B. They could not tell him in natural ideas how absurd must men be to understand him, as if he said the angels could not express themselves at all to him.

S. (304, condensed) There is progression of fibres and vessels in man, and their states from their first principles where they are in the light (underlined) and heat to ultimates in shade and not in heat.

B. We see here that the cause of an ultimate is the absence from heat and light.

S. (315) Heat, light, and atmospheres of the natural world conduce absolutely nothing to the image of creation.

B. Therefore the Natural Earth and Atmosphere is a Phantasy.

S. (315, continued) They only open seeds, maintain their shoots in expansion, and put upon them matters which fix them, but this not by Powers derived from their own Sun.

B. Mark this.

S. (316) There is a progression in the forms of animals and vegetables from first principles to ultimates, and from ultimates to first principles. Will and understanding are primes: thought and action ultimates.

B. A going forth and returning.

S. (324) There is nothing in the created universe which has not correspondence with something in man, affections, thoughts, or even organs and viscera of the body . . . not with these as substances but

as uses.

B. Things and substances are so different as not to correspond.

(A long portion here of the book has no note made, but Blake read and partly used afterwards many remarks in it, such as: (371) "There is a correspondence of the will with the heart, and of the understanding with the lungs." This recalls all that is said in Jerusalem and Milton about the furnaces and bellows of Los.)

S. (404, condensed) There is thought out of affection for truth, it is wisdom, but there is a thought out of memory through the sight of the natural mind.

B. Note this.

S. (410) Love or the will joins itself to wisdom or understanding, and wisdom or understanding does not conjoin itself to love or the will. B. Mark this.

S. (410, later, condensed) Knowledge which love acquires is not of understanding, but of love. It flows in from the spiritual world not to the understanding but to love in the understanding. It appears as if the understanding received it, but this is a fallacy, and as if love conjoined itself to affection, but this is a fallacy.

B. Mark this. Note this.

S. (410, still later) Love acts through truths, deriving nothing from understanding, but acting as though wisdom came from it, from some determination of Love called affection.

B. Mark this.

S. (411) Therefore love conjoins itself to understanding, not the

converse.

B. Mark this.

S. (417) Any one who is familiar with the anatomic structure of the lungs, and collates it with the understanding, can see clearly that the understanding does nothing of itself.

B. Mark.

S. (412, later) My knowledge of the fabric of the lungs fully convinced me that love through its affections conjoins itself to the understanding, and that the understanding does not conjoin itself to the affection of love.

B. Mark.

S. (413) The wisdom or understanding, out of the potency given to it by love or the will, is able to receive those things which are light from heaven, and to receive them.

B. Mark this.

S. (414) Love cannot be elevated through honour or gain as an end. Love towards the neighbour from the Lord is the love of wisdom. The light in man corresponding to winter is . . . wisdom without love.

B. Is it not false, then, that Love receives its influx through the understanding, as was asserted in the Society?

S. (419) Material love has become impure through the separation from heavenly love in parents.

B. Therefore it was not created impure and is not naturally so.

S. (419, later) In so far as the love puts heaven in the first place and the world in the second . . . it is raised into the heart of heaven and conjoined to the light of heaven.

B. Therefore it may not receive influx through the understanding. S. (421) The love or will is defiled in the understanding and by it, if they are not elevated together.

B. Mark this. They are elevated together.

S. (422) The understanding is not become spiritual or celestial, but the love does. When the love is so it makes its spouse, the understanding, spiritual and celestial.

B. underlines this.

S. (432, condensed) The initiament or primitive of man as it is in the womb after conception no man can know because it cannot be seen. It is of spiritual substance that does not fall into natural light. The right half of the brain at smallest is of love, the left of understanding. Its form within is in the form of heaven, but its exterior form was seen in it in opposition to that Order and Form.

B. Heaven and Hell are born together.

In Swedenborg's Angelic Wisdom concerning the Divine Love it is also taught that (288) "Inasmuch as God is a Man, therefore the universal Heaven in the complex is as one man, and it is distinguished into regions and provinces according to the members, viscera, and organs of a man. All these provinces are distinct from one another. The angels who constitute heaven are the recipients of love and wisdom from the Lord, and RECIPIENTS ARE IMAGES."

The last three words relate what may be called the first law of mysticism. It contains a conceivable relation between the IMAGINATION in Blake's sense of the word, and the Logos.

CHAPTER XIII

ROBERT'S INVENTION

IN the year 1788-89 Blake was not only busy with his studies of Swedenborg, he received from a dream or vision of his dead brother Robert the invention of the kind of printing in which he published all his autograph books. Robert directed him to write and draw in a liquid varnish that would protect a copper plate from being eaten away by acid, and then to leave the plate in an acid bath till only the lines were left standing up. He could then roll an ordinary printing roller soaked with printing ink over the surface and print as from an ordinary block.

