may utterly extinguish the most excellent and
delicate of these powers. In old age the mind gradually
withers; and as it grew and strengthened with the body, so
does it with the body sink into decrepitude."

He also considered that:

"It is probable that what we call thought is not an actual
being, but no more than the relation between certain parts
of that infinitely varied mass, of which the rest of the
universe is composed, and which ceases to exist so soon as
those parts change their position with regard to each other.
Thus color, and sound, and taste, and odor, exist only
relatively."

Even granted that mind or thought be a part of, or in fact, the soul,
then he asks in what manner it could be made a proof of its
imperishability, as all that we see or know perishes and is changed.

Here then comes the query, "Have we existed before birth?" A difficult
possibility to conceive of individual intelligence and if unprovable
against the theory of existence after death.

He then winds up the whole by thinking that it is impossible that,

"we should continue to exist after death in some mode
totally inconceivable to us at present."

and that only those who desire to be persuaded are persuaded.

This is but a rough outline of some of the principal features of his
considerations on soul immortality from a logical basis, and which,
after all, only constitute an argument, to which, and the thoughts
presented therein, he did not necessarily bind himself. There can be
little doubt, independently of what I have quoted, that he did not
believe in a future state as popularly accepted. Trelawney asked him on
one occasion: "Do you believe in the immortality of the spirit?"
Shelley's answer was unmistakable, "Certainly not; how can I? We know
nothing; we have no evidence."[B]

[Footnote B: Those who desire to fully investigate Shelley's ideas on
the immortality of the soul, and the existence, or nature, of Deity,
will be amply repaid by reading W.M. Rossetti's admirable memoir of
the poet, appended to the last two-volume London edition of his
works.]

When we take Shelley from a poetical standpoint, or with the divine
truism implanted by the Ain-soph clamoring within to his intelligence
for expression, how confident he appears of a hereafter, as in the
"Adonais," or in the following extract from an unpublished letter to
his father-in-law, William Godwin, the prop