When a man has got so far, he not unfrequently begins to feel himself a little bewildered. Nothing is left—to quote from a philosopher of whom neither Godwin nor Shelley apparently ever heard—but 'ceaseless change.' 'I know of no being, not even of my own. Pictures are—they are the only things which exist, and they know of themselves after the fashion of pictures; pictures which float past without there being anything past which they float, which by means of like pictures are connected with each other; pictures without anything which is pictured in them, without significance and without aim. I myself am one of these pictures—nay, I am not even this, but merely a confused picture of the pictures. All reality is transformed into a strange dream, without a life which is dreamed of, and without a mind which dreams it; with a dream which is woven together in a dream of itself. Perception is the dream; thought is the dream of that dream.' This description of the thoroughgoing sceptical position might pass (to anticipate for a moment) for a description of the state of mind produced by some of Shelley's poetry. It is, at any rate, a state of mind from which a reasoner is generally anxious to provide some escape, lest all ground for reasoning should be cut away. How can knowledge be possible if the mind is merely a stream of baseless impressions, cohering or separating according to radically unknowable laws? Godwin, however, goes on calmly, without any attempt to solve our difficulties, and proceeds to build up his scheme of perfectibility. Upon this shifting quicksand of utter scepticism he lays the foundations of his ideal temple of reason. For, as he argues, since a man is nothing but an aggregate of 'ideas' he is capable of indefinite modification. Education or the influences of climate or race can have no ineradicable power upon this radically arbitrary combination of flitting phantasms. Anything may be the cause of anything; for cause means nothing but the temporary coherence of two sets of unsubstantial images. And hence, we may easily abolish all the traditional ties by which people have hitherto been bound together, and rearrange the whole structure of human society on principles of mathematical and infallible perfection. The force which is to weave ropes of sand, or rather to arrange the separate independent unsubstantial atoms in a perfect mathematical sphere, rounded, complete and eternal, is the force of reason.