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Example research essay topic: York W W Norton W W Norton Company - 1,293 words

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... Blakes most challenging proposition, since it cannot be reasoned with and requires a blind faith and firm persuasion that you are the wise man and not the fool. It is impossible to tell, other than by being judged against common-sense, since Man by his reasoning power can only compare & judge of what he has already perched. But it is this type of perception that Blake challenges. So, it can be seen that this is a very difficult idea to reconcile with modern thought, one that requires we give ourselves up entirely to a belief that cannot be proven. That is, a religious belief.

Blake obviously does not see this as similar to the blind faith and received truths of the church, because it is blind faith in our own imagination that he stresses-not acceptance of others beliefs. I cannot put faith in something that can never be proven or disproved, and see such behaviour as leading only to insanity. Again, Blakes argument is such that this statement can be turned against me. Perhaps some argument can be made against Blake on the grounds that imagination is definitely organic, and of the body, and is in no way a portal to the infinite universe, which I believe, though I cannot give this argument.

In There is No Natural Religion, Blake dismisses that idea, still beloved by many today, of common sense. He recognises that morality is not absolute truth, but received in education-this coming from the church-and tells us that Reason, or the ratio of what we have already known is not the same that it shall be when we know more, (b, II) so, that which seems reasonable today may not tomorrow. Slavery, of course, is a good example. He persuasively argues that we cannot rely on our five bodily senses, on the grounds that: if we did not have, for example, a sense of smell, we would never know of the existence of smell; it does not follow that because we cannot sense it, it does not exist. This is challenging in its implications, yet perfectly valid.

He goes on to state that since men are capable of experience other than the purely physical, that is, spiritual, then perception must not and is not limited to (bounded by) that of the five senses. Imagination is the perception of infinite capacity, and He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. (Application, p. 15) This is the idea Blake would expand on greatly in The Marriage. Blake begins his Argument with a bold statement: that, in the traditional sense at least, there is no Good and Evil; these terms do not exist in the sense that one is the aim of mankind, while the other should be eliminated. The two are contraries, and Without Contraries is no progression. (Plate 3) Goodness, we are taught, is Reason, restriction, and passivity. Evil is Energy, physical desire, and activity.

Reason is Heaven. Energy is Hell. Blake challenges this with a magnificently vivid symbolization of the true natures of Reason and Energy. Reason, virtue in abstinence, is not of the soul while Energy is earthly temptation.

Both are, in fact, of the body. Energy is the very driving force of life, is the only life and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. (Plate 4) The image is that of a sphere of Energy, surrounding man, and encased in Reason. This accompanies his statement, in There is No Natural Religion, that if man limits himself to perceiving only through the bodily senses, then he limits himself to bodily desires and can never know God. He goes on to talk of Those who restrain desire because theirs is weak enough to be restrained, (Plate 5) whom we can take to be priests. This, wickedly, carries connotations of phallic pride, and is suggestive of the sexual impotence of priests and the like.

His argument is, that no desire should be unfulfilled, because we can only desire what is within our Reason. No bird soars too high, he says in the Proverbs of Hell, if he soars with his own wings. (15) His theory on the effects of imposing false limits on Energy are similar to what Freud would later state in his theory of repression, that whatever desire is repressed will re-emerge in a corrupted and ugly form. This is the subject of The Poison Tree, in Experience, and of the Proverb of Hell: Expect poison from the standing water. (45) Blakes argument is that God reside[s] in the human breast (Marriage, Plate 11), but what does he mean by this. It is not meant in the Nietzscheian sense that we are our own Gods, but in the sense that every man has the capacity to commune with God. God is not in any of the words of priests, or in the church.

The Memorable Fancy on Plate 12 of The Marriage is an objection to the orthodox idea of God, and the Prophet Isaiah states that he saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organic perception. Blakes explanation of why religion strays so far from original meaning, however, is similar to the explanation that Nietzsche would offer on morality: A morality at length enters consciousness as a law, as dominating-And therewith the entire group of related values and states enters into it: it becomes venerable, unassailable, holy, true; it is part of its development that its origin should be forgotten-That is a sign that it has become master- We an see the comparison in The Marriage: The ancient poets animated all sensible objects with Gods [And] a system was formed, which took some advantage of & england the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects; thus began Priesthood. (Plate 11) And in his earlier work, All Religions Are One. In this, viewed with There is No Natural Religion, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, we come close to understanding the real essence of what Blake means when he states, perhaps incomprehensibly, that The desire of Man being Infinite, the possession is Infinite, & himself Infinite. (There is No Natural Religion, b, VII) He speaks of the Poetic Genius, those with enlarged & numerous senses (Marriage, Plate 11), he who has cleansed the doors of perception and to whom all things appear, as they are, infinite (Plate 14). It is Blakes (questionable) belief that it is from the Poetic Genius that all knowledge springs, and without whom the universe would soon become a mill with complicated wheels (There is No Natural Religion, b, IV). Without whose vision, the progress of humanity would halt, since none, by travelling over known lands can find out the unknown, So from already acquired knowledge Man could not acquire more (All Religions Are One, Principle 4).

This is the challenge of Blake, to become true Men: The true Man is the source, he being the Poetic Genius. (Principle 7 th) Bibliography Blake, William, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Johnson, Mary Lynn and Grant, John E. (eds. ), Blakes Poetry and Designs (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979), pp. 81 - 102. -Songs of Innocence and Experience; Johnson, Mary Lynn and Grant, John E. (eds. ), Blakes Poetry and Designs (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979), pp 19 - 60. Merriman, John, Eighteenth-Century Economic and Social Change, A History of Modern Europe: from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: W.

W. Norton & Company, 1996), pp. 354 - 398. -Enlightened Thought and the Republic of Letters, A History of Modern Europe: from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996), pp. 399 - 441.


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