As this is usually told from Blake's own account of it, we cannot help understanding it as though Blake were a medium, and the spirit of Robert came to him and spoke to him. Whether such a thing be possible or not seems to be still a matter in dispute with most people, but we have an incorrect idea of Blake if we look upon him as here claiming to be a medium"; though he would seem to speak as though that were his idea of himself. Whatever the "mediumistic faculty may be, it is one which imagination does not help, but rather hinders and distorts. Blake's imagination being habitually in a state of boiling activity, ready at the smallest suggestion to boil over, we should expect him to be less of a medium than most people, while his Swedenborgian habit of talk, dating back to before he possessed more than a childish smattering of Swedenborg, would naturally cause him to refer to the dead in such a way that mediums, especially those who were not Swedenborgians, would claim him as one of themselves.

In fact, he seems to have possessed a very slight and easily disturbed and deceived faculty of an occult or psychic sort, showing itself in presentiment and intuition, and leading him as often to errors as to revelations. His views of the subsist

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ence of the influence of the dead upon us were almost identical with those of Auguste Comte, as was most of his philosophy. The circle of joined hands at a séance, the man exists not but by brotherhood" of Blake's formula, and the mystic "Humanity" of Comte are all phases of the same thing, as is the French writer's epigram: "Il y a toujours quelqu'un qui aura plus d'esprit que qui que ce soit, c'est tout-le-monde." The thing is multiple personality,—a subject whose psychology is yet in its infancy. The language in which Blake spoke was picturesque, and disguised the Positivism of the ideas, as Positivism, on the other hand, disguises its own truth by the distressingly unpicturesque nature of the way in which it is presented.

The letter already referred to of Blake to Hayley, with whom he was not yet acquainted at the time of Robert's death, written a few years later, when Hayley had just lost a son, gives a view of the spiritual communications from Robert that might have been written by Comte himself, if he had been educated in the Swedenborgian school. Blake is enclosing a drawing that he has made of Hayley's son. The letter is dated Lambeth, May 6, 1800:

DEAR SIR-I am very sorry for your immense loss, which is a repetition of what all feel in this valley of misery and happiness mixed. I send the shadow of the departed angel and hope that the likeness is improved. The lips I have again lessened, as you advised, and done a good many other softenings to the whole. I know that our deceased friends are more really with us than when they were apparent to our mortal part. Thirteen years ago I lost a brother, and with his spirit I converse daily and hourly in the spirit, and see him in my remembrance, in the region of my imagination. I hear his advice, and even now write from his dictate. Forgive me for expressing to you my enthusiasm, which I wish all to partake of, since it is a source of immortal joy, even in this world. By it I am the companion of angels. May you continue to be so more and more, and to be more and more persuaded that every mortal loss is an immortal gain. The ruins of Time build mansions in Eternity.

I have also sent a proof of Pericles for your remarks, thanking you for the kindness with which you express them, and feeling heartily your grief with a brother's sympathy.-I remain, etc.

Some small portion of Blake's ideas of life and death may be sketched as follows:-Just as while the generations run on there is seen a personal tendency to take shape which is a spiritual influence that survives the disappearance of a man's features when they are melted down in his own seed, and is capable of blending with other features in an equally nonexistent state in a woman's seed, and as it depends on and

yet stamps and moulds mental faculties, when these are still non-existent, so there is something personal that survives by joining in brotherhood the non-existence of each of us through death. In fact, it only becomes free to be fully alive when it ceases to be obliged to work at forming and feeding a mortal body at all. The chief qualities of the framework that is called a mortal body are time and space. The mind, free from these, is necessarily immortal, and is even immortal before it gets free from them. Therefore, the immortal part of the mind (for much of the mind is as mortal as the body, and is only used to keep the body alive and teach it to propagate) is able during life to have communication with immortality, which is the whole mind of those who, being dead, no longer waste mentality on corporeal needs.

The conditions of identity are different after death. Minds merge themselves in Mind, as when a sheep-pen is removed the particular portion of the meadow where the sheep were confined merges in the acres around. Yet a characteristic living mind turning itself toward the general mind can communicate with a sympathetic mind merged in the mass. Memory is existence in Time; Imagination is existence in Eternity; Contraries vivify; Space without motion is not yet alive; Space with motion is not space only, but is partly Time; Space without place is barren; Place is an idea, an imagination; Space is Nature.

This is only a free sketch of a small portion of Blake's creed, not quoted from any particular passages of his, but it may be enough to put us on our guard against reading him in a rough and ready sense which should attribute to him either materialistic spiritualism or Positivist metaphysics.

We must, as Swedenborg warns us, immerse our minds in contemplative celestial light for some time before they will work in any other than the corporeal manner, whose space and time are its essence, for the corporeal is the manner that our own essence habitually needs for its own purposes, and only habit can conquer habit.

By whatever means of communication Blake received his idea from Robert, even if memory of him produced a vision during waking hours exactly like a dream, and this vision spoke as our dreams do, and told him what to do, the result was that he had a new occupation. It was now possible to print the pictorial poems, and tint them, as his Íslander in the Moon had suggested.

After the partnership with Parker was broken off and