‘I no longer believe that the apparently impervious rationalists who demand so aggressively that we others should ‘explain what you mean by…’ (God, love, beauty, the good, the soul, the Logos,) are always victims of what the Church calls ‘invincible ignorance’… To judge others by myself, I would judge that in many more it is the will that has at some time denied and rejected spiritual knowledge. In the choice of premisses the will is free: logic cannot dictate the ground from which its conclusions proceed; and I wonder whether the loveless, beautyless state is not the cause rather than the effect of such systems? If, disregarding those superstructures so dazzling to ignorance, we regard their foundations, they will be seen for what they are. Blake never answered Urizen’s arguments, but merely drew his portrait.’
– Raine

KATHLEEN RAINE FOUGHT A lifelong battle to extricate herself from the cast of mind of progressivist Cambridge natural science and philosophy of the 1920s and 1930s, which seemed to her to push her into the position of denying the insights into transcendence she had had as a girl in Northumberland. So we may perhaps forgive her a degree of stridency here. She knows that of which she speaks.

But is the will operative in premiss choice? In recent times, philosophers have fought against allotting the will any role in belief formation (Descartes’ brilliant arguments to the contrary notwithstanding, which they usually show little sign of having pondered either deeply or sympathetically). Maybe the denial of the role of the will in belief formation is itself a feature of a form of intellectualism or rationalism neither Plato nor Aristotle would have recognised, for both understood the way that moral and other evaluative dispositions played a role in choice of ends, and maybe of premises too. We do in a sense have to choose for or against Urizen, but can this be done by means of argument, in the sense that argument one way will show the other way rationally indefensible?

It is often at this point that one begins to hear about judgements of sense and robust senses of reality, as if there might be some touchstone available to the worldly-wise, allowing them to brush off those with other fish to fry. I am not denying that to the person of good sense some things will seem whimsical, far-fetched, superstitious and just plain incredible, astrology, ley-lines and homeopathic medicines being among the usual and obvious suspects. To people brought up in a certain way, or with a certain cast of mind, Blake to whom I have already referred, is going to seem just off the wall.

William Blake: Newton

To speak personally, and Kathleen Raine notwithstanding, I am in no sense an uncritical admirer of Blake, although, sometimes against my better judgement it seems, I do admire. But I’m reminded here that a philosopher friend of mine has used Blake’s famous image of Newton for the cover of a book on the philosophy of science. He had not realised that Blake intended this image to be one of repression, of cruelty, of enmity to life and above all of a blindness to all that was not material, below and measurable, or that the primary sense of Blake’s expression ‘dark satanic mills’ was to refer to the reductionist and mechanistic laws the constrained and constricted geometer Newton was mapping out in Blake’s image.

This is not, of course, an argument against the historic Newton or his philosophy, nor does it show that my friend was entirely wrong to take Newton in a positive sense. As I said to him, attempting to soften the blow I had just landed on him, you could even see the Newton of Blake’s image as an angel, albeit fallen; and, as Peter Ackroyd has pointed out, there is indeed a monumentality about Blake’s Newton, reflecting his creativity and mental isolation, akin to Blake’s own, albeit in Newton’s case maddened with unbelief. My point is rather that it simply did not enter my friend’s mind that Newton’s science should be seen as hateful and life-denying, so he was unable to imagine that Blake’s intention might be to show Newton as such.