A conflict of realities: William Blake's imagination versus Joseph McCabe's empiricism

“ The world of imagination is infinite and eternal, whereas the world of generation or vegetation is finite and temporal. There exist in that eternal world the eternal realities of everything which we see reflected in the vegetable glass of nature.’
Every visionary knows that the mind’s eye soon comes to see a capricious and variable world, which the will cannot shape or change, though it can call it up and banish it again. ”

“ The conceptions of reality, substance, causality, nay, even that of necessity in existence, have no significance out of the sphere of empirical cognition, and cannot, beyond that sphere, determine any object. They may, accordingly, be employed to explain the possibility of things in the world of sense, but they are utterly inadequate to explain the possibility of the universe itself considered as a whole ”

“ If the spectator could enter into these images in his imagination, approaching them on the fiery chariot of his contemplative thought; if he could enter into Noah's rainbow, could make a friend and companion of one of these images of wonder, which always entreat him to leave mortal things (as he must know) , then would he arise from the grave, then would he meet the Lord in the air, and then he would be happy. General knowledge is remote knowledge: it is in particulars that wisdom consists, and happiness too. Both in art and in life general masses are as much art as a pasteboard man is human. ”

“ I omit the function of entertainment only because it has never been neglected. The supreme business of a State is to make its people happy, strong, and prosperous. We shall approach the ideal when we abolish war and reduce pauperism and crime by registering all workers, organising all industry, reforming justice and the penal system, and removing the morally diseased.
In those days education will be a vast, humane, scientific scheme for guiding the growth of human embryos into industrious and orderly citizens, and enabling the adult citizen pleasurably to cultivate his mind and taste. ”

“ The “must” is a psychological phenomenon, and nothing more—a mental impulse or craving is construed into an objective necessity. So it is in the philosophical elaboration of the same thought: self-existence, or necessary existence, and contingency is an antithesis of thought transferred illegitimately into attributes of things; the principle of sufficient reason is the expression of a law, or, rather, a strong tendency of thought, which has been projected into the real world in the day-dream of the metaphysician. ”

“ The limitations of genius are consequently not so much limitations as the abrogation of limits in the ordinary sense; its originality of insight, interpretation, and expression broadens the human horizons and enriches the fields within them; it tells us what we may not have known or felt or guessed, but what we shall at last understand. Thus, as the theory of art is most fixed in the doctrine of order, so here it is most flexible in the doctrine of personality, through which that order is most variously set forth and illustrated. ”

“ But there are limitations inherent in the human mind beyond which our intellect cannot reach, and therefore science does not and cannot show us the world as it actually is, with its true facts and laws, but only as it appears to us within the inherent limitations of the human mind.
The greatest limitation of the human mind is that all its perceptions are finite, and our intellect cannot grasp the conception of infinity. ”

“ It is a fact testified by experience, not the experience of external objects, but that of consciousness, by that which is most hidden in our soul, that there is in every cognition a subject and an object, perception and the thing perceived, and without this difference the act is not possible. Even when by an effort of reflection, we take ourselves for our own object, the duality appears ”

“ We have already seen that thinking is the questioning of experience, and that the moment it begins it gives rise to a distinction between appearance and reality. It is the asking what? of every that of felt experience to which the mind attends. The world in which we find ourselves is extended all around us in space and full of things which affect us in various ways: some give us pleasure, others give us pain, and we ourselves are things that affect other things as well as being ourselves affected by them. ”

“ As to the vastly important relation of Thought to external Experience, we have seen that our thought, indeed, looks to this external experience to decide whether our hypotheses about fact can be confirmed. But, on the other hand, while external experience, in confirming ideas, furnishes a positive content which our human internal meanings never can construct for themselves, still the service of our external experience, in revealing what is Real, has perfectly obvious limitations. ”

“ Being is not an object that we men come near at will to finally observing, so that while we never get it wholly present in our internal meanings, we can come as near as we like to telling all that it is. But the Real, as our judgments and empirical investigations seek it, is that determinate object which all our ideas and experiences try to decide upon, and to bring within the range of our internal meanings; while, by the very nature of our fragmentary hypotheses and of our particular experiences, it always lies Beyond. ”

“ For we come to the conclusion that our faculty of cognition is unable to transcend the limits of possible experience; and yet this is precisely the most essential object of this science. The estimate of our rational cognition a priori at which we arrive is that it has only to do with phenomena, and that things in themselves, while possessing a real existence, lie beyond its sphere. ”

