What is confusing to many readers is that Blake alternates this representation of the Fall (as a fragmentation of the one Primal Man into separate parts) with a different kind of representation, in terms of two sharply opposed ways of seeing the universe. In this latter mode the Fall is a catastrophic change from imaginative insight (which sees the cosmos as unified and humanized) to sight by the physical eye (which sees the cosmos as a multitude of isolated individuals in an inhuman and alien nature). In terms of this distinction, the apocalypse toward which Blake as imaginative artist strives unceasingly will enable men and women once again to envision all beings as participant in the individual life that he calls "the Universal Brotherhood of Eden"� that is, a humanized world in which all individuals, in familial union, can feel at home.
The text for Blake's writings is that of The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, edited by David V. Erdman and Harold Bloom (rev. ed., Berkeley, 1982). Blake's erratic spelling and punctuation have been altered when the original form might mislead the reader. The editors are grateful for the expert advice of Joseph Viscomi and Robert Essick in editing the selections from Blake.
All Religions Are One1
The Voice of one crying in the Wilderness2
The Argument. As the true method of knowledge is experiment the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which experiences. This faculty I treat of.
PRINCIPLE 1st. That the Poetic Genius is the true Man, and that the body or outward form of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius. Likewise that the forms of all things are derived from their Genius, which by the Ancients was call'd an Angel & Spirit & Demon.
PRINCIPLE 2d. As all men are alike in outward form, So (and with the same infinite variety) all are alike in the Poetic Genius. PRINCIPLE 3d. No man can think write or speak from his heart, but he must
1. This and the following two selections are early illuminated works, probably etched in 1788. They are directed both against 18th-century Deism, or "natural religion" (which bases its religious tenets not on scriptural revelation, but on evidences of God in the natural or "organic" world), and against Christian orthodoxy, whose creed is based on a particular Scripture. In this selection Blake ironically accepts the Deistic view that all particular religions are variants of the one true religion but rejects the Deists' "Argument" that this religion is grounded on reasoning from sense experience. He attributes the one religion instead to the innate possession by all people of "Poetic Genius"�that is, of a capacity for imaginative vision.
2. Applied in the Gospels (e.g., Matthew 3.3) to John the Baptist, regarded as fulfilling the prophecy in Isaiah 39.3. Blake applies the phrase to himself, as a later prophetic voice in an alien time.
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intend truth. Thus all sects of Philosophy are from the Poetic Genius, adapted to the weaknesses of every individual.
P RINCIPLE 4. As none by travelling over known lands can find out the unknown, So from already acquired knowledge Man could not acquire more. Therefore an universal Poetic Genius exists.
P RINCIPLE 5. The Religions of all Nations are derived from each Nation's different reception of the Poetic Genius, which is every where call'd the Spirit of Prophecy.
P RINCIPLE 6. The Jewish & Christian Testaments are An original derivation from the Poetic Genius. This is necessary from the confined nature of bodily sensation.
P RINCIPLE 7th. As all men are alike (tho' infinitely various), So all Religions & as all similars have one source. The true Man is the source, he being the Poetic Genius.
1788
There Is No Natural Religion1
[a] The Argument. Man has no notion of moral fitness but from Education. Naturally he is only a natural organ subject to Sense.
I. Man cannot naturally Percieve but through his natural or bodily organs. II. Man by his reasoning power can only compare & judge of what he has already perciev'd. III. From a perception of only 3 senses or 3 elements none could deduce a fourth or fifth. IV. None could have other than natural or organic thoughts if he had none but organic perceptions. V. Man's desires are limited by his perceptions; none can desire what he has not perciev'd. VI. The desires & perceptions of man, untaught by any thing but organs of sense, must be limited to objects of sense. Conclusion. If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things, & stand still unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again.
1788
There Is No Natural Religion1
[b] I. Man's perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception; he percieves more than sense (tho' ever so acute) can discover. 1. In this selection Blake presents his version of tions (in opposition to those in the preceding tract) English empiricism, which derives all mental con-that knowledge is not limited to the physical tent (including the evidences from which, in "nat-senses, but is as unbounded as the infinite desires ural religion," reason is held to prove the existence of humankind and its godlike capacity for infinite of God) from perceptions by the physical senses. vision. 1. In this third document Blaki? presents his asser
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INTRODUCTION / 81
II. Reason, or the ratio2 of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more. [Ill lacking]
IV. The bounded is loathed by its possessor. The same dull round even of a universe would soon become a mill with complicated wheels. V. If the many become the same as the few when possess'd, More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul. Less than All cannot satisfy Man. VI. If any could desire what he is incapable of possessing, despair must be his eternal lot. VII. The desire of Man being Infinite, the possession is Infinite & himself Infinite. Application. He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only. Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is.
1788
FROM SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND OF EXPERIENCE1
SHEWING THE TWO CONTRARY STATES OF THE HUMAN SOUL
FROM SONGS OF INNOCENCE
Introduction
Piping down the valleys wild Piping songs of pleasant glee On a cloud I saw a child, And he laughing said to me,
5 "Pipe a song about a Lamb"; So I piped with merry chear; "Piper pipe that song again"� So I piped, he wept to hear.
2. In Latin ratio signifies both "reason" and "calculation." Blake applies the term derogatorily to the 18th-century concept of reason as a calculating faculty whose operations are limited to sense perceptions. 1. Songs of Innocence was etched in 1789, and in 1794 was combined with additional poems under the title Songs of Innocence and of Experience; this collection was reprinted at various later times with varying arrangements of the poems. In his songs of innocence Blake assumes the stance that he is writing "happy songs / Every child may joy to hear," but they do not all depict an innocent and happy world; many of them incorporate injustice, evil, and suffering. These aspects of the fallen world, however, are represented as they appear to a "state" of the human soul that Blake calls "innocence" and that he expresses in a simple pastoral language, in the tradition both of Isaac Watts's widely read Divine Songs for Children (1715) and of the picture-books for child readers pioneered by mid-eighteenth-century booksellers such as John Newbery. The vision of the same world, as it appears to the "contrary" state of the soul that Blake calls "experience," is an ugly and terrifying one of poverty, disease, prostitution, war, and social, institutional, and sexual repression, epitomized in the ghastly representation of modern London. Though each stands as an independent poem, a number of the songs of innocence have a matched counterpart, or "contrary," in the songs of experience. Thus "Infant Joy" is paired with "Infant Sorrow," and the meek "Lamb" reveals its other aspect of divinity in the flaming, wrathful "Tyger."