The Prophetic Books bear witness, in their own way, to that great gospel of imagination which Blake taught and exemplified. In Jerusalem it is stated in a single sentence: 'I know of no other Christianity and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body and mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination: Imagination, the real and eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow, and in which we shall live in our Eternal or Imaginative Bodies, when these Vegetable Mortal Bodies are no more.' 'O Human Imagination, O Divine Body I have Crucified!' he cries; and he sees continually:
'Abstract Philosophy warring in enmity against
Imagination,
Which is the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus, blessed
for ever.'
He finds the England of his time generalising Art and Science till Art and Science is lost,' making:
'A pretence of Art, to destroy Art, a pretence of
Liberty
To destroy Liberty, a pretence of Religion to destroy
Religion.'
He sees that:
'The Visions of Eternity, by reason of narrowed
perceptions,
Are become weak visions of Time and Space, fix'd
into furrows of death.'
He sees everywhere 'the indefinite Spectre; who is the Rational Power,' crying out:
'I am God, O Sons of Men! I am your Rational
Power!
Am I not Bacon and Newton and Locke who teach
Humility to Man?
Who teach Doubt and Experiment: and my two
kings, Voltaire, Rousseau.'
He sees this threefold spirit of doubt and negation overspreading the earth, 'brooding Abstract Philosophy,' destroying Imagination; and, as he looked about him:
'Every Universal Form was become barren mountains
of Moral
Virtue: and every Minute Particular harden'd into
grains of sand:
And all the tenderness of the soul cast forth as filth
and mire.'