— 11 —
some tyrannical law? Why should he put a restraint upon his natural enjoyments?
"Why cannot the ear be closed to its own destruction?
Or the glistening eye to the passion of a smile —
Why a tongue impressed with honey from every wind;
Why a nostril wide inhaling terror trembling and affright?
Why a tender curb upon the youthful burning boy?" etc.
Soon however this spirit of doubt is taken from Blake. The immemorial struggle between the body and the soul, the man principle and the woman principle, Satan and the redeeming powers, the cause of all human suffering is the result of the fall of mankind; a fall from a hermaphroditic state into generative life, from the kingdom of Imagination, the celestial, into the natural world, the vegetative. This division of mankind into sexual life tended to a closing up of men into separate selfhoods; each selfhood was guilty of error, and gradually the inlets through which communication with the universal spirit, the eternal imagination, were maintained, were dried up; the senses were mostly used for the natural world only.
"One day the world was a Paradise
And Imagination was its principal Goddess."
"If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything
would appear to men as it is: infinite. For man has
closed himself up until he sees all things through
the narrow chinks in his cavern".
(A memorable Fancy.)
It is now his, Blake's mission in life, to lead man back to the golden age in which imagination reigned supreme and the reasoning powers of man were kept in proper subjection. In his prophetic Book "Jerusalem", he calls it his great task "to open the eternal worlds, to open the eternal eyes of Man inwards, into the worlds of thought, into eternity, ever expanding in the bosom of God, the human Imagination." The redeeming powers of mankind are love and imaginative art.
