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A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays

P >> Percy Bysshe Shelley >> A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays




[1815; publ. 1840]




ON THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH

A FRAGMENT

The first law which it becomes a Reformer to propose and support,
at the approach of a period of great political change, is the
abolition of the punishment of death.

It is sufficiently clear that revenge, retaliation, atonement,
expiation, are rules and motives, so far from deserving a place in
any enlightened system of political life, that they are the chief
sources of a prodigious class of miseries in the domestic circles
of society. It is clear that however the spirit of legislation may
appear to frame institutions upon more philosophical maxims, it
has hitherto, in those cases which are termed criminal, done little
more than palliate the spirit, by gratifying a portion of it; and
afforded a compromise between that which is bests--the inflicting
of no evil upon a sensitive being, without a decisively beneficial
result in which he should at least participates--and that which is
worst; that he should be put to torture for the amusement of those
whom he may have injured, or may seem to have injured.

Omitting these remoter considerations, let us inquire what, DEATH
is; that punishment which is applied as a measure of transgressions
of indefinite shades of distinction, so soon as they shall have
passed that degree and colour of enormity, with which it is supposed
no, inferior infliction is commensurate.

And first, whether death is good or evil, a punishment or a reward,
or whether it be wholly indifferent, no man can take upon himself
to assert. That that within us which thinks and feels, continues
to think and feel after the dissolution of the body, has been the
almost universal opinion of mankind, and the accurate philosophy
of what I may be permitted to term the modern Academy, by showing
the prodigious depth and extent of our ignorance respecting the
causes and nature of sensation, renders probable the affirmative
of a proposition, the negative of which it is so difficult to
conceive, and the popular arguments against which, derived from
what is called the atomic system, are proved to be applicable only
to the relation which one object bears to another, as apprehended
by the mind, and not to existence itself, or the nature of that
essence which is the medium and receptacle of objects.

The popular system of religion suggests the idea that the mind,
after death, will be painfully or pleasurably affected according to
its determinations during life. However ridiculous and pernicious
we must admit the vulgar accessories of this creed to be, there
is a certain analogy, not wholly absurd, between the consequences
resulting to an individual during life from the virtuous or vicious,
prudent or imprudent, conduct of his external actions, to those
consequences which are conjectured to ensue from the discipline
and order of his internal thoughts, as affecting his condition in
a future state. They omit, indeed, to calculate upon the accidents
of disease, and temperament, and organization, and circumstance,
together with the multitude of independent agencies which affect
the opinions, the conduct, and the happiness of individuals, and
produce determinations of the will, and modify the judgement, so
as to produce effects the most opposite in natures considerably
similar. These are those operations in the order of the whole of
nature, tending, we are prone to believe, to some definite mighty
end, to which the agencies of our peculiar nature are subordinate;
nor is there any reason to suppose, that in a future state they should
become suddenly exempt from that subordination. The philosopher is
unable to determine whether our existence in a previous state has
affected our present condition, and abstains from deciding whether
our present condition will affect us in that which may be future.
That, if we continue to exist, the manner of our existence will be
such as no inferences nor conjectures, afforded by a consideration
of our earthly experience, can elucidate, is sufficiently obvious.
The opinion that the vital principle within us, in whatever mode
it may continue to exist, must lose that consciousness of definite
and individual being which now characterizes it, and become a unit
in the vast sum of action and of thought which disposes and animates
the universe, and is called God, seems to belong to that class of
opinion which has been designated as indifferent.

To compel a person to know all that can be known by the dead
concerning that which the living fear, hope, or forget; to plunge
him into the pleasure or pain which there awaits him; to punish or
reward him in a manner and in a degree incalculable and incomprehensible
by us; to disrobe him at once from all that intertexture of good
and evil with which Nature seems to have clothed every form of
individual existence, is to inflict on him the doom of death.