“ Arise O Sons give all your strength against Eternal Death,
35⁠Lest we are vegetated, for Cathedron's Looms weave only Death,
A Web of Death: & were it not for Bowlahoola & Allamanda
No Human Form but only a Fibrous Vegetation,
A Polypus of soft affections without Thought or Vision,
Must tremble in the Heavens & Earths thro' all the Ulro space.
40⁠Throw all the Vegetated Mortals into Bowlahoola:
But as to this Elected Form who is return'd again,
He is the Signal that the Last Vintage now approaches,
Nor Vegetation may go on till all the Earth is reap'd.
So Los spoke. ”

“ Like as a Polypus that vegetates beneath the deep,
They saw his Shadow vegetated underneath the Couch
10⁠Of death: for when he enter'd into his Shadow, Himself,
His real and immortal Self; was as appear'd to those
Who dwell in immortality, as One sleeping on a couch
Of gold: and those in immortality gave forth their Emanations
Like Females of sweet beauty, to guard round him & to feed
15⁠His lips with food of Eden in his cold and dim repose:
But to himself he seem'd a wanderer lost in dreary night. ”

“ A man sets himself down with colours, and with all the articles of painting; he puts a model before him, and he copies that so neat as to make it a deception. Now, let any man of sense ask himself one question: Is this art? Can it be worthy of admiration to anybody of understanding? Who could not do this? What man, who has eyes and an ordinary share of patience, cannot do this neatly? Is this art, or is it glorious to a nation to produce such contemptible copies? Countrymen, countrymen, do not suffer yourselves to be disgraced! ”

“ Next, man as he is upon earth attains for once to the vision of that which he was and shall be; his eyes open upon the sight of life beyond the mundane and mortal elements, and the chains of reason and religion relax. In the evening he travels towards the grave; a figure stepping out swiftly and steadily, staff in hand, over rough country ground and beside low thick bushes and underwood, dressed as a man of Blake’s day; a touch of realism curious in the midst of such mystical work. Next in extreme age he passes through the door of death to find the worm at her work ”

“ They make for doubts and fears cabinets of ivory and gold; when two spectres “like lamps quivering” between life and death stand ready for the blind malignity of combat, they are taken and moulded instead into shapes fit for love, clothed with soft raiment by softer hands, drawn after lines of sweet and perfect form. Some “in the optic nerve” give to the poor infinite wealth of insight, power to know and enjoy the invisible heaven, and to the rich scorn and ignorance and thick darkness. Others build minutes and hours and days ”

“ Europe and America are vital and significant; we mean by all names somewhat more than we know of; for where there is anything visible or conceivable, there is also some invisible and inconceivable thing. This is but the rough grotesque result of the tenet that matter apart from spirit is non-existent. Launched once upon that theory, Blake never thought it worth while to shorten sail or tack about for fear of any rock or shoal. It is inadequate and even inaccurate to say that he allotted to each place as to each world a presiding dæmon or deity. ”

“ Blake was always looking westward for his islands of the blest. All transatlantic things appear to have a singular hold upon his fancy. America was a land of misty and stormy morning, struck by the fierce and fugitive fires of intermittent war and nascent freedom. In a dim confused manner, he seems to mix up the actual events of history with the formless and labouring legends of his own mythology; or rather to cast circumstances into the crucible of vision, and extract a strange amalgam of metals unfit for mortal currency and difficult to bring to any test. ”

“ The designs, even if taken apart from their significance, are among his most inventive and interesting. They were done “for children,” because, in Blake’s mind, the wise innocence of children was likeliest to appreciate and accept the message involved in them; “for the sexes,” that they [Pg 28] might be at once enlightened to see beyond themselves, and enfranchised from the bondage of pietism or materialism. Interpreted according to Blake’s intention, the book was a small leaf or chapter of the inspired gospel of deliverance which he was charged to preach through the organs of his art ”

“ Nor has Blake left us anything of more profound and perfect value than The Human Abstract; a little mythical vision of the growth of error; through soft sophistries of pity and faith, subtle humility of abstinence and fear, under which the pure simple nature lies corrupted and strangled; through selfish loves which prepare a way for cruelty, and cruelty that works by spiritual abasement and awe.
Under the shadow of this tree of mystery, [7] rooted in artificial belief, all the meaner kind of devouring things take shelter and eat of the fruit of its branches ”

