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Natura Naturata: Shelley’s Philosophy of the Mind in Creation

Abstract The place of Percy Shelley’s Mont Blanc in the nineteenth-century philosophical and theological debate about creation and man’s place within it has been the subject of great critical debate. Although previous criticism (such as by Earl R. Wasserman) has assumed Shelley’s use of the terms ‘things’ and ‘human thought’ as synonymous, this essay illuminates their difference. It hopes to provide an insight into Shelley’s understanding of creation and the Creator. In Mont Blanc Shelley credits the human mind, rather than the divine creator, as the infinite source of creative power. This essay reads Shelley’s Mont Blanc against William Paley’s Natural Theology, suggesting that, whilst Shelley does not defy the possibility of a designer (God), he renders Man’s role in creation as greater than God’s. Man in Mont Blanc does not create once, but creates in his every moment. The natural universe is a product of human consciousness; a consciousness formed and shaped by the way in which the mind receives, perceives, and reinterprets the universe.