William Blake as Natural Philosopher, 1788-1795

By Joseph Fletcher

William Blake as Natural Philosopher, 1788-1795 takes seriously William Blake’s wish to be read as a natural philosopher, particularly in his early illuminated works, and reveals the way that poetry and visual art were for Blake an imaginative way of philosophizing. Blake’s poetry and designs reveal a consistent preoccupation with eighteenth-century natural philosophical debates concerning the properties of the physical world, the nature of the soul, and God’s relationship to the material universe. This book traces the history of these debates and examines images and ideas in Blake’s illuminated books that mark the development of the monist pantheism, which contends that every material thing is in its essence God, to the idealism of his later period, which casts the natural world as degenerate and illusory. The book argues that Blake’s philosophical thought was not as monolithic as has been previously characterized, and that pantheism is important to understanding his early works because it entails an ethics that respects the interconnected divinity of all material objects – not just humans – which in turn spurns hierarchical power structures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Dec 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781785279539

Book preview

William Blake as

Natural Philosopher, 1788–1795

William Blake as

Natural Philosopher, 1788–1795

Joseph Fletcher

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

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Copyright © Joseph Fletcher 2022

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021946522

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-951-5 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-951-3 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction: We Who Are Philosophers: Blake’s Early Metaphysics

Chapter OneA 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

FIGURES

1William Blake, There is No Natural Religion , Copy C, Plate a6

2William Blake, There is No Natural Religion , Copy C, Plate a3

3William Blake, There is No Natural Religion , Copy C, Plate b12

4William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell , Copy D, Plate 1

5William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell , Copy D, Plate 3

6William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell , Copy D, Plate 11

7William Blake, The Book of Thel , Copy H, Plate 2

8William Blake, The Book of Thel , Copy H, Plate 4

9William Blake, The Book of Thel , Copy H, Plate 6

10 William Blake, Europe a Prophecy , Copy E, Plate 1

11 William Blake, Europe a Prophecy , Copy E, Plate 6

12 William Blake, Europe a Prophecy , Copy E, Plate 17

13 William Blake, America a Prophecy , Copy E, Plate 18

14 William Blake, Little Girl Lost, from Songs of Innocence and of Experience , Copy C, Plate 34

15 William Blake, The Book of Thel , Copy H, Plate 8

16 William Blake, Europe a Prophecy , Copy E, Plate 2

17 William Blake, Europe a Prophecy , Copy E, Plate 13

18 William Blake, engraving, from The Botanic Garden , by Erasmus Darwin

19 Henry Fuseli, design, William Blake, engraving. Tornado–Zeus Battling Typhon , from The Botanic Garden, by Erasmus Darwin

20 William Blake, The Song of Los , Copy B, Plate 1

21 William Blake, The Song of Los , Copy B, Plate 2

22 William Blake, The Song of Los , Copy B, Plate 3

23 William Blake, The Song of Los , Copy B, Plate 8

24 William Blake, The Book of Urizen , Copy G, Plate 1

25 William Blake, The Book of Urizen , Copy G, Plate 24

26 William Blake, The Book of Urizen , Copy G, Plate 17

27 William Blake, The Book of Urizen , Copy G, Plate 23

28 William Blake, The Book of Urizen , Copy G, Plate 28

29 William Blake, The Book of Urizen , Copy G, Plate 25

30 William Blake, The Book of Urizen , Copy G, Plate 6

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am deeply grateful to the mentors and colleagues who have facilitated progress on this project during my time as a doctoral and postdoctoral student, as well as a faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I owe special thanks to Joseph Viscomi, who, as my doctoral advisor, generously initiated me into the complex multimedia cosmos that is The William Blake Archive (www.blakearchive.org), which I recommend readers use in addition to the figures included in this volume. I also thank Jessica Wolfe for sharing her compendious knowledge of natural philosophy and its intersections with literature. My gratitude also goes to Morris Eaves and Robert N. Essick, whose editorial guidance at the Blake Archive has been invaluable, and whose own insightful writings on Blake and the long eighteenth century have been a model for me. Thomas Reinert has been a wonderful teacher of eighteenth-century literature and culture, as well as an astute reader of my work. Alan Nelson provided crucial clarification of the complexities of early modern and Enlightenment-era philosophy. Invaluable guidance has also come from Andrew Janiak, David Marshall Miller, Reid Barbour and Jeanne Moskal.

