series of phenomena, that is to say, of dreams and illusions?

The great Bacon he is called-I call him the little Bacon―says that everything must be done by experiment. His first principle is unbelief.” 1 Blake's first principle was just the opposite distrust in experience. Reynolds thinks that man learns all that he knows. I say, on the contrary, that man brings all that he has or can have into the world with him."2 The study of the sciences, by binding us to the visible world, is even more harmful in its effect, since it prevents us from seeing eternal truth. " Study science till you are blind," he says in the "Notes to Swedenborg."

In the same way, he could not subscribe to any natural religion, any creed like that of the Savoyard Vicar, semi-scientific and replete with reason. To him the so-called Deists, such as Voltaire and Rousseau, were either scoundrels or imbeciles. Natural religion is only the product of experience and reason, inexact and imperfect sources. How could their result be right? Religion ought to make clear the unknown world. But, says Blake, "as none by travelling over known lands can find out the unknown, so from already acquired knowledge man could not acquire more." 3 No long demonstration is needed to show the incorrectness of such reasoning, despite its apparent logic. The laws of the known do open to us large vistas of the unknown; and this fact was much more clearly understood by Swedenborg, who made a complete study of all the sciences and of all the laws of the visible universe, as a preliminary to the study of the human spirit and to his searches after God, the Eternal Spirit, in Whom all knowledge must be contained and completed. But Blake did not possess Swedenborg's scientific mind, nor had he ever any idea of building his religion upon scientific attainments or scientific reasonings. He did not even think of basing upon them his own moral or political rules. All existing societies are, according to him, founded upon reason, and make laws which are, or appear to be, logical. Therefore, they are all wrong. Every man should have a law adapted to his own character. "One law for the lion and ox is oppression." Blake is all for liberty, for the absence of any laws, for anarchy, as we should call it. What would be the practical effects of such disorganisation, or how it could be attained, he did not trouble to consider. These questions belong to the world of material reality, with which he had neither the power nor the wish to concern himself.

1 Notes on Reynolds: Discourse III 3 There is no Natural Religion.

2 Id: Discourse VI.

4

* Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

And so he goes on, clearing his own path, tearing down and trampling underfoot the very fabric of the world, pitilessly destroying all that generations of men have built up, attacking with desperate energy everything that his age most valued and approved. No wonder that we find him regarded by his contemporaries as an eccentric, and even as a madman. But he is not contented with demolishing. Reconstruction follows the work of the destroyer; and upon the chaos of ruins he has made, he builds a new and complicated system, itself at times scarcely less chaotic, and one that seems strange indeed to anyone who approaches it unprepared.

I

VIII: CONSTRUCTIVE WORK-IMAGINATION
AND SYMBOLISM

F we take away from the human soul its faculty of perceiving external objects, and that of reasoning and judging,

there will remain only Imagination, that is to say, the power

of creating new ideas; Passion, which in its widest sense includes all pleasure and pain, all love and hate; and Will, or the power to act, which influences both these faculties. Thus, to take the old-fashioned division of the soul's faculties into Intellect, Feeling and Will, Intellect will now be represented only by Imagination.

Here we have practically the whole of Blake's psychology. For him, imagination is the only source of knowledge. Sometimes he calls it the spirit of prophecy, sometimes the poetic genius: but it is always the same faculty. In it are to be found the origin and medium of his visions, his manner of regarding the world, and all his religious and philosophical doctrines. Obviously, any system so founded must defy all discussion. For a man whose sole standard of truth is his own imagination, argument has no force, and any affirmation is possible. The truth is what he sees, or, rather, what he imagines. It cannot be demonstrated: it can only be felt by an act of faith. Blake had the most profound contempt for those who tried to show, by argument, the truth of any religion whatsoever. The sole and indisputable proof of any truth, according to him, is our direct spiritual perception of it, a kind of intuitive and instinctive vision. We know that such and such a thing is true because our spirit feels it to be so, just as we know that a thing is hot when we touch it. Therefore everything that we imagine is true, provided we feel that it is true. And Blake did feel the truth of everything he imagined.