“ As I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius, which to Angels look like torment and insanity, I collected some of their Proverbs: thinking that as the sayings used in a nation mark its character, so the Proverbs of Hell show the nature of the Infernal wisdom better than any description of buildings or garments. When I came home, on the abyss of the five senses, where a flat-sided steep frowns over the present world, I saw a mighty Devil folded in black clouds, hovering on the sides of the rock ”

“ For the moment it was perhaps not wonderful that even so much excellence should obtain something of mistrustful admiration. The noble passion and exaltation of spirit here made visible burnt its way into notice for a time; and Cromek was allowed to claim applause for his invention of Blake. We will choose two designs only for reference. None who have seen can well forget the glorious violence of reunion between soul and body, meeting with fierce embraces, with glad agony and rage of delight; with breasts yearning and eyes wide, with sweet madness of laughter at their lips ”

“ But, if these phenomena must be employed in the construction or support of the cosmological idea of an absolute whole, and when we are discussing a question that oversteps the limits of possible experience, the proper distinction of the different theories of the reality of sensuous objects is of great importance, in order to avoid the illusion which must necessarily arise from the misinterpretation of our empirical conceptions. ”

“ It is difficult to see how such a panorama of an objective world of things differs from the transcendental conception of 'Dinge an Sich.' The spectacle presented to our very limited powers of vision and of thought by such petty corner of the Unfathomable Universe as may be within our ken is still of itself so vast, so complex, so shifting, so subtle, and yet to us so infinite, that it must ever baffle our efforts to reach farther than a simple tabulation of what is within our range of mental vision. ”

“ Herein we may see the radical and inalienable excellence of romanticism; its sincerity, freedom, richness, and infinity. Herein, too, we may see its limitations, in that it cannot fix or trust any of its ideals, and blindly believes the universe to be as wayward as itself, so that nature and art are always slipping through its fingers. It is obstinately empirical, and will never learn anything from experience. ”

“ Reality, howsoever remote, is always defined as a terminus within the general possibilities of experience; and what knows it is defined as an experience THAT 'REPRESENTS' IT, IN THE SENSE OF BEING SUBSTITUTABLE FOR IT IN OUR THINKING because it leads to the same associates, OR IN THE SENSE OF 'POINTING TO IT THROUGH A CHAIN OF OTHER EXPERIENCES THAT EITHER INTERVENE OR MAY INTERVENE.
Absolute reality here bears the same relation to sensation as sensation bears to conception or imagination. ”

“ If the theme of the intentional claims to illustrate merely a psychological attitude, by which reality is drained instead of being explained, nothing in fact separates it from the absurd spirit. It aims to enumerate what it cannot transcend. It affirms solely that without any unifying principle thought can still take delight in describing and understanding every aspect of experience. The truth involved then for each of those aspects is psychological in nature. ”

“ But to aim at realizing the ideal in an example in the world of experience—to describe, for instance, the character of the perfectly wise man in a romance—is impracticable. Nay more, there is something absurd in the attempt; and the result must be little edifying, as the natural limitations, which are continually breaking in upon the perfection and completeness of the idea, destroy the illusion in the story and throw an air of suspicion even on what is good in the idea, which hence appears fictitious and unreal. ”

“ Limitation is the fundamental law of the possibility of thought. For, as the greyhound cannot outstrip his shadow, nor the eagle outsoar the atmosphere in which he floats, and by which alone he may be supported; so the mind cannot transcend that sphere of limitation within and through which exclusively the possibility of thought is realized. ”

“ The real, as the independent, is as careless of your immediate feelings as it is of the mediation of your thinking processes. It is beyond what you see, feel, touch. For seeing, feeling, touch, vanish; but reality remains when unseen, unfelt, untouched by any external observer. Now realists usually lay great stress upon the substantiality of the real, and the classic doctrine of substance was developed upon the basis of this notion of the independently real. And thirdly, Does the real make ideas true or false? ”

“ But the admission of both these positions brings us not one step nearer the conclusion which the realist draws from them, that real existence is independent of all experience. Because it is easy to show that the reality of a thing does not depend on its being explicitly recognised by any one finite percipient or any aggregate of finite percipients, and again, that there is more in any experience of finite percipients than those percipients know, the realist thinks he may infer that there are realities which would still be real though they entered into no experience at all. ”