Chapter 1 of this book contains a revised version of an article entitled Leibniz, the Infinite, and Blake’s Early Metaphysics from Studies in Romanticism, vol. 56, no. 2, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Chapter 4 contains a revised version of an article entitled "Unruly Children: Blake’s Book of Urizen and Embryology’s Break from Newtonian Law" that appeared in Essays in Romanticism, vol. 23, no. 1—published by Liverpool University Press—as well as a revised portion of a Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly article entitled "Ocean Growing: Blake’s Two Versions of Newton and the Emerging Polypus," vol. 49, no. 3. Many thanks to the editorial boards of these journals for allowing revised inclusion of this material here.

I am grateful to Megan Greiving and the editorial team at Anthem Press for their support and careful attention to the production of this book. The insightful comments from the anonymous readers of the manuscript are also much appreciated.

My family has been an unflagging source of support. Thanks are due to my mother, Maribeth, my father James, who passed in 2014, my parents-in-law Loyal and Marilyn Rue, and my siblings, Victoria, Jane and Edward. This book is dedicated to my wife Elena, my daughter Elenora and my son Sylvan, without whom this would not have been possible. Their love and wisdom assure me of the holiness of life.

INTRODUCTION

WE WHO ARE PHILOSOPHERS: BLAKE’S EARLY METAPHYSICS

The world has long since done its worst toward Blake; and he has emerged triumphant, with the twin crowns of Poet and Painter. But this is not enough. The modern Trismegistus must receive his third crown, that of Philosopher, before his permanent place among the great of this earth can be determined.

—S. Foster Damon¹

Every thing on earth is the word of God & in its essence is God.

—William Blake, Annotations to Johann Casper Lavater’s Aphorisms on Man²

William Blake’s wish to be read as a philosopher in his early works is expressed in numerous ways. His main enemies were not other poets or visual artists but the natural philosophers Emanuel Swedenborg, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and John Locke. In his earliest manuscript, An Island in the Moon (c.1784–85), Blake self-identifies as Quid the Cynic, and much of the work satirizes philosophical positions; similarly, Blake’s first illuminated works are not poetry but the philosophical tractates There is No Natural Religion and All Religions are One (1788), which attack Lockean empiricism and Newtonian deism. And on the title page of his 1788 edition of John Caspar Lavater’s Aphorisms on Man, Blake drew a heart around his own name and that of the philosopher, and further linked himself to Lavater within the book, writing, we who are philosophers ought not to call the Staminal Virtues of Humanity by the same name that we call the omissions of intellect springing from poverty.³ Blake took it for granted that he would be recognized as a philosopher, and his poetry and designs reveal a consistent preoccupation with questions pertinent to eighteenth-century natural philosophy, which, preceding the sciences as we currently designate them, concerned the study of nature and the physical universe.

Today, Blake is first recognized as a poet, but poetry was for him a way of philosophizing, as it was for other Romantic writers. In his Defence of Poetry, Shelley declared that the difference between prose and poetry was misleading, and that Plato and Francis Bacon were essentially poets.⁴ Drawing from William Wordsworth’s preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Shelley proclaimed the synthesizing powers of the imagination as fundamental to moral virtue, and he wrote that poetry is an epistemological tool that yields as much, if not more, insight into human experience as science, philosophy and religion. Contemporary with Wordsworth and Shelley, the German Romantics, such as Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich Schelling, called for a unification of poetry and philosophy. Schiller claimed, in a letter of 1795, that the highest philosophy ends in a poetic idea,⁵ and Schelling awaited the poet who would portray in verse the unification of mind and nature described in his Naturphilosophie.⁶ Samuel Taylor Coleridge believed that Wordsworth was that poet.

Most critical discussions of the intersections of poetry and natural philosophy during the British Romantic period begin with Coleridge, who discusses his extensive readings in natural philosophy in his Biographia Literaria and elsewhere, and who declared it his task to combat the philosophy of mechanism that he saw dominating the eighteenth century. Hostility to Cartesian mechanical philosophy, however, does not imply hostility to natural philosophy altogether, and recent scholarship has done much to overturn the long-standing assumption that the Romantics were averse to what we now call the sciences. For instance, Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder traces the connections between Romantic-era poets and natural philosophers, and what Holmes argues is the shared sense of wonder between them.⁷ However, Holmes’s work is representative of other recent interdisciplinary fusions of Romantic literary criticism and science studies in that—while devoting ample attention to Coleridge, Wordsworth, the Shelleys and their interactions with William Herschel, Humphry Davy, Erasmus Darwin and other natural philosophers—it all but ignores William Blake.

