There are important differences, as the metaphysician would point out, between the two conceptions, and language of a similar kind might be found in innumerable writers before and since. I only infer that the two minds are proceeding, if one may say so, upon parallel lines. Fichte, like Shelley, was accused of atheism, and his language would, like Shelley's, be regarded by mere readers as an unfair appropriation of old words to new meanings. Shelley had of course no definite metaphysical system to set beside that of the German philosopher; and had learnt what system he had rather from Plato than from Kant. It may also be called significant that Fichte finds the ultimate point of support in conscience or duty; whereas, in Shelley's theory, duty seems to vanish, and the one ultimate reality to be rather love or the beautiful. But it would be pedantic to attempt the discovery of a definite system of opinion where there is really nothing but a certain intellectual tendency. One can only say that, somehow or other, Shelley sought comfort under his general sense that everything is but the baseless fabric of a vision, and moreover a very uncomfortable vision, made up of pain, grief, and the 'unrest which men miscall delight,' in the belief, or, if belief is too strong a word, the imagination of a transcendental and eternal world of absolute perfection, entirely beyond the influence of 'chance, and death, and mutability.' Intellectual beauty, to which he addresses one of his finest poems, is the most distinct name of the power which he worships. Thy light alone, he exclaims— Thy light alone, like mist on mountains driven, Or music by the night wind sent Through strings of some still instrument, Or moonlight on a midnight stream, Gives peace and truth to life's unquiet dream. In presence of such speculations, the ordinary mass of mankind will be content with declaring that the doctrine, if it can be called a doctrine, is totally unintelligible. The ideal world is upon this vein so hopelessly dissevered from the real, that it can give us no consolation. If life is a dream, the dream is the basis of all we know, and it is small comfort to proclaim its unreality. A truth existing all by itself in a transcendental vacuum entirely unrelated to all that we call fact, is a truth in which we can find very small comfort. And upon this matter I have no desire to differ from the ordinary mass of mankind. In truth, Shelley's creed means only a vague longing, and must be passed through some more philosophical brain before it can become a fit topic for discussion.