(Reprinted from _The Pilot_, 20th April 1901. With added postscript.)
DR. ÉMILE LEGOUIS, in his singularly interesting book, _La Jeunesse de
William Wordsworth_, well translated into English by Mr. T. W. Matthews
(Dent and Co., 1897), calls attention to the influence on Wordsworth in
his early years of Godwin’s _Political Justice_. On reading _Political
Justice_ now, it is difficult to understand why Wordsworth should have
been so much affected by it. Its philosophy, if philosophy it can be
called, is simply the denial of any rule of conduct or of any belief
which the understanding cannot prove, and the inclusion of man in the
necessity which controls inanimate nature. ‘All vice is nothing more
than error and mistake’ (i. 31). {205} ‘We differ from the inferior
animals in the greater facility with which we arrange our sensations, and
compare, prefer, and judge’ (i. 57). ‘Justice . . . is coincident with
utility’ (i. 121). ‘If my mother were in a house on fire, and I had a
ladder outside with which I could save her, she would not, because she
was my mother, have any greater claim than the other inmates on my
exertions’ (i. 83). ‘But,’ says an objector, ‘your mother nourished you
in the helplessness of infancy.’ ‘When she first subjected herself,’
replies Godwin, ‘to the necessity of these cares, she was probably
influenced by no particular motives of benevolence to her future
offspring. . . . It is the disposition of the mind . . . that entitles
to respect,’ and consequently justice demands that I should rescue the
most meritorious person first.’ All moral science may be reduced to this
one head, calculation of the future’ (ii. 468), and consequently a
promise is not an obligation. The statement that it is essential that we
should be able to depend on engagements ‘would be somewhat more accurate
if we said “that it was essential to various circumstances of human
intercourse, that we should be known to bestow a steady attention upon
the quantities of convenience or inconvenience, of good or evil, that
might arise to others from our conduct”’ (i. 156). The understanding is
supreme in us, and ‘depravity would have gained little ground in the
world, if every man had been in the exercise of his independent judgment’
(i. 174). Reason (the Godwinian Reason) is sufficient to control or even
extinguish the strongest of all passions. Marriage having been denounced
as ‘the most odious of all monopolies’ (ii. 850), Godwin is reminded that
half a dozen men perhaps might feel for a woman ‘the same preference that
I do.’ ‘This,’ says he, ‘will create no difficulty. We may all enjoy
her conversation; and we shall be wise enough to consider the sensual
intercourse as a very trivial object.’ It was impossible not to
acknowledge that the understanding often finds the problem rather
abstruse of deciding whether an action will or will not secure ultimately
the largest balance of happiness. Calvin was no fool, and yet he
deliberately came to the conclusion that in burning Servetus he was
promoting the welfare of mankind; but ‘Calvin was unacquainted with the
principles of justice, and therefore could not practise them. The duty
of no man can exceed his capacity’ (i. 102). As to Godwin’s
necessarianism, it is perhaps hardly worth while to cite passages in
order to explain it. It is of the usual type, incontrovertible if the
question is to be settled by common logic. ‘Volition is that state of an
intellectual being in which, the mind being affected in a certain manner
by the apprehension of an end to be accomplished, a certain motion of the
organs and members of the animal frame is found to be produced’ (i. 297).
‘A knife has a capacity of cutting. In the same manner a human being has
a capacity of walking, though it may be no more true of him than of the
inanimate substance, that he has the power of exercising or not
exercising that capacity’ (i. 308). ‘A knife is as capable as a man of
being employed in the purposes of virtue, and the one is no more free
than the other as to its employment. The mode in which a knife is made
subservient to these purposes is by material impulse. The mode in which
a man is made subservient is by inducement and persuasion. But both are
equally the affair of necessity. The man differs from the knife, just as
the iron candlestick differs from the brass one; he has one more way of
being acted upon. This additional way in man is motive, in the
candlestick is magnetism’ (i. 309).
At first sight it is, as I have said, a wonder that Wordsworth should
have been much impressed by such doctrines as these, but the evidence is
strong that for a time they lay upon him like a nightmare. I will not
quote the _Borderers_ for a reason which will be seen presently, but the
testimony of Hazlitt, Coleridge, the _Prelude_, and the _Excursion_ is
decisive. “Throw aside your books of chemistry,” said Wordsworth to a
young man, a student in the Temple, “and read _Godwin on Necessity_”’
(Hazlitt’s _Spirit of the Age_, p. 49, 3rd edition). Now it is a
question, important historically, but more important to ourselves
privately, whether Wordsworth’s temporary subjugation by _Political
Justice_ was due to pure intellectual conviction. I think not.
Coleridge noticed that Wordsworth suffered much from hypochondria. He
complains that during the Scotch tour in 1803 ‘Wordsworth’s
hypochondriacal feelings keep him silent and self-centred.’ He again
says to Richard Sharp, in 1804, that Wordsworth has ‘occasional fits of
hypochondriacal uncomfortableness, from which, more or less, and at
longer or shorter intervals, he has never been wholly free from his very
childhood,’ and that he has a ‘hypochondriacal graft in his nature.’
Wordsworth himself speaks of times when—
‘ . . . fears and fancies thick upon me came;
Dim sadness—and blind thoughts, I knew not nor could name.’