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Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer by Charles Sotheran
page 23 of 83 (27%)

He then winds up the whole by thinking that it is impossible that,

"we should continue to exist after death in some mode
totally inconceivable to us at present."

and that only those who desire to be persuaded are persuaded.

This is but a rough outline of some of the principal features of his
considerations on soul immortality from a logical basis, and which,
after all, only constitute an argument, to which, and the thoughts
presented therein, he did not necessarily bind himself. There can be
little doubt, independently of what I have quoted, that he did not
believe in a future state as popularly accepted. Trelawney asked him on
one occasion: "Do you believe in the immortality of the spirit?"
Shelley's answer was unmistakable, "Certainly not; how can I? We know
nothing; we have no evidence."[B]

[Footnote B: Those who desire to fully investigate Shelley's ideas on
the immortality of the soul, and the existence, or nature, of Deity,
will be amply repaid by reading W.M. Rossetti's admirable memoir of
the poet, appended to the last two-volume London edition of his
works.]

When we take Shelley from a poetical standpoint, or with the divine
truism implanted by the Ain-soph clamoring within to his intelligence
for expression, how confident he appears of a hereafter, as in the
"Adonais," or in the following extract from an unpublished letter to
his father-in-law, William Godwin, the property of my friend C.W.
Frederickson, of New York, one of the most enthusiastic admirers of
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