A certain degree of pain and terror usually accompany the infliction
of death. This degree is infinitely varied by the infinite variety
in the temperament and opinions of the sufferers. As a measure of
punishment, strictly so considered, and as an exhibition, which, by
its known effects on the sensibility of the sufferer, is intended
to intimidate the spectators from incurring a similar liability,
it is singularly inadequate.

Firstly, Persons of energetic character, in whom, as in men who
suffer for political crimes, there is a large mixture of enterprise,
and fortitude, and disinterestedness, and the elements, though
misguided and disarranged, by which the strength and happiness of a
nation might have been cemented, die in such a manner, as to make
death appear not evil, but good. The death of what is called a
traitor, that is, a person who, from whatever motive, would abolish
the government of the day, is as often a triumphant exhibition
of suffering virtue, as the warning of a culprit. The multitude,
instead of departing with a panic-stricken approbation of the laws
which exhibited such a spectacle, are inspired with pity, admiration
and sympathy; and the most generous among them feel an emulation
to be the authors of such flattering emotions, as they experience
stirring in their bosoms. Impressed by what they see and feel,
they make no distinctive between the motives which incited the
criminals to the action for which they suffer, or the heroic courage
with which they turned into good that which their judges awarded
to them as evil or the purpose itself of those actions, though that
purpose may happen to be eminently pernicious. The laws in this
case lose their sympathy, which it ought to be their chief object
to secure, and in a participation of which consists their chief
strength in maintaining those sanctions by which the parts of the
social union are bound together, so as to produce, as nearly as
possible, the ends for which it is instituted.

Secondly,--Persons of energetic character, in communities not
modelled with philosophical skill to turn all the energies which
they contain to the purposes of common good, are prone also to fall
into the temptation of undertaking, and are peculiarly fitted for
despising the perils attendant upon consummating, the most enormous
crimes. Murder, rapes, extensive schemes of plunder are the actions
of persons belonging to this class; and death is the penalty of
conviction. But the coarseness of organization, peculiar to men
capable of committing acts wholly selfish, is usually found to
be associated with a proportionate insensibility to fear or pain.
Their sufferings communicate to those of the spectators, who may be
liable to the commission of similar crimes a sense of the lightness
of that event, when closely examined which, at a distance, as
uneducated persons are accustomed to do, probably they regarded with
horror. But a great majority of the spectators are so bound up in
the interests and the habits of social union that no temptation
would be sufficiently strong to induce them to a commission of the
enormities to which this penalty is assigned. The more powerful, and
the richer among them,--and a numerous class of little tradesmen are
richer and more powerful than those who are employed by them, and
the employer, in general, bears this relation to the employed,--regard
their own wrongs as, in some degree, avenged, and their own rights
secured by this punishment, inflicted as the penalty of whatever
crime. In cases of murder or mutilation, this feeling is almost
universal. In those, therefore, whom this exhibition does not
awaken to the sympathy which extenuates crime and discredits the
law which restrains it, it produces feelings more directly at war
with the genuine purposes of political society. It excites those
emotions which it is the chief object of civilization to extinguish
for ever, and in the extinction of which alone there can be any
hope of better institutions than those under which men now misgovern
one another. Men feel that their revenge is gratified, and that
their security is established by the extinction and the sufferings
of beings, in most respects resembling themselves; and their daily
occupations constraining them to a precise form in all their thoughts,
they come to connect inseparably the idea of their own advantage
with that of the death and torture of others. It is manifest that
the object of sane polity is directly the reverse; and that laws
founded upon reason, should accustom the gross vulgar to associate
their ideas of security and of interest with the reformation, and
the strict restraint, for that purpose alone, of those who might
invade it.