This book positions Blake as the earliest of the British Romantics to envision natural philosophy and metaphysics as inextricable from poetry and, in Blake’s case, visual art. Blake’s works embody the synthetic imagination Shelley celebrated decades later and execute the union of poetry and philosophy called for by Schiller and Schlegel. Blake was well aware of the tradition of poet-philosophers dating back to Lucretius (whose Epicurean philosophy as expressed in the verses of De Rerum Natura Blake found to have infected Francis Bacon⁸) and including, in the eighteenth century, Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (which Blake extensively illustrated) and Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (for which Blake provided engravings). Blake’s work lacks the philosophical didacticism of Pope and Lucretius, nor did he feel the need to supplement his poetry with prose philosophical notes that legitimize the fanciful verses, as Darwin did. Rather, utilizing a variety of textual forms and visual designs, Blake engages with the metaphysical tradition by caricaturing what he considers to be erroneous or dangerous ontological and epistemological perspectives, while advocating others. And unlike the major British Romantic poets who followed him, Blake’s mature poetry largely dispenses with the lyric form and its preoccupation with the intimate and autobiographical experience of the speaker, which one finds in Coleridge, Wordsworth and Shelley, whose philosophical positions have been given much more critical attention than have Blake’s. Rather, Blake’s artistic vision, especially as seen in the major works of the 1790s, tends toward epic dramatizations of religious, mythical, political and—as I will emphasize—metaphysical and epistemological themes.

I contend that metaphysics, what Descartes calls first philosophy in his Meditations, is inextricable from other aspects—religious, political, aesthetic—of Blake’s work that have received more attention. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), which I take to be the most explicit positive elaboration of Blake’s early philosophy, the protagonist Devil tells the Swedenborgian Angel that the frightening vision of the approaching Leviathan that the two of them witness is owing to your metaphysics.⁹ Metaphysical commitments, according to this claim, are a foundational first cause to which perception and other phenomenological components are owing. Differing metaphysics entails divergent experiences, as Blake’s poems vividly demonstrate. In his introduction to the philosophical writings of Newton, Andrew Janiak discusses what metaphysics meant for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers, and he identifies three streams of metaphysical inquiry:

For those with at least a quasi-Aristotelian conception, metaphysics concerns an inquiry into being qua being, and not, for instance, an inquiry into natural beings. For others metaphysics concerns especially non-physical beings, such as God, angels, and the soul. And for some seventeenth-century natural philosophers, including some broadly Cartesian thinkers, metaphysics involves three principal matters: first, an investigation into the first principles that enable our knowledge of natural phenomena; second, an investigation into the basic components of the natural world; and third, an investigation of God’s relationship to nature.¹⁰

Blake’s early works don’t extensively address "being qua being, but he often returns to questions concerning God and God’s relationship to nature, the soul (though Blake does not grant it to be a non-physical being"), the basic components of the natural world and the first principles that enable our knowledge of these entities. Insofar as metaphysics on this broad definition investigates both what exists and how we come to our knowledge of existing things, it encompasses both ontology and epistemology.

Questions asked within Blake’s early works attest to his metaphysical inclinations: why fades the lotus of the water? (The Book of Thel, 1789);¹¹ What is Man! (For Children: The Gates of Paradise, 1793);¹² With what sense does the bee form cells? […] what is a thought & of what substance is it made? (Visions of the Daughters of Albion, 1793);¹³ what is the material world, and is it dead? (Europe, 1794);¹⁴ What immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful symmetry? (The Tyger, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 1794).¹⁵ A central eighteenth-century metaphysical debate with which I find Blake to be engaging—as much as Coleridge and Shelley after him—concerns mechanism and vitalism. These terms vary according to context, but vitalism can be broadly construed in this context as a response to Cartesian mechanism, which describes the universe as obeying physico-mechanical principles; for mechanists, all activity could be explained in terms of extended and inert matter and motion, the laws of which Newton elaborated. For Descartes, the machine is an apt metaphor for living bodies, man being distinguished from beasts by his immaterial soul. According to Ann Thomson, the mechanical philosophy […] saw matter as passive and banished God from his creation,¹⁶ though for Newton God remained directly responsible for the activity of the created universe. For eighteenth-century vitalists, however, this mechanical model could not explain the behavior of living organisms, whose constituent matter appeared much less inert than had been described by Descartes and Newton. Peter Hanns Reill writes that for vitalists, Living matter was seen as containing an immanent principle of self-movement or self-organization whose sources lay in active powers, which resided in matter itself.¹⁷ In addition to exploring the historical context of these debates over the course of the long eighteenth century, I argue that Blake’s metaphysical positions are on the vitalist end of the natural-philosophical spectrum. He believed that matter was immanently active and not transcendentally acted upon.