“ The difficulty is that our physical senses only perceive the surface of our surroundings, and that we have hitherto been looking at the Woof of Nature as though it were the glass of a window covered with patterns, smudges, flies, &c., comprising all that we call physical phenomena and which, when analysed in terms of Time and Space, produce the appearance of succession and motion. It requires a keener perception, unbounded by these limitations, to look through the glass at the Reality which is beyond. ”

“ I shall trace them to the utmost limit of our conception, and try to gain thereby a clearer insight into the fact, not only that the whole Physical Universe is but a transient and Space-limited phenomenon, a thin film which our senses have erected and which divides us from the Reality, but that, if our power of introspection were fully developed, we should know that the Reality is nearer and dearer to us, and has much more to do with us, even in this life, than has the physical. ”

“ But it takes the farther-reaching mind of man to invent the trap and the latch. Perception alone does not go far enough. It is limited to immediately present objects and their most obvious relations. The perceptual image is likewise subject to similar limitations. While it enables us to dispense with the immediate presence of the object, yet it deals with separate individuals; and the world is too full of individual objects for us to deal with them separately. It is in conception, judgment, and reasoning that true thinking takes place. ”

“ The subject, however, is not yet exhausted, for we have now to remark, that no one has ever been known to see a spectre which does not represent some one whom he has seen, or whose picture he has noticed; nor does he ever hear a voice in a tongue unknown to himself. Consequently, when we find individuals recognizing some one whose portrait they have seen, but who talks in the mother tongue of the visionary, we are forced to conclude that the matter is unreal. ”

“ It is always thought about a reality which falls, in part, outside the thought itself, is only imperfectly represented by the thought’s content, and for that very reason is a not-self to the thought for which it is an object. And the whole process of thinking may be described as a series of attempts on the part of thought to transcend this limitation. So long as the content of the thought is not adequate to the reality which it thinks, so long, that is, as there is anything left to know about the reality, thought restlessly presses forward towards an unreached consummation. ”

“ Reality exists now, but the infinite has disappeared. To describe a figure in space, we are obliged to limit infinite space; to represent to ourselves a change in time, we are obliged to divide the totality of time. Thus we only arrive at reality by limitation, at the positive, at a real position, by negation or exclusion; to determination, by the suppression of our free determinableness. ”

“ If it be a knowledge of things as they really are and not as they appear, we must remember that reality means what the intellect infers from the data of sense; and yet the principles of such inference, by which the distinction between appearance and reality is first instituted, are precisely the principles now to be discarded as subjective and of merely empirical validity.
“Merely empirical” is a vicious phrase: what is other than empirical is less than empirical, and what is not relative to eventual experience is something given only in present fancy. ”

“ Every phenomenon or so-called 'fact' has an infinity of aspects or properties, as we have seen, amongst which the fool, or man with little sagacity, will inevitably go astray. But no matter for this point now. The first thing is to have seen that every possible case of reasoning involves the extraction of a particular partial aspect of the phenomena thought about, and that whilst Empirical Thought simply associates phenomena in their entirety, Reasoned Thought couples them by the conscious use of this extract. ”

“ Every metaphysic is an attempt to explain experience. It seeks not to describe phenomena, but to get behind phenomena to some ultimate ground, and the experience to be explained presents as its most characteristic feature the cognition of apparently transcendent objects. This character, which comes out most frankly in the naive realism which I have called the natural view of the world, appears to determine metaphysics more than any other character of experience. ”

“ Likewise, the mind that aims to understand reality can consider itself satisfied only by reducing it to terms of thought. If man realized that the universe like him can love and suffer, he would be reconciled. If thought discovered in the shimmering mirrors of phenomena eternal relations capable of summing them up and summing themselves up in a single principle, then would be seen an intellectual joy of which the myth of the blessed would be but a ridiculous imitation. That nostalgia for unity, that appetite for the absolute illustrates the essential impulse of the human drama. ”

“ The very fact that the reality of phenomena is limited well indicates that there must needs be an unlimited reality, for were there no unlimited, or infinite, reality in life, the finite being of objects would be inconceivable. To make it plainer for you, if there were no wealth in the world, you would not have poverty. If there were no light in the world, you could not conceive of darkness, for we know things philosophically by their antitheses. We know, for example, that poverty is the lack of wealth. Where there is no knowledge, there is no ignorance. What is ignorance? ”