The passion of revenge is originally nothing more than an habitual
perception of the ideas of the sufferings of the person who inflicts
an injury, as connected, as they are in a savage state, or in such
portions of society as are yet undisciplined to civilization, with
security that that injury will not be repeated in future. This
feeling, engrafted upon superstition and confirmed by habit, at
last loses sight of the only object for which it may be supposed
to have been implanted, and becomes a passion and a duty to be
pursued and fulfilled, even to the destruction of those ends to
which it originally tended. The other passions, both good and evil.
Avarice, Remorse, Love, Patriotism, present a similar appearance;
and to this principle of the mind over-shooting the mark at which
it aims, we owe all that is eminently base or excellent in human
nature; in providing for the nutriment or the extinction of which,
consists the true art of the legislator. [Footnote: The savage and
the illiterate are but faintly aware of the distinction between
the future and the past; they make actions belonging to periods so
distinct, the subjects of similar feelings; they live only in the
present, or in the past, as it is present. It is in this that the
philosopher excels one of the many; it is this which distinguishes
the doctrine of philosophic necessity from fatalism; and that
determination of the will, by which it is the active source of future
events, from that liberty or indifference, to which the abstract
liability of irremediable actions is attached, according to the
notions of the vulgar.

This is the source of the erroneous excesses of Remorse and Revenge;
the one extending itself over the future, and the other over the
past; provinces in which their suggestions can only be the sources
of evil. The purpose of a resolution to act more wisely and virtuously
in future, and the sense of a necessity of caution in repressing
an enemy, are the sources from which the enormous superstitions
implied in the words cited have arisen.]

Nothing is more clear than that the infliction of punishment in
general, in a degree which the reformation and the restraint of
those who transgress the laws does not render indispensable, and
none more than death, confirms all the inhuman and unsocial impulses
of men. It is almost a proverbial remark, that those nations in which
the penal code has been particularly mild, have been distinguished
from all others by the rarity of crime. But the example is to be
admitted to be equivocal. A more decisive argument is afforded by
a consideration of the universal connexion of ferocity of manners,
and a contempt of social ties, with the contempt of human life.
Governments which derive their institutions from the existence of
circumstances of barbarism and violence, with some rare exceptions
perhaps, are bloody in proportion as they are despotic, and form
the manners of their subjects to a sympathy with their own spirit.

The spectators who feel no abhorrence at a public execution, but
rather a self-applauding superiority, and a sense of gratified
indignation, are surely excited to the most inauspicious emotions. The
first reflection of such a one is the sense of his own internal and
actual worth, as preferable to that of the victim, whom circumstances
have led to destruction. The meanest wretch is impressed with a
sense of his own comparative merit. He is one of those on whom the
tower of Siloam fell not--he is such a one as Jesus Christ found
not in all Samaria, who, in his own soul, throws the first stone at
the woman taken in adultery. The popular religion of the country
takes its designation from that illustrious person whose beautiful
sentiment I have quoted. Any one who has stript from the doctrines
of this person the veil of familiarity, will perceive how adverse
their spirit is to feelings of this nature.





SPECULATIONS ON METAPHYSICS

I--THE MIND

It is an axiom in mental philosophy, that we can think of nothing
which we have not perceived. When I say that we can think of nothing,
I mean, we can imagine nothing, we can reason of nothing, we can
remember nothing, we can foresee nothing. The most astonishing
combinations of poetry, the subtlest deductions of logic and
mathematics, are no other than combinations which the intellect
makes of sensations according to its own laws. A catalogue of all
the thoughts of the mind, and of all their possible modifications,
is a cyclopedic history of the universe.

But, it will be objected, the inhabitants of the various planets of
this and other solar systems; and the existence of a Power bearing
the same relation to all that we perceive and are, as what we
call a cause does to what we call effect, were never subjects of
sensation, and yet the laws of mind almost universally suggest,
according to the various disposition of each, a conjecture,
a persuasion, or a conviction of their existence. The reply is
simple; these thoughts are also to be included in the catalogue
of existence; they are modes in which thoughts are combined; the
objection only adds force to the conclusion, that beyond the limits
of perception and thought nothing can exist.