But to simply label Blake a vitalist is insufficient and not entirely accurate, since his attitude toward the vital aspects of the natural world evolves in the course of the period under consideration here. Eighteenth-century vitalism applied to biological organisms, but Blake’s early conception of vital matter applies to the inorganic realm as well. All material entities are not only self-active but also sentient, exhibiting some degree of mentality, as exemplified by the speaking Cloud and Clod of Clay in The Book of Thel. I therefore contend that Blake’s early works belong in the panpsychist tradition. David Skrbina defines panpsychism, which was a predominant pre-Socratic view, as the view that all things have mind or a mind-like quality.¹⁸ The definition does not assert that clods and pebbles can perform all the mental operations that humans can, but rather that there is a vast range of mental complexities and that "the panpsychist asks us to see the ‘mentality’ of other objects not in terms of human consciousness but as a subset of a certain universal quality of physical things."¹⁹

But Blake finds more than mentality in materiality. Skrbina writes that the term animism, the belief that everything in the universe has a soul or a spirit, is a synonym of panpsychism, but it usually implies a dualist ontology or theory of mind, since the inhabiting spirits of things are not bound to the physical realm.²⁰ Other synonyms of panpsychism include hylozoism, "(from the Greek hyle, matter, and zoe, life) the doctrine that all matter is intrinsically alive (19), and pantheism, the theory that all (pan) is God (theos)—that God is identical with everything that exists, i.e. the universe.²¹ Skrbina claims that pantheism usually implies that God is a non-personal being, that there is no Creator or Providence, and that there is no transcendent realm of the Divine."²² In terms of Blake’s early works, though I apply all of these synonyms, I find pantheism to be most fitting, since in addition to assuming matter’s sentience, Blake denies an immaterial transcendent God and instead identifies the divine with the material universe. This book traces Blake eclectically drawing from a long metaphysical tradition to develop a poetic version of monist pantheism, from which, by 1795, he will have begun to retreat.

The most famous—or infamous—representative of monist pantheism during Blake’s time was Benedict de Spinoza, whose Ethics (1677) is, according to Michael Levine, the last full-length philosophical work on pantheism.²³ Spinoza was widely dismissed as an atheist by eighteenth-century natural philosophers for identifying God with the material universe.²⁴ As I will elaborate in Chapter 2, while I am not claiming that Blake was directly influenced by Spinoza, the latter provides an analogue for Blake’s early metaphysics. Levine’s study details the many forms that pantheism can take, Spinoza’s monism being just one of them. As Levine defines it, pantheism is the belief in an all-inclusive divine Unity, which need not be understood as God in a theistic, anthropomorphic sense; indeed, pantheism does not believe God is a person or anything like a person.²⁵ The divine Unity that is the material universe also need not be one undifferentiated substance: The totality that is a divine Unity may allow for the existence of ontologically real and separate entities.²⁶ This point is crucial for my analysis of Blake’s early works, as is Levine’s assertion that pantheism denies the theistic view that God transcends the world.²⁷

While no book-length study has addressed Blake’s pantheism, the term has been applied to the more commonly regarded Romantic philosopher-poets, Coleridge and Wordsworth, most notably in Thomas McFarland’s Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition. McFarland’s compendious intellectual history traces pantheist natural-philosophical currents on the continent from Spinoza to Schelling, whose ideas permeate Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria.²⁸ Noting the close association between poetry and pantheism, McFarland lists Blake as exhibiting pantheistic thought in his line from Auguries of Innocence (c.1807) about seeing a World in a Grain of Sand.²⁹ McFarland identifies Swedenborg’s theory of correspondences as influencing Blake’s pantheism,³⁰ but my reading of Swedenborg is antithetical to McFarland’s: I find Blake rejecting Swedenborg precisely on the grounds of his ontological dualism and his positing of a transcendent, divine realm. I trace a different history of panpsychism/pantheism with which Blake engages in his early works, and in so doing I claim that Blake—and not Coleridge—is the first major philosopher-poet of the Romantic period.

