Now I want to draw your attention especially to these three aphorisms, because the critics, notable among them Mr. Swinburne, have generally held that Blake's was a gospel of licence. And I am the more willing to insist upon their real meaning in connection with the magnificent but most cryptic of his prophetic books, Jerusalem, because this, more than any other, exposes him to the charge of incoherencies.
"(1) Man has no body distinct from his soul." All systems of religion have taught that man possesses a soul, whereas Blake would have us understand that the reverse is the case: Edmund Spenser had long before expressed the same truth thus:—
For of the Soul the Body Form doth take
For Soul is Form and doth the Body make.
Or to quote certain lines of Blake from Jerusalem more cryptic but signifying the same idea:—
In great eternity every particular Form gives forth or Emanates
Its own peculiar Light, and the Form is the Divine Vision
And the Light is his Garment. This is Jerusalem in every Man,
A Tent and Tabernacle of Mutual Forgiveness.—p. 54.
