In another place he writes: “Negations are not contraries. Contraries exist. But negations exist not; nor shall they ever be organized for ever and ever.” Contraries, ‘the marriage of Heaven and Hell,’ seemed necessary and right to him, and the urge and recoil natural correlatives.

The great strife with Blake was always that between reason and imagination, experience and spiritual discernment.

The greater part of humanity seemed to him to see with the natural eye natural phenomena only. This was accordingly opaque to them, and did not let through the light of the Universal Spirit or Imagination, seen with which alone it was beautiful, as being then the symbol of something immeasureably greater than itself. Locke and Newton, the men of “single vision” as he called them, were the types of this part of humanity. He would fain have had men look through the eye at the infinite imagination which is the cause of phenomena.

[Larger Image]

DEATH’S DOOR: FROM BLAIR’S “GRAVE”

Engraved by L. Schiavonetti after Blake’s drawing.
Published 1808

As he states in a glorious passage in his prose essay of the Last Judgement: “Mental things are alone real: what is called corporeal nobody knows of; its dwelling-place is a fallacy, and its existence an imposture. Where is the existence out of mind, or thought? where is it but in the mind of a fool? Some people flatter themselves that there will be no Last Judgement, and that bad art will be adopted, and mixed with good art—that error or experiment will make a part of truth—and they boast that it is its foundation. These people flatter themselves; I will not flatter them. Error is created, truth is eternal. Error or creation will be burnt up, and then, and not till then, truth or eternity will appear. It is burned up the moment men cease to behold it.” (This is a mystical utterance, a spiritual discernment which will repay thoughtful consideration. It gives the Last Judgement—hitherto conceived of by the orthodox as a terribly material and mundane affair—an imaginative and esoteric significance very grateful and welcome to the spiritually sensitive.) “I assert for myself, that I do not behold the outward creation, and that to me it is hindrance and not action. ‘What!’ it will be questioned, ‘when the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire, somewhat like a guinea?’ Oh! no! no! I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.’ I question not my corporeal eye, any more than I would question a window concerning a sight. I look through it, and not with it.”

One of Blake’s most beautiful conceptions of God is as the universal “Poetic Genius,” and he was very fond of asserting that Art is Religion, which indeed it is when, like his own, it represents the forms of this world as the transparent media through which pulses the light of the universal Poetic Genius. Another belief of Blake’s must be quoted before I leave this part of our subject: “Men are admitted into heaven, not because they have curbed and governed their passions, or have no passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings. The treasures of heaven are not negations of passion, but realities of intellect, from which all the passions emanate, uncurbed in their eternal glory.

“The fool shall not enter into heaven, let him be ever so holy; holiness is not the price of entrance into heaven. Those who are cast out are all those who, having no passions of their own, because no intellect, have spent their lives in curbing and governing other people’s by the various arts of poverty, and cruelty of all kinds. The modern Church crucifies Christ with the head downwards.” And again, “Many persons, such as Paine and Voltaire, with some of the ancient Greeks, say: “We will not converse concerning good and evil, we will live in Paradise and Liberty! You may do so in spirit, but not in the mortal body, as you pretend, till after the Last Judgment. For in Paradise they have no corporeal and mortal body: that originated with the Fall and was called Death, and cannot be removed but by a Last Judgment. While we are in the world of mortality, we must suffer—the whole Creation groans to be delivered....