Shelley’s Uncreative Mind

Abstract Mary Shelley wrote of her late husband that he was a ‘disciple of the immaterialist Philosophy of Berkeley’—a claim that does not seem to sit easily with Shelley’s responses to organized religion nor his strongly sceptical thought. This chapter makes the case for such a discipleship in Shelley by taking up his thinking in the essay fragment ‘On Life’, in which Berkeley’s claim that everything exists as it is perceived is taken up by Shelley as a universal and fundamental truth. The chapter shows that, where Shelley moves beyond Berkeley to suggest that there is a noumenal world beyond our perceptions, his brand of scepticism is still rooted in Berkeleian ideas; for Shelley, in ‘On Life’ and the great lyric ‘Mont Blanc’, the very nature of being is something that is felt and inferred in a manner that is strikingly redolent of Berkeley’s category of ‘notional’ knowledge of spirits.