Blake invented names for them. Of these--Urizen, Urthona-Los, Luvah, and
Tharmas--Urizen and Los are by far the clearest conceived figures. Perfect
unity is maintained so long as Los is supreme. Reason is important in its
right place. It becomes an evil when it usurps the place of imagination
and thinks it can see as far. The essence of the fall is disorder.
Redemption restores order, which is unity. Science alone breaks down
because it is built up on observation and induction. Its observation is
insufficient, for it is the observation of a shrunk universe. It gathers
its materials through the five senses. But there are other avenues in
regenerated man. If science were built up on the observation or vision of
the whole instead of a very small part, it would become divine science and
coincident with religion.
Religion breaks down whether built on nature or experience. If on nature,
it is nature only as seen through limited vision; if on experience, it is
the experience of fallen man, and therefore it is of vital force only when
it transcends nature and becomes super-natural, and rests on a revelation
not from man's experience, however deep, but from God.
[Illustration: ALBION.
_From Jerusalem._]
Deism was the particular time-heresy of Blake's day. He came into direct
contact with it through his friend Tom Paine. Deistic religion, to be
adequate for man's need, must rest on perfect nature and perfect
experience. Paine, Voltaire, and Rousseau, in order to provide these
conditions which they saw to be necessary, were driven to make the wild
statement, contrary to all experience, that man is naturally holy and
good, and if he is not so as we know him, it is because he is everywhere
perverted by artificial civilization. Having swallowed this baseless
assumption, the rest was easy. They had only like Godwin to manufacture
some scheme of political justice, or like Rousseau to arrange a social
contract, and then the Millennium would come.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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