Shelley’s Philosophy of Human Life. O. W. Campbell has elaborated Shelley’s concept of human life in contrast with Plato the renowned Greek philosopher. His Dialogues and his Republic are among the greatest works of the ancients and embody a philosophical system which has served for admiration and discussion in all succeeding ages. According to 0. W. Campbell, from his earliest youth Shelley was ambitious to improve the world : he tried to do this by reasoning against superstition and by actively supporting causes of political freedom. He was aware of the evils of the time in which he lived and he deliberately turned to poetry to expound his ideas on different aspects of life and society. Much of the romanticism of his contemporaries was a refuge from reality. Shelley sought poetry with the most serious purposes. His poetry reflects his outlook on life. Shelley’s real philosophy of life lay deep down in his imagination and though it developed as he learnt wisdom, its main tendency was never changed. The most important of his beliefs, the motive power of his life and work, was his immense faith in man. With Plato Shelley had far more in common than with Rousseau or Godwin and two of the ideas which recur most frequently in his prose and poetry are essentially platonic. “These were the belief that life, as man knows it, is only an unreal show or a dream, and the conception of some all pervading Spirit of Reality dwelling behind this painted veil of life.” To Shelley life is the great unreality, a painted veil, anti the triumphal procession of a pretender. There is profound resemblance between Shelley and Plato in their whole outlook on life. Both were inspired almost entirely by what Jowell calls “the passion of the idea.” Both seemed to see life not in its transient and imperfect form so much as in its eternal relation to the future and the ideal, and to value it for the unrealized (but not unrealizable) more than for the actual. Both not only taught, but vividly felt, that between the shadow life on earth and the immortal world of ideas there was only a mist of ignorance or error which any man might dispel at any time— if he had sufficient wisdom, according to Plato, and according to Shelley, sufficient love. For both, the possible was the foundation of the actual, and the abstract perfection of the human character a reflection from the actual perfection of the divine. Shelley himself wrote:
Man is a being of high aspirations, ‘looking both before and after, whose ‘thoughts wander through eternity.’ There is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution.
Moreover, as his faith in the possibility of a millennium and in the divine nature of man grew deeper and more spiritual, he ceased to use the word “God” as a pure term of abuse. Apparently he proclaimed himself as an atheist, but in actual fact he had never been an atheist. But, philosophically, he would never accept the idea of an all-powerful, self-sufficient, personal God. he felt that “where indefiniteness ends, idolatry and anthropomorphism begin.” Shelley’s estimate of the innate qualities of the human mind and heart were high. “The prominent feature of Shelley’s theory of the divinity of the human species,” Writes Mrs. Shelley, “was the evil is not inherent in the system of creation, but an accident that might be expelled.” He insisted that error and ignorance are the ultimate sources of man’s sorrow and degradation. He seriously believed in liberty, equality and fraternity. But Shelley had some queer nations. History is to him at best a black business, an orgy of fantastic and luxurious cruelty. Commerce is, according to him, “the venal interchange of all the human art and nature yield.”
As a poetical philosopher he believed in an all-prevading Benignant Principle, and in an immortal human soul—immortal by reason of a spark of divinity within it. Death, according to Shelley, is I)LIt an escape from the prison of the unreal into the unconfined life of the spirit, the permanent reality which is hidden by the delusive and ever-changing appearances of earth. This idea is summed up in the following lines of Adorzais
The One remains, the many change and pass:
Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like dome of many coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.
To Shelley, ‘life is but an empty dream.’ This world is only a show, an illusion. He bewails the frailty of human existence :—
O Love ! who bewailest
The frailty of all things here
Why choose you the frailest
For your cradle; your home and your bier.
(Lines: When the lemp is shattered)
; but in this life
Of error, ignorance, and strife,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
And we shadows of the dream.
(The Sensitive Plant)
I fall upon the thorns of life.
(Ode to the West Wind)
— Art and eloquence,
And all the shows o’ the world are fail and vain.
(Alastor)
O cease! must hate and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die.
(Obedient to the light)
Shelley had an intense love of humanity. He writes in the introduction to Alastor: “Those who love not their fellow-beings live unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.”
Shelley wanted to have no concern with the past, because,
