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Updated: June 25, 2025
The trouble is that despotism is seldom, if ever, wise. It is its nature to be inconsiderate, being essentially selfish, grasping and tyrannous. As a rule therefore revolution usually of force has been required to change or reform it. Perfectibility was not designed for mortal man.
When our moral powers increase in proportion to our physical ones, then huzza, for the perfectibility of man! and respectable, idle loungers like you and I, Vivian, may then have a chance of walking in the streets of London without having their heels trodden upon, a ceremony which I have this moment undergone. In the present day we are all studying science, and none of us are studying ourselves.
Thus continuous progress in man's knowledge of his environment, which is one of the chief conditions of general Progress, is a hypothesis which may or may not be true. And if it is true, there remains the further hypothesis of man's moral and social "perfectibility," which rests on much less impressive evidence.
Let us suppose, then, that the inhabitants of the moon, by astonishing advancement in science, and by profound insight into that ineffable lunar philosophy, the mere flickerings of which have of late years dazzled the feebled optics, and addled the shallow brains of the good people of our globe let us suppose, I say, that the inhabitants of the moon, by these means, had arrived at such a command of their energies, such an enviable state of perfectibility, as to control the elements, and navigate the boundless regions of space.
There was a time once when I talked republicanism as loudly as raw youth ever did when I had an excuse for it, too; for when I was a boy, I saw the French Revolution; and it was no wonder if young, enthusiastic brains were excited by all sorts of wild hopes 'perfectibility of the species, 'rights of man, 'universal liberty, equality, and brotherhood. My dear sir, there is nothing new under the sun; all that is stale and trite to a septuagenarian, who has seen where it all ends.
Some men attacked the ancients and by comparison praised the modern time as Perrault did with "The Age of Louis the Great"; some men foresaw so clearly the possibility of man's control over nature that they dreamed of terrestrial Utopias as Francis Bacon did in "New Atlantis"; some men, like Descartes, sought to grasp the intellectual conditions of human improvement; and others, like Condorcet, became the fervid prophets of human perfectibility; some, like Turgot, re-examined history in terms of the new ideas; and some, like Saint Simon and Comte, sought to discover the law by which all progress moves.
Do not suppose that I entertain the belief, as foolish as it is absorb, that in any future glorious period of the world's history, mankind will be perfectly beautiful, or perfectly conformed to one standard of beauty. I entertain no belief in human perfectibility.
The art of acting I had little considered, and was ignorant of its extent and degree of perfectibility. To read a play was no common pleasure, but to see one was ecstacy.
Mirabeau was a sort of Swift, who had strangely taken up the trade of friendship for man and adopted the phrases of perfectibility; while Rousseau on the other hand was meant for a Fénelon, save that he became possessed of unclean devils.
The vision of a better world at hand absorbed the Israelites in exile, St. John the Baptist in the desert, and Christ on the cross. The martyred spirit always says to the world it leaves, "This day thou shall be with me in paradise." In just this way, Shelley believed in perfectibility.
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