ature of
impulses. His predominant passion was an enthusiastic desire to reform the
world. Filled with the wildest ideas of the French revolution, his
impulsiveness hurried him on to give expression to them. His intellectual
nature was analogous to the moral, and itself received a stimulus from it.
His mental peculiarity was his power of sustained abstraction. His poems
are not lyrics of life, but of an ideal world. His tendency was to
insulate qualities or feelings, and hold them up to the mental vision as
personalities. The words which he has addressed to his own skylark fitly
describe his mind as it soared in the solitude of its abstraction:

Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest,

And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

It has been well observed, that this tendency of the mind to personify
isolated qualities or impulses, was essentially the mythological
tendency(647) which had created the religion and expressed itself in the
poetry of the Greeks, and possibly contributed to foster Shelley's
sympathies with heathen religion. His mind was peculiarly Greek, simple
not complex, imaginative rather than fanciful, abstract not concrete,
intellectual not emotional; wanting the many-sidedness of modern taste,
partaking of the unity of science rather than the multiformity of nature,
like sculpture rather than painting. This mental peculiarity contributed
to scepticism by inclining his mind to the pantheistic philosophy, which
can never be held save by those whose minds can give being to an
abstraction, and is revolting to those who are deeply touched with the
Hebrew consciousness of personality and of duty. His philosophy was at
first a form of naturalism, which identified God with nature, and made
body and spirit co-essential. In this stage he oscillated between the
belief of half personified self-moved atoms, or a general pervading spirit
of nature. From this stage he passed into a new one, by contact with the
philosophy of Hume; and, while admitting the diversity of matter and
spirit, yet denied the substantial reality of both. In this state of mind
he studied the philosophy of Plato, which was originally designed for
doubters somewhat analogous to him; and he readily imbibed the theory that
the passing phenomena are types of eternal archetypes, embodiments of
eternal realities. But it was Plato's view of the universe that he
accepted, not his view of man; his metaphysics