He never doubted whether his fellow-creatures were certain to be equally fortunate.
Shelley had no faculty for compromise, no perception of the blended truths and falsehoods through which the mind of man must gradually win its way from the obscurity of myths into the clearness of positive knowledge, for ever toiling and for ever foiled, and forced to content itself with the increasing consciousness of limitations.

Brimming over with love for men, he was deficient in sympathy with the conditions under which they actually think and feel.

Could he but dethrone the Anarch Custom, the millennium, he argued, would immediately arrive; nor did he stop to think how different was the fibre of his own soul from that of the unnumbered multitudes around him.

In his adoration of what he recognized as living, he retained no reverence for the ossified experience of past ages.

The principle of evolution, which forms a saving link between the obsolete and the organically vital, had no place in his logic.