Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: “We Who Are Philosophers”: Blake’s Early Metaphysics
- Chapter One A Sense of the Infinite: Leibniz, Hume and Panpsychism in the Early Tractates
- Chapter Two Soul Matter: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Monist Pantheism
- Chapter Three Breathing Dust: Erasmus Darwin and Blake’s Regenerative Materialism
- Chapter Four “Horrible Forms of Deformity”: The Urizen Cycle and Vitalist Materialism
- Coda: The Ghost of Pantheism
- Bibliography
- Index
Coda: The Ghost of Pantheism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 February 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: “We Who Are Philosophers”: Blake’s Early Metaphysics
- Chapter One A Sense of the Infinite: Leibniz, Hume and Panpsychism in the Early Tractates
- Chapter Two Soul Matter: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Monist Pantheism
- Chapter Three Breathing Dust: Erasmus Darwin and Blake’s Regenerative Materialism
- Chapter Four “Horrible Forms of Deformity”: The Urizen Cycle and Vitalist Materialism
- Coda: The Ghost of Pantheism
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
But what is my God? I put my question to the earth. It answered, “I am not God,” and all things on earth declared the same. I asked the sea and the chasms of the deep and the living things that creep in them, but they answered, “We are not your God. Seek what is above us.”
—Saint AugustineAm not I / A fly like thee? / Or art not thou / A man like me?
—William BlakeAs a natural philosopher arguing via poetry and visual art, Blake eclectically integrated numerous traditions in developing the panpsychist and pantheistic metaphysics of his early work. But his monist materialism, which argued for the divinity of all things, becomes increasingly muted and eventually abandoned by the end of the Urizen cycle. Blake's rejection of all forms of nonhuman nature as well as the human body is glaringly evident in his address “To the Christians” in the last illuminated prophecy, Jerusalem (1804–c.1820), wherein he asserts that “this Vegetable Universe is / but a faint shadow” of the “eternal World” one enters when “these Vegetable Mortal Bodies are no more.” Here the material universe is a shadowy hindrance to divine vision, and the corporeal, or “Vegetable” body, which Blake earlier in the poem calls an “excrementitious husk,” prevents its realization. Blake makes the same assertion in his annotation to George Berkeley's Siris: “The Natural Body is an Obstruction to the Soul or Spiritual Body.” This is clearly not the same philosopher who in The Marriage declares, “Man has no Body distinct from his Soul.” A detailed analysis of Blake's later prophecies is beyond the scope of this work, which has challenged the prevailing assertion that such statements from Jerusalem and the Siris annotations are characteristic of Blake's philosophy throughout his oeuvre. And just as Blake's philosophy is modified in each work studied here, I do not assume that a rigid Christianized dualism or Berkeleian Idealism uniformly characterizes everything Blake wrote, drew, painted, printed or engraved from the mid-1790s until his death in 1827. Indeed, a strain of pantheism persists in the later works, as in the following lines from The Four Zoas (1797): “So Man looks out in tree & herb & fish & bird & beast / Collecting up the scatterd portions of his immortal body / Into the Elemental forms of every thing that grows.”
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- William Blake as Natural Philosopher, 1788-1795 , pp. 229 - 234Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2021