's mode of conceiving the problem shows how powerfully he
grasped the questions at issue. If his doctrines are not systematically
expounded, they all have a direct bearing upon the real difficulties
involved. They are stated so forcibly in his noblest poems that we might
almost express a complete theory in his own language. But, without
seeking to make a collection of aphorisms from his poetry, we may
indicate the cardinal points of his teaching.[24]

The most characteristic of all his doctrines is that which is embodied
in the great ode upon the 'Intimations of Immortality.' The doctrine
itself--the theory that the instincts of childhood testify to the
pre-existence of the soul--sounds fanciful enough; and Wordsworth took
rather unnecessary pains to say that he did not hold it as a serious
dogma. We certainly need not ask whether it is reasonable or orthodox to
be