Although it dates from June 1818, and thus postdates the publication of the first
edition of Frankenstein by several months, Percy Bysshe Shelley's fragment of an essay
"On Life" has a passage that may shed light on Mary Shelley's own attitude to her
adolescent student's disenchantment with a philosophical discipline that deconstructs
rather than creates:
Philosophy, impatient as it may be to build, has much work yet remaining as pioneer*
for the overgrowth of ages. It makes one step towards this object; it destroys error,
and the roots of error. It leaves, what is too often the duty of the reformer in political
and ethical questions to leave, a vacancy.# It reduces the mind to that freedom in
which it would have acted, but for the misuse of words and signs, the instruments
of its own creation. —By signs, I would be understood in a wide sense, including what
is properly meant by that term, and what I peculiarly mean. In this latter sense almost
all familiar objects are signs, standing not for themselves but for others, in their
capacity of suggesting one thought, which shall lead to a train of thoughts. —Our
whole life is thus an education of error. (Reiman-Powers, eds., Shelley's Poetry and
Prose, p. 477)
*advance guard.
#see I:1:10, and note.