It admits of more doubt whether Godwin possessed in any marked degree the positive qualification of high reasoning power. What is called 'remorseless logic'—the ruthless sweeping aside of every consideration that conflicts with our deductions from certain assumptions—is as often a proof of weakness as of strength. Nothing is so easy as to be perfectly symmetrical and consistent, if you will calmly accept every paradox that flows from your principles and call it a plain conclusion instead of a _reductio ad absurdum_. A man who is quite ready to say that black is white whenever the whiteness of black is convenient for his argument, may easily pass with some people for a great reasoner. Godwin, however, was beyond question a man of considerable power, though neither vigorous enough nor sufficiently familiar with the wider philosophical conceptions to produce results of much permanent value. Crude thinkers habitually mistake the blunders into which they, like their fathers before them, have fallen for genuine discoveries. They have once more made the old mistakes, and do not know that the mistakes have been exposed. Godwin was familiar with the recent school of French materialists, and with the writings of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. He worked out by their help a system which curiously combines opposite modes of thought. He was, in one sense, a thoroughgoing sceptic. Nobody could set aside more completely the whole body of theological speculation. He assumes that all the old religions are exploded superstitions. He did not argue against Theism, like Shelley; and, indeed, arguments that might lead him into personal difficulty were not much to his taste. But he virtually ignores all such doctrine as undeniably effete. So far he, of course, sympathises with the French materialists, and with them he abolishes at one blow all the traditional and prescriptive beliefs of mankind. The fact that a doctrine has been generally accepted is a presumption rather against it than in its favour. He will believe nothing, nor even temporarily accept any practical precept which is not capable of direct scientific proof. But, in the next place, Godwin did not in any sense accept the materialism of the French writers. He, like other English thinkers, had been profoundly impressed by the idealism of Berkeley. But then he extends Berkeley by the aid of Hume. He abolishes not only matter but mind. It may be still convenient to use the word mind, but in fact there is nothing, so far as we know, but a chain of 'ideas' which somehow link themselves together so as to produce the complex idea we generally know by that name. Of any substratum, any internal power which causes the coherence of these ideas or of the universe in general, we know and can know absolutely nothing.