As Blake’s work progresses, the distinction between vitalism and pantheism becomes more crucial, since I argue that by the Urizen cycle (1794–95), Blake rejects late eighteenth-century vital materialisms for being atheistic. These vitalists held that matter was self-activating, but they denied its divinity, and thus for Blake their systems were monstrous abominations. This aversion to vitalism is not evident in earlier writings of Blake’s, however, as evidenced in his annotated objection to Lavater’s assertion that A GOD, an ANIMAL, a PLANT, are not companions of man. Blake responds: "It is the God in all that is our companion & friend. […] God is in the lowest effects as well as in the highest causes. […] Every thing on earth is the word of God & in its essence is God."³¹ Lavater’s claim isolates man on the Great Chain of Being, from God above him and from animals and plants below him. Blake’s early work, I argue, conveys a flat ontology, in which all material forms share fundamental properties, and man, however complex a form he may be, is not ultimately distinct from other beings. Flat ontology, according to Levi Bryant, insists that "humans are no longer monarchs of being, but are instead among beings, entangled in beings, and implicated in other beings.³² Blake’s stress of all and Every thing" implies a flat ontology whose essence he claims is divinity.

In arguing for Blake’s pantheistic ontology, I also reopen the question of Neoplatonism in his work. S. Foster Damon begins his study, William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols (1924), by declaring, The key to everything Blake ever wrote or painted lies in his mysticism.³³ Damon connects Blake’s philosophy with Plato, the Neoplatonists, Hermes Trismegistus, Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Jacob Boehme and others, while Locke, Newton and other non-mystical natural philosophers receive little attention. Similarly, in his Fearful Symmetry (1947), Northrop Frye, seeking to establish the intellectual tradition informing Blake’s poetry and to destroy the myth that Blake is a literary freak, nevertheless admits that [i]‌t is true that in the study of Blake certain mysterious figures—Agrippa, Paracelsus, Boehme, Swedenborg—begin to loom up on the horizon, a cloudy phalanx whom many lovers of painting and poetry may not care to engage.³⁴ Other critics, such as Desirée Hirst and Kathleen Raine, followed Frye,³⁵ drawing further connections between the cloudy phalanx and Blake’s poetry, while George Mills Harper sought to establish the Platonic and Neoplatonic ideas that were revived by the Renaissance Neoplatonism of Agrippa, Paracelsus and Boehme.³⁶ Harper, like Damon before him, found historical support for his study in Blake’s association with Thomas Taylor, whose translations of Plato and Neoplatonists such as Plotinus, Proclus and Porphyry were well known in Blake’s time. This stream of Blake criticism has largely dried up due to various factors, including the conjectural claims made by Hirst and Raine and the historicist approach ushered in by David Erdman.³⁷ Cementing Blake’s place in the canon involved casting him less as a literary freak than as a political and Protestant antinomian radical deeply involved with the revolutionary politics and religious movements of his time.³⁸

While I agree that to read Blake only as a Neoplatonic mystic limits one’s experience of his work, I find several key Neoplatonist ideas aligning with the pantheistic tradition. Like vitalism, Neoplatonism has been loosely applied to many strands of thought, and I therefore distinguish it from Platonism insofar as the latter term’s connotation of a dualist ontology was anathema to Blake’s early thought, as he makes clear in The Song of Los (1795), in which Plato is named as one of the first thinkers in the West whose abstract Law led to the religious and political tyranny of Blake’s age.³⁹ Plato’s dualist account of a transcendent soul and a corrupt, material body, from which the soul suffers much evil,⁴⁰ informs Descartes’s dualist mechanism. Nevertheless, as will be discussed in Chapter 2, this common understanding of Plato belies the tricksterish ambiguity of Plato’s work, as the Timaeus also contains passages in which the soul’s distinctness from the body is less clearly evident, and in which the entire material universe is described as a living organism.

