“Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active, springing from Energy. Good is Heaven, Evil is Hell.”
“All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following errors:
“1. That man has two existing principles, viz., a Body and a Soul.
“2. That energy, called evil, is alone from the body, and that Heaven, called Good, is alone from the soul.
“3. That God will torment man in Eternity for following his energies. But the following contraries are true:
“1. Man has no Body distinct from Soul, for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of soul in this age.
“2. Energy is the only life, and is from the body, and reason is the bound or outward circumference of energy.
“3. Energy is eternal delight.”
These postulates form links in a chain of thought, another progression of which is developed in “Jerusalem.” Blake writes: “There is a limit of opaqueness and a limit of contraction in every individual man, and the limit of opaqueness is called Satan, and the limit of contraction is called Adam. But there is no limit of expansion, there is no limit of translucence in the bosom of man for ever from eternity to eternity.” Certainly there was no limit in his own bosom, and in vision he expanded away from his own “ego” and merged in the universal life, the all-pervading Spirit. Opaqueness and contraction were the only forms of evil he recognized, and these are negative rather than active qualities.
Indeed, Blake often seems to deny the existence of sin at all. Again referring to the invaluable record that Crabb Robinson has left of Blake—I quote always from Messrs. Ellis and Yeats’ complete reprint of the part of the diary referring to him—“He allowed, indeed, that there are errors, mistakes, etc., and if these be evil, then there is evil. But these are only negations. He denied that the natural world is anything. It is all nothing, and Satan’s empire is the empire of nothing.”