influence of
Condorcet's Sketch, which had appeared in the meantime. Godwin says
that his original idea was to produce a work on political science to
supersede Montesquieu. The note of Montesquieu's political philosophy
was respect for social institutions. Godwin's principle was that social
institutions are entirely pernicious, that they perpetuate harmful
prejudices, and are an almost insuperable obstacle to improvement. If
he particularly denounced monarchical government, he regarded all
government as evil, and held that social progress would consist, not in
the reformation of government, but in its abolition. While he recognised
that man had progressed in the past, he considered history mainly a
sequence of horrors, and he was incapable of a calm survey of the course
of civilisation. In English institutions he saw nothing that did not
outrage the principles of justice and benevolence. The present state of
humanity is about as bad as it could be.

It is easy to see the deep influence which the teaching of Rousseau
exercised on Godwin. Without accepting the theory of Arcadia Godwin
followed him in unsparing condemnation of existing conditions. Rousseau
and Godwin are the two great champions in the eighteenth century of the
toiling and suffering masses. But Godwin drew the logical conclusion
from Rousseau's premisses which Rousseau hesitated to draw himself. The
French thinker, while he extolled the anarchical state of uncivilised
society, and denounced government as one of the sources of its
corruption, nevertheless sought the remedy in new social and political
institutions. Godwin said boldly, government is the evil; government
must go. Humanity can never be happy until all political authority and
social institutions disappear.

Now the peculiarity of Godwin's position as a doctrinaire of Progress
lies in the fact that he entertained the same pessimistic view of
some important sides of civilisation as Rousseau, and at the same time
adopted the theories of Rousseau's opponents, especially Helvetius. His
survey of human conditions seems to lead inevitably to pessimism; then
he turns round and proclaims the doctrine of perfectibility.

The explanation of this argument was the psychological theory of
Helvetius. He taught, as we saw, and Godwin developed the view in his
own way, that the natures and characters of men are moulded entirely by
their environment--not physical, but intellectual and moral environment,
and th