elley asserted from the earliest stage of his career
to the last day of his life. He ignored all religions as superstitions."

On another occasion Shelley said to Trelawny--"The knaves are the
cleverest; they profess to know everything; the fools believe them, and
so they govern the world." Which is a most sagacious observation. He
said that "Atheist!" in the mouth of orthodoxy was "a word of abuse to
stop discussion, a painted devil to frighten the foolish, a threat to
intimidate the wise and good."

Mr. Gosse may reply that Shelley's conversations with Trelawny are not
absolute evidence; that they were written down long afterwards, and that
we cannot be sure of Shelley's using the precise words attributed to
him. Very well then; be it so. Mr. Gosse has appealed to Shelley's
"writings," and to Shelley's writings we will go. True, the epithet
"best" is inserted by Mr. Gosse as a saving qualification; but we shall
disregard it, partly because "best" is a disputable adjective, but more
because _all_ Shelley's writings attest his Atheism.

Let us first go to Shelley's prose, not because it is his "best" work
(though some parts of it are exquisitely beautiful, often very powerful,
and always chaste), but because prose is less open than verse to false
conception and interpretation. In the fine fragment "On Life" he acutely
observes that "Mind, as far as we have any experience of its properties,
and beyond that experience how vain is argument! cannot create, it can
only perceive." And he concludes "It is infinitely improbable that
the cause of mind, that is, of existence, is similar to mind." Be it
observed, however, that Shelley does not dogmatise. He simply cannot
conceive that mind is the _basis_ of all things. The cause of life is
still obscure. "All recorded generations of mankind," Shelley says,
"have wearily-busied themselves in inventing answers to this question;
and the result has been--Religion."

Shelley's essay "On a Future State" follows the same line of reasoning
as his essay "On Life." He considers it highly probable that _thought_
is "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 as soon as those parts change their positions with
regard to each other." His conclusion is that "the desire to be for ever
as we are, the reluctance to a violent and unexperienced change," which
is common to man and other liv