Thus Godwin was rationalist, altruist, anarchist, and non-resister. It is not probable that Blake ever read _Political Justice_, his patience not being equal to the task. While ardently desiring political justice and liberty, it was soon plain to him from his personal knowledge of Godwin that all his first principles were false. It was not true that man's character originates in his external circumstances, although these do act on him. The differences between men are traceable to a fundamental inequality. One man turns everything he touches into dross, another into gold. Why? Blake had no need to argue. Being a mystic, he knew that man's innate principles, ideas, and instincts differed, that heredity could not be ignored, that beyond the five inlets of the senses which reason alone recognizes, there are a thousand inlets for the man whose spiritual understanding is awakened. He shivered at the thought of what the world would become if the rationalist had his way; for though he would sweep away superstitions, injustices, cruelties, yet from his invariable lack of discrimination he would crush with these the flowers and fruits of imagination, intuition, and inspiration. Besides, whether State or no State, what sort of life would man's be when his fundamental instincts and passions were allowed no expression? Blake had not the statesman's power of looking at men in the mass, but he knew that the individual was of extreme importance in any community, and also that the individual's value lay in his power of passion, and therefore Godwin's calm, reasoned, _doctrinaire_ scheme for bringing the Millennium made no appeal to him whatever, and the two men went their separate courses. It is interesting to note later that Shelley attained to liberty and song just so far as he shook off Godwin. When he talked with exaggerated nonsense about kings and priests, he was but repeating what he imbibed from Godwin in his early undiscriminating youth.