William Godwin saw himself as the herald of a new society governed by ‘pleasures of intellect’. He foresaw a world in which the species would be propagated by ‘reasonable men regulated by the dictates of reason and duty’, disinclined to pursue sexual gratification for its own sake. In time, he predicted, sexual activity would diminish, to be used only for ‘rational’ acts of procreation. Mary Wollstonecraft was a more austere thinker than Godwin. Her wish was that ‘chastity must more universally prevail’, and that when people married, they ‘ought not to continue to love each other with passion’, an anti-sensualist vision in which sex was purely functional. The propensity of William Godwin's acolytes to misconceive him is illustrated by three of the most famous, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Robert Lovell, who, in 1794, planned a ‘pantisocratic’ commune in America on rationalist principles.