ws them--that is to say when they are over.
In point of fact, Godwin argues, sheer sensuality has a smaller empire
over us than we commonly suppose. Strip the feast of its social
pleasures, and the commerce of the sexes of all its intellectual and
emotional allurements, and who would be overcome?

One need not follow Godwin minutely in his handling of what is after all
a commonplace of academic philosophy. He was concerned to insist that
men's voluntary actions originate in opinion, that he might secure a
fulcrum for the leverage of argument and persuasion. Vice is error, and
error can always be corrected. "Show me in the clearest and most
unambiguous manner that a certain mode of proceeding is most reasonable
in itself, or most conducive to my interest, and I shall infallibly
pursue that mode, so long as the views you suggested to me continue
present to my mind." The practical problem is therefore to make
ourselves and our fellows perfectly conscious of our motives, and always
prepared to render a reason for our actions. The perfection of human
character is to approach as nearly as possible to the absolutely
voluntary state, to act always, in other words, from a clear and
comprehensive survey of the consequences which we desire to produce.

The incautious reader may be invited to pause at this point, for in this
premise lies already the whole of philosophic anarchism. You have
admitted that voluntary action is rational. You have conceded that all
action _ought_ to be voluntary. The silent assumption is that by
education and effort it _can_ be made so. One may doubt whether in the
sense required by Godwin's argument any human action ever is or can be
absolutely "voluntary," rational or self-conscious. To attain it, we
should have to reason naked in a desert with algebraic symbols. To use
words is to think in step, and to beg our question. But Godwin is well
aware that most men rarely reason. He is here framing an ideal, without
realising its remoteness. The mischief of his faith in logic as a force,
was that it led him to ignore the aesthetic and emotional influences, by
which the mass of men can best be led to a virtuous ideal. Shelley, who
was a thorough Platonist, supplements, as we shall see (p. 234), this
characteristic defect in his master's teaching. The main conclusions
follow rapidly. Sound reasoning and truth when adequately communicated
must always be victorious over error. Truth, then, is omnipotent, and
th