Against the Evidence: 'Persuasion' and the Facts of Experience in Shelley's 'A Future State'

Shelley's speculative essay, A Future State', has been unduly neglected. Its ostensibly circumscribed argument and strictly empiricist, Humean logic appear to set it apart from more intimate reflections on similar topics such as On Love' and On Life', which are regularly anthologised. Redating of the composition to the winter of 1818-19 when Shelley was at Rome or Naples alters the significance of the piece, indicating that it is an intermediary work that scrupulously re-proposes earlier sceptical and materialist formulations as a means of putting belief in an afterlife to the test. The dialectical strategy of the text places the inescapable and lamentable fact of mortality - a pressing and ongoing concern as reflected in the narrative, The Coliseum', and A Vision of the Sea' - in opposition to the extraordinary persistence and prevalence of persuasion'. This approach is neither rigidly materialist nor idealist. The fascination of A Future State' lies in the fact that, as one who wholly excludes recourse to religious testimony or faith, since there is no factual evidence to support it, Shelley continued to advocate extreme doubt (in the manner of Hume) whilst admitting to an irrepressible human desire for everlasting life, founded on an innate resistance to change.