o drove Godwin out of his compromising Unitarianism into a
view which for some years he boldly described as Atheism. His religious
opinions were afterwards modified (or so he supposed) by S. T.
Coleridge; but that influence is not conspicuous in his posthumous
essay on religion, and the best label for his attitude is perhaps
Huxley's word, "Agnostic."

As the French Revolution approached, the two friends fell under the
prevailing excitement. Godwin attended the Revolution Society's dinners,
and Holcroft was, as we have seen, a leading member of the Corresponding
Society. There is no difficulty in accounting for most of the opinions
which the two friends held in common, and which Godwin was soon to
embody in _Political Justice_. Some were common to all the group; others
lie in germ at least in the writings of the Encyclopaedists. Even
communism was anticipated by Mably, and was held in some tentative form
by many of the leading men of the Revolution. (See Kropotkin: _The Great
French Revolution_.) The puzzle is rather to account for the anarchist
tendency which seems to be wholly original in Godwin. It was a revolt
not merely against all coercive action by the State, but also against
collective action by the citizens. The root of it was probably the
extreme individualism which felt that a man surrendered too much of
himself, too much of truth and manhood in any political association. The
beginnings of this line of thought may be detected in a vivid
contemptuous account of the riotous Westminster election of 1788, in
which Holcroft had worked with the Foxites: "Scandal, pitiful, mean,
mutual scandal, never was more plentifully dispersed. Electioneering is
a trade so despicably degrading, so eternally incompatible with moral
and mental dignity that I can scarcely believe a truly great mind
capable of the dirty drudgery of such vice. I am at least certain no
mind is great while thus employed. It is the periodical reign of the
evil nature or demon."

This, to be sure, is no more than a hint of a tendency, but it shows
that experience was already fermenting in the brain of one member at
least of the pair, and it took these alchemists no great while to distil
from it their theoretic spirit. The doings of the Corresponding Society
were destined to enlarge and confirm this experience. In the hopes, the
indignations, and the perils of the years of revolutionary excitement
Godwin had his intimate share. He was one of a small comm