These theories, though he rarely states them as actual doctrine, are at the bottom of his whole system of thought. They are the theories of all believers, all mystics, visionaries and occultists. Has not Pascal defined faith as " God felt by the heart"? We find these doctrines set forth very fully, and in terms that Blake would not have disavowed, in the writings of the greatest Theosophist of our time, Mrs. A. Besant. According to her, the spirit which perceives instead of reasoning is a quality of the Supreme Ego, and its faculty is true

intuition, absolute knowledge of an object, quicker than bodily vision, sure, unhesitating, and superior to all reason. But, unlike the images created by passion or desire, these intuitions do not come except by silent prayer and profound contemplation, for so only can the soul hear the voice of the Supreme Ego, which, proceeding directly from God, remains in uninterrupted communication with him.

We cannot clearly see from Blake's work whether, like Mrs. Besant and the ancient Hindoo sages, he believed this intuition to come from the soul's Supreme Ego, the " Higher Manas," which is as omniscient as God, or whether he regarded it as a revelation of God Himself, though the former view seems the more probable. However that may be, the practical result is the same. He believed in intuition as opposed to reason, just as an animal trusts in the infallibility of its instinct. For a mind so organised, to see or hear a truth is to be immediately convinced by it. On the other hand, it would be as difficult to convince an unbeliever by argument as to give a full explanation of colour to one blind from birth. And so Blake never sets forth his theories in the hope of convincing those who do not already know them, but only in order to confirm his supporters in their adherence. He who replies to words of Doubt

Doth put the Light of Knowledge out.

A Riddle, or the Cricket's Cry

Is to Doubt a fit Reply. . . .

He who Doubts from what he sees
Will never Believe, do what you Please;
If the Sun and Moon should Doubt,
They'd immediately Go Out.1

And so the field is open to every kind of theory, no matter how extraordinary. But the theories, for this very reason, can only interest us as curiosities, and cannot, unless indeed we are believers, bring us a step nearer to the solution of the problems they claim to settle. We can only regard them as a work of art, to be admired for its beauty or its ingenuity, not as a philosophical system to be examined and tested. If we believe in Blake at all, it must be by sheer intuitive faith like his own." This thing is true, because I feel that it must be so." Thus his religion becomes a simple revelation, a question of faith, like all revealed religions. Revealed religion still tries at times to prove its Divine origin. Though no explanation can be given of its mysteries, it seeks to establish them upon facts, miracles and logical arguments. 1 Auguries of Innocence.

Blake denies the facts, despises the miracles and puts no trust in the arguments. Going further than Swedenborg, who does often reason and explain, he relies simply upon assertions, for which his visions are the sole authority. Of any revelations that differ from his own he takes no account: they do not disturb his faith at all. All are true. For truth is not a unity; or if it is, then it presents different appearances to different minds. All the visions of the prophets are individual expressions of truth, seen in the light of each one's imagination. At bottom, when beheld with double or triple vision, all must have the same meaning. All contradictions are apparent only. And some day, when we know more, when " Sweet Science "—that is, art and the poetic genius—“ reigns,” 1 harmony will emerge from the chaos. It is only the systems founded on experience and reason that are opposed to one another and for ever conflicting. Human knowledge is proved false by the very fact that its conclusions are perpetually being changed. "Truth has bounds, Error none."2 And, in this limitless world of error, the philosophers and the learned will always continue to dispute. Poets and artists alone understand each other. They offer no reasoned criticism. Instead of arguing about beauty, they feel it instinctively, because they believe in its existence and recognise it everywhere. And our test of truth should be the same. Blake might indeed have written Keats's celebrated lines:

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. 3

We can no more prove truth than we can beauty. Both are objects of intuitive spiritual perception; and the only real science is art.

It follows that the source of art, the faculty through which all truth reaches us, and in which neither reason nor the external world can have any part, can only be the imagination. To imagination we owe the intuitive power which gives us our direct vision of the truth. Now imagination, in the normal mind, performs two great functions. One is to interpret and make more alive to us our perception of the external world, and the other is to create, out of nothing, ideas that are entirely new. In Blake's mind the first of these functions gave rise to his philosophic symbolism: the second produced his mythology and his new universe.

1 Vala: Night IX. 2 Book of Los: Chapter II.

3 Ode on a Grecian Urn.