Epicurean, the
Polytheist, the Dualist, and the Trinitarian, differ entirely
in their conceptions of its meaning. They agree only in
considering it the most awful and most venerable of names,
as a common term to express all of mystery, or majesty, or
power, which the invisible world contains. And not only has
every sect distinct conceptions of the application of this
name, but scarcely two individuals of the same sect, which
exercise in any degree the freedom of their judgment, or
yield themselves with any candor of feeling to the
influences of the visible world, find perfect coincidence of
opinion to exist between them.... God is neither the Jupiter
who sends rain upon the earth; nor the Venus through whom
all living things are produced; nor the Vulcan who presides
over the terrestrial element of fire; nor the Vesta that
preserves the light which is enshrined in the sun, the moon,
and the stars. He is neither the Proteus nor the Pan of the
material world. But the word 'God' unites all the attributes
which these denominations contain and is the (inter-point)
and over-ruling spirit of all the energy and wisdom included
within the circle of existing things."

Of these attributes generally supposed to appertain to Deity, he
writes:

"There is no attribute of God which is not either borrowed
from the passions and powers of the human mind, or which is
not a negation. Omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence,
infinity, immutability, incomprehensibility, and
immateriality, are all words which designate properties and
powers peculiar to organized beings, with the addition of
negations, by which the idea of limitation is excluded."

There is no other writer, I think, who seems to grasp so clearly as
Shelley the everlasting and immutable laws of Naturismus, or who
believed so fully in the divine mission of man, and the religion of
humanity. Ever soaring into the ideal, philosophizing by the aid of
his emotional impulses, Shelley possessed, like all true Hermetists
and Theosophists imbued with mysticism, a wonderful power of continued
abstraction in the contemplation of the Supreme Power. His mentality,
described by one of his critics as essentially Greek, "simple, not
complex, imaginative rather than fanciful, abstract not concrete,
intellectual not emotional," contributed its share to his bel