In the early period he accepted the theory of the eighteenth century masters that knowledge is derived from sensation; but he soon began to conceive of thought as having no beginning, as being spiritual in origin and character. Knowledge is both intuitive and discursive. Intuitive knowledge, like the soul, has elsewhere its setting and comes from afar; the mind is essentially transcendent in character. This change in him was also, if not the sole cause, certainly a determining influence on his political and social views. His fundamental conceptions and his particular personal and political experiences undoubtedly acted and reacted on each other. To comprehend the poet aright they must be studied together; together they reveal a unity of development. With the principles of immanence and of individualism running throughout his work and with the principle of transcendence appearing in it fairly early and harmonizing it with liberal Christianity with the spirit of which it was implicitly inspired from the beginning, Wordsworth created a large body of poetry of religious idealism, which, with the teachings of Coleridge, had a mighty influence in determining the current of thought of the nineteenth century. SHELLEY 3ere children Among the great poets of the early part of the nineteenth century Shelley and Byron were both poets of religious as well as of political and social revolt. Their attacks were directed, not in the main against religion and society as such, but against the established conventions of religion and society. As regards their feelings-interest in Nature, love of unfettered freedom, etc.—and the free and personal expression of them they of the nineteenth century, but as regards their thought— its sources and grounds-they were true products of the eighteenth century. Byron early and late was a partisan of the school of Pope, and poems like the Essay on Man contained the type of thinking on the whole best suited to his mind. Shelley early absorbed the writings of eighteenth century philosophers-French and Englishand adopted outright as his spiritual leader and guide one of the latest of them-William Godwin. In this day it is difficult to conceive how profoundly the youth of the latter part of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century were influenced by such writers as Locke and Hume, Voltaire and Pope. As Wordsworth and Coleridge began their work wholly in the spirit of the eighteenth century tradition, so did Byron and Shelley. But whereas Wordsworth and Coleridge effected a constructive reaction against that tradition, Byron and Shelley, either because of their youth or because of lack of original constructive philosophical thinking, never at |