The Importance of Shelley’s Scepticism (1954)

Abstract

During the years 1811–16 much of Shelley’s reading in philosophy was devoted to sceptics. Hume and Drummond familiarised him with the most recent developments in sceptical thought — developments interpreted by Hume’s chief British adversaries, the Common Sense school of thinkers, as the logical and inevitable result of a doctrine pervading nearly all modem speculation. Cicero and Diogenes Laertius introduced Shelley to the scepticism of antiquity; Sir Thomas Browne and Montaigne to the scepticism of the Renaissance. The impact on the poet’s mind of the sceptical tradition, as variously represented by these authors, is largely responsible for those modifications in his thought which critics have long recognised as distinguishing the mature from the young Shelley.

Increasingly scholars have become interested in Shelley’s ideas; but however much their sources are identified in Godwin, Plato, Berkeley, a very real question-mark is raised over Shelley’s development of them. A frequent accusation is that he is a muddled thinker, simply because he tries to tie together strands from opposed philosophies. Recent studies have suggested that it is a mistake to see him as belonging to any one particular system, for he is really attempting a synthesis, to argue towards an independent position. To find an approach that does not discredit Shelley’s powers as an original thinker, Dr Pulos turned to the Sceptical Tradition, and those English writers such as Hume and Drummond whom Shelley read at Oxford and whose theories he subsequently adapted into his early poems.