Thoughts, or ideas, or notions, call them what you will, differ
from each other, not in kind, but in force. It has commonly been
supposed that those distinct thoughts which affect a number of
persons, at regular intervals, during the passage of a multitude
of other thoughts, which are called REAL or EXTERNAL OBJECTS,
are totally different in kind from those which affect only a few
persons, and which recur at irregular intervals, and are usually
more obscure and indistinct, such as hallucinations, dreams, and the
ideas of madness. No essential distinction between any one of these
ideas, or any class of them, is founded on a correct observation of
the nature of things, but merely on a consideration of what thoughts
are most invariably subservient to the security and happiness of
life; and if nothing more were expressed by the distinction, the
philosopher might safely accommodate his language to that of the
vulgar. But they pretend to assert an essential difference, which
has no foundation in truth, and which suggests a narrow and false
conception of universal nature, the parent of the most fatal errors
in speculation. A specific difference between every thought of the
mind, is, indeed, a necessary consequence of that law by which it
perceives diversity and number; but a generic and essential difference
is wholly arbitrary. The principle of the agreement and similarity
of all thoughts, is, that they are all thoughts; the principle
of their disagreement consists in the variety and irregularity of
the occasions on which they arise in the mind. That in which they
agree, to that in which they differ, is as everything to nothing.
Important distinctions, of various degrees of force, indeed, are to
be established between them, if they were, as they may be, subjects
of ethical and economical discussion; but that is a question
altogether distinct. By considering all knowledge as bounded by
perception, whose operations may be indefinitely combined, we arrive
at a conception of Nature inexpressibly more magnificent, simple
and true, than accords with the ordinary systems of complicated and
partial consideration. Nor does a contemplation of the universe,
in this comprehensive and synthetical view, exclude the subtlest
analysis of its modifications and parts.

A scale might be formed, graduated according to the degrees
of a combined ratio of intensity, duration, connexion, periods of
recurrence, and utility, which would be the standard, according to
which all ideas might be measured, and an uninterrupted chain of
nicely shadowed distinctions would be observed, from the faintest
impression on the senses, to the most distinct combination of those
impressions; from the simplest of those combinations, to that mass
of knowledge which, including our own nature, constitutes what we
call the universe.

We are intuitively conscious of our own existence, and of that
connexion in the train of our successive ideas, which we term our
identity. We are conscious also of the existence of other minds;
but not intuitively. Our evidence, with respect to the existence of
other minds, is founded upon a very complicated relation of ideas,
which it is foreign to the purpose of this treatise to anatomize.
The basis of this relation is, undoubtedly, a periodical recurrence
of masses of ideas, which our voluntary determinations have, in
one peculiar direction, no power to circumscribe or to arrest, and
against the recurrence of which they can only imperfectly provide.
The irresistible laws of thought constrain us to believe that the
precise limits of our actual ideas are not the actual limits of
possible ideas; the law, according to which these deductions are
drawn, is called analogy; and this is the foundation of all our
inferences, from one idea to another, inasmuch as they resemble
each other.

We see trees, houses, fields, living beings in our own shape, and
in shapes more or less analogous to our own. These are perpetually
changing the mode of their existence relatively to us. To express
the varieties of these modes, we say, WE MOVE, THEY MOVE; and as this
motion is continual, though not uniform, we express our conception
of the diversities of its course by--IT HAS BEEN, IT IS, IT SHALL
BE. These diversities are events or objects, and are essential,
considered relatively to human identity, for the existence of the
human mind. For if the inequalities, produced by what has been
termed the operations of the external universe, were levelled by the
perception of our being, uniting and filling up their interstices,
motion and mensuration, and time, and space; the elements of the
human mind being thus abstracted, sensation and imagination cease.
Mind cannot be considered pure.

II--WHAT METAPHYSICS ARE. ERRORS IN THE USUAL METHODS OF CONSIDERING
THEM

We do not attend sufficiently to what passes within ourselves. We
combine words, combined a thousand times before. In our minds we
assume entire opinions; and in the expression of those opinions,
entire phrases, when we would philosophize. Our whole style of
expression and sentiment is infected with the tritest plagiarisms.
Our words are dead, our thoughts are cold and borrowed.

