n the propensities of the
new-born infant is there something permanent and inflexible? Helvetius
had been Godwin's chief precursor in this opinion. He had gone so far as
to declare that men are at birth equal, some raw human stuff which
"education," in the broad sense of the word, proceeds to modify in the
long schooling from the cradle to the grave. Men differ in genius, he
would assert, by education and experience, not by natural organisation.
The original acuteness of the senses has little to do with the
development of talent. The new psychology had swept "faculties" away.
Interest is the main factor in the development of perception and
attention. The scarcity of attention is the true cause of the scarcity
of genius, and the chief means of promoting it are emulation and the
love of glory.

Godwin is too cautious to accept this ultra-revolutionary statement of
the potential equality of men without some reserves. But the idea
inspires him as it inspired all the vital thought of his day. It set
humane physicians at the height of the Terror to work on discovering a
method by which even defective and idiot children might be raised by
"education" to the normal stature of the human mind. It fired Godwin
himself with a zeal for education. "Folly," said Helvetius, "is
factitious." "Nature," said Godwin, "never made a dunce." The failures
of education are due primarily to the teacher's error in substituting
compulsion for persuasion and despotism for encouragement. The
excellences and defects of the human character are not due to occult
causes beyond the reach of ingenuity to modify or correct, nor are false
views the offspring of an irresistible destiny. Our conventional schools
are the slaughterhouses of mind; but of all the external influences
which build up character and opinion, the chief are political. It is
Godwin's favourite theme, and he carries it even further than Holbach
and Helvetius had done. From this influence there is no escape, for it
infects the teacher no less than the taught. Equality will make men
frank, ingenuous and intrepid, but a great disparity of ranks renders
men cold, irresolute, timid and cautious. However lofty the morality of
the teacher, the mind of the child is continually corrupted by seeing,
in the society around him, wealth honoured, poverty contemned, intrepid
virtue proscribed and servility encouraged. From the influence of social
and political institutions there is no escape: "They pois