Writing ‘On Life’ in Florence in late 1819, Shelley disavows the dogmatic materialism of his youth and, encouraged by the diverse lessons of Hume, Drummond, and Tooke, together with over a year's intensive reading of Plato, outlines an approach to experience and reality altogether less grounded and logocentric:

On one hand, this passage appears strikingly performative. Shelley's own writing, the self-consciously rhetorical use (rather than ‘misuse’) of words and signs, might itself be seen as an ‘education of error’. Remarkably tenacious in this centrifugal action, however, is the centripetal function of philosophy, which has ‘much work yet remaining’ in monitoring the relationship between the ‘centre’ and ‘circumference’ of human life.