of things sympathetically, by assimilating his habits of thought to their habits of evolution.  His faculties being innate and unadaptable will not allow him to correct his presumptions and axioms; he will never be able to make nature the standard of naturalness.  What contradicts his private impulses will seem to him to contradict reason, beauty, and necessity.  In this paradoxical situation he will probably take refuge in the conviction that what he finds to exist is an illusion, or at least not a fair sample of reality.  Being so perverse, absurd, and repugnant, the given state of things must be, he will say, only accidental and temporary.  He will be sure that his own a priori imagination is the mirror of all the eternal proprieties, and that as his mind can move only in one predetermined way, things cannot be prevented from moving in that same way save by some strange violence done to their nature.  It would be easy, therefore, to set everything right again:  nay, everything must be on the point of righting itself spontaneously.  Wrong, of its very essence, must be in unstable equilibrium.  The conflict between what such a man feels ought to exist and what he finds actually existing must, he will feel sure, end by a speedy revolution in things, and by the removal of all scandals; that it should end by the speedy removal of his own person, or by such a revolution in his demands as might reconcile him to existence, will never occur to him; or, if the thought occurs to him, it will seem too horrible to be true.

Such a creature cannot adapt himself to things by education, and consequently he cannot adapt things to himself by industry.  His choice lies absolutely between victory and martyrdom.  But at the very moment of martyrdom, martyrs, as is well known, usually feel assured of victory.  The a priori spirit will therefore be always a prophet of victory, so long as it subsists at all.  The vision of a better world at hand absorbed the Israelites in exile, St. John the Baptist in the desert, and Christ on the cross.  The martyred spirit always says to the world it leaves, “This day thou shall be with me in paradise.”

In just this way, Shelley believed in perfectibility.  In his latest poems—­in Hellas, in Adonais—­he was perhaps a little inclined to remove the scene of perfectibility to a metaphysical region, as the Christian church soon removed it to the other world.  Indeed, an earth really made perfect is hardly distinguishable from a posthumous heaven:  so profoundly must everything in it be changed, and so angel-like must every one in it become.  Shelley’s earthly paradise, as described in Prometheus and in Epipsychidion, is too festival-like> too much of a mere culmination, not to be fugitive:  it cries aloud to be translated into a changeless and metaphysical heaven, which to Shelley’s mind could be nothing but the realm of Platonic ideas, where “life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,” no longer “stains