Shelley had developed his own ideal social world, he was subject to the reality of the society that surrounded him. "Shelley never abandoned the hope that an expansion of physical knowledge--combined with refinement of moral sensibility--was a precondition of progressive civilization." (Kipperman, 409). Shelley embraced the ideas Darwinism both in physical science and in the progress of the emotional world. Central to his ideas of millennialism, Shelley hoped believed that the authority of our knowledge is the revelation that the universe will appear as civilized to us as we make ourselves to be. It is difficult to understand Shelley's feelings of science, as again he appears to contradict himself in the Defense of Poetry. In the Defense of Poetry, Shelley subordinates science to the guidance of imagination and moral leadership. His ideas of evolution rarely stray from those of Darwin, however. "Shelley interpreted universal "forces" as continuous in some way with the human, as 'universal' across the Organic, inorganic, and the ideal" (Kipperman, 411). It (the poem) is a succession of pictures illustrating the growth And progress of individual mind aspiring after excellence and Devoted to the love of mankind.--from the preface to The Revolt of Islam--In this Shelley did not see the soul as a free acting entity, but rather a non-human power. Reading this one may think that Shelley was a sort of optimist. However the exact opposite is truer. Shelley became skeptical that dominant causes in being could proceed as ideal or material. Shelley's idealism served only in how he saw the human mind as the bounds of veracity that can be known. "Shelley . . .[continued] to value natural science both for it's power to explain the real forces (whether thought of as ideal or material) that act upon us and to suggest ways to alter their courses and outcomes" (Kipperman, 413). But as stated earlier, Shelley would come to criticize the path o...
