'
To limit itself to the annihilation of those visions
to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions
Although it dates from June 1818,
and thus postdates the publication of
the first edition of Frankenstein by several months, Percy Bysshe Shelley's fragment of an
essay "On Life" has a passage that may shed light on Mary Shelley's own
attitude to her adolescent student's disenchantment with a philosophical
discipline that deconstructs rather than creates:
Philosophy, impatient as it may be to build, has much work yet remaining
as pioneer* for the overgrowth of ages. It makes one step towards this
object; it destroys error, and the roots of error. It leaves, what is too
often the duty of the reformer in political and ethical questions to
leave, a vacancy.# It reduces the mind to that freedom in
which it would have acted, but for the misuse of words and signs, the
instruments of its own creation. -- By signs, I would be understood in a
wide sense, including what is properly meant by that term, and what I
peculiarly mean. In this latter sense almost all familiar objects are
signs, standing not for themselves but for others, in their capacity of
suggesting one thought, which shall lead to a train of thoughts. -- Our
whole life is thus an education of error. (Reiman-Powers, eds., Shelley's
Poetry and Prose, p. 477)
*advance guard.
#see 1.1.4, and note.
