Southey, who had come under the influence of Rousseau, was initiated by Coleridge into Godwin's theories, and in their utopian enthusiasm they formed the design of founding a "pantisocratic" settlement in America, to show how happiness could be realised in a social environment in which duty and interest coincide and consequently all are virtuous.

The plan anticipated the experiments of Owen and Cabet; but the pantisocrats did not experience the disappointments of the socialists, for it was never carried out.
Coleridge and Southey as well as Wordsworth soon abandoned their Godwinian doctrines.

[Footnote: In letters of 1797 and 1798 Coleridge repudiated the French doctrines and Godwin's philosophy.

See Cestre, La Revolution francaise et les poetes anglais (1789-1809), pp.

389, 414.] They had, to use a phrase of Hazlitt, lost their way in Utopia, and they gave up the abstract and mechanical view of society which the French philosophy of the eighteenth century taught, for an organic conception in which historic sentiment and the wisdom of our ancestors had their due place.