Let us contemplate facts; let us, in the great study of ourselves,
resolutely compel the mind to a rigid consideration of itself. We
are not content with conjecture, and inductions, and syllogisms,
in sciences regarding external objects. As in these, let us also,
in considering the phenomena of mind, severely collect those
facts which cannot be disputed. Metaphysics will thus possess this
conspicuous advantage over every other science, that each student,
by attentively referring to his own mind, may ascertain the
authorities upon which any assertions regarding it are supported.
There can thus be no deception, we ourselves being the depositaries
of the evidence of the subject which we consider.

Metaphysics may be defined as an inquiry concerning those things
belonging to, or connected with, the internal nature of man.

It is said that mind produces motion; and it might as well have
been said, that motion produces mind.

III--DIFFICULTY OF ANALYSING THE HUMAN MIND

If it were possible that a person should give a faithful history of
his being, from the earliest epochs of his recollection, a picture
would be presented such as the world has never contemplated before.
A mirror would be held up to all men in which they might behold
their own recollections, and, in dim perspective, their shadowy hopes
and fears,--all that they dare not, or that, daring and desiring,
they could not expose to the open eyes of day. But thought can
with difficulty visit the intricate and winding chambers which it
inhabits. It is like a river whose rapid and perpetual stream flows
outwards;--like one in dread who speeds through the recesses of
some haunted pile, and dares not look behind. The caverns of the
mind are obscure, and shadowy; or pervaded with a lustre, beautifully
bright indeed, but shining not beyond their portals. If it were
possible to be where we have been, vitally and indeed--if, at the
moment of our presence there, we could define the results of our
experience,--if the passage from sensation to reflection--from a
state of passive perception to voluntary contemplation, were not
so dizzying and so tumultuous, this attempt would be less difficult.

IV--HOW THE ANALYSIS SHOULD BE CARRIED ON

Most of the errors of philosophers have arisen from considering
the human being in a point of view too detailed and circumscribed
He is not a moral, and an intellectual,--but also, and pre-eminently,
an imaginative being. His own mind is his law; his own mind is all
things to him. If we would arrive at any knowledge which should be
serviceable from the practical conclusions to which it leads, we
ought to consider the mind of man and the universe as the great
whole on which to exercise our speculations. Here, above all,
verbal disputes ought to be laid aside, though this has long been
their chosen field of battle. It imports little to inquire whether
thought be distinct from the objects of thought. The use of the
words EXTERNAL and INTERNAL, as applied to the establishment of this
distinction, has been the symbol and the source of much dispute.
This is merely an affair of words, and as the dispute deserves, to
say, that when speaking of the objects of thought, we indeed only
describe one of the forms of thought--or that, speaking of thought,
we only apprehend one of the operations of the universal system of
beings.

V--CATALOGUE OF THE PHENOMENA OF DREAMS, AS CONNECTING SLEEPING
AND WAKING

1. Let us reflect on our infancy, and give as faithfully as possible
a relation of the events of sleep.

And first I am bound to present a faithful picture of my own peculiar
nature relatively to sleep. I do not doubt that were every individual
to imitate me, it would be found that among many circumstances
peculiar to their individual nature, a sufficiently general
resemblance would be found to prove the connexion existing between
those peculiarities and the most universal phenomena. I shall employ
caution, indeed, as to the facts which I state, that they contain
nothing false or exaggerated. But they contain no more than certain
elucidations of my own nature; concerning the degree in which
it resembles, or differs from, that of others, I am by no means
accurately aware. It is sufficient, however, to caution the reader
against drawing general inferences from particular instances.

I omit the general instances of delusion in fever or delirium, as
well as mere dreams considered in themselves. A delineation of this
subject, however inexhaustible and interesting, is to be passed
over. What is the connexion of sleeping and of waking?

2. I distinctly remember dreaming three several times, between
intervals of two or more years, the same precise dream. It was
not so much what is ordinarily called a dream; the single image,
unconnected with all other images, of a youth who was educated at
the same school with myself, presented itself in sleep. Even now,
after the lapse of many years, I can never hear the name of this
youth, without the three places where I dreamed of him presenting
themselves distinctly to my mind.

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