This interfusion of soul and body and the description of a living universe was elaborated centuries later by Plotinus, whose Enneads posits a world-soul, or anima, the vital principle immanent in material entities. Plotinus’s God emanates downward through the Great Chain of Being such that all material forms partake of divine essence to some degree, and therefore matter is less evil than in the commonly understood Platonic account. In book 3, Plotinus claims that Nature is a Soul and that through that soul (anima) this universe is a God.⁴¹ Asking the reader to imagine a spring that has no source outside itself, Plotinus articulates what could be employed in an eighteenth-century vitalist response to Cartesian mechanism: nature’s productivity cannot depend upon mechanical operation.⁴² Rather, the soul interfused and inextricable from nature has the power to animate all of nature. In book 5, Plotinus makes the pantheistic claim that the beginning must be a really existent One, wholly and truly One, while its sequent, poured down in some way from the One, is all, a total which has participation in unity and whose every member is similarly all and one.⁴³ As M. H. Abrams notes, contra Plato, Plotinus provides the basic figure of creation as emanation, a trope that was revived in Renaissance Neoplatonism via figures like Paracelsus.⁴⁴ Spinoza’s hylozoism exhibits a similar metaphysics, which claims that all things in different degrees, are nevertheless animate.⁴⁵ My application of the term Neoplatonism to Blake’s work connotes the pantheistic metaphysical principles—concerning the immanent soul, or anima, interfused with and inextricable from the material body—surveyed here, and not a dualist ontology of an immaterial soul descending into and directing degraded and inert matter.

Thus, Blake’s question What is Man? acquires added significance when considered in the context of eighteenth-century debates over the vitalist or mechanical qualities of life, the nature of the soul and the properties of matter, debates which feature Neoplatonic ideas in modified form. This book highlights Blake’s attentiveness to these discourses, especially given that two prominent voices in such debates—Erasmus Darwin and Joseph Priestley—were associates of Blake via their mutual friend, Joseph Johnson. Darwin’s and Priestley’s works address many of the pantheistic and Neoplatonic ideas presented above. Blake’s early works belong in this multifaceted discourse, analogous as their metaphysical assertions are to many natural-philosophic voices across the long eighteenth century. Blake’s eclectically derived monist pantheism is unique in its artistic formulation, but he was not without contemporary anti-Newtonian and anti-Lockean allies.

The disregard among twentieth-century critics for Blake’s engagement with natural philosophy is partially due to T. S. Eliot’s declaration that Blake’s occasional marriages of poetry and philosophy are not so felicitous, and that what his genius required, and what it sadly lacked, was a framework of accepted and traditional ideas which would have prevented him from indulging in a philosophy of his own.⁴⁶ Added to this was William Powell Jones’s claim that Blake attacked science more vigorously than any other poet of the eighteenth century.⁴⁷ Apart from the works focusing on Blake’s mysticism noted above, such views would not be challenged until Donald Ault’s Visionary Physics, the first book-length study devoted to Blake and natural philosophy. Stuart Peterfreund’s William Blake in a Newtonian World explores similar territory, though his work differs in being inflected by the postmodern theory that pervaded literary criticism in the decades after Ault’s book was published.⁴⁸

In this century, Blake criticism has begun to situate Blake’s work in the context of eighteenth-century vitalism and physiological debates, particularly in the work of Tristanne Connolly, Stephanie Engelstein, Denise Gigante and Janelle Schwartz.⁴⁹ While these works have made exciting advances in Blake criticism, aside from Ault’s and Peterfreund’s, only Connolly’s is a book-length investigation. This project departs from Ault and Peterfreund by ranging beyond Blake’s relationship to Newton, and it also attends more extensively to Blake’s designs. And while Connolly focuses on Blake’s depiction of the human body, I argue that Blake’s metaphysics applies to the myriad material forms—organic and inorganic—that proliferate in his text and designs.

In focusing on the development of Blake’s philosophy in the particular seven-year period from 1788 to 1795, I follow a similar path taken by Matthew J. A. Green, whose Visionary Materialism in the Early Works of William Blake specifies the same date range and likewise sees Blake as developing a materialist metaphysics. I find much of Green’s discussion concerning Blake’s philosophy to be insightful, but our projects ultimately diverge in their focus, as Green is as much concerned with Blake’s relationship to religious enthusiasm as he is with Blake’s place in the natural-philosophic tradition. Green analyzes Blake’s engagement with Locke and Priestley, and while he briefly identifies some similarities between Spinoza and Blake early in his book, claiming a pursuit of the intersections and overlaps between Spinoza’s thought and Blake’s can be expected to bear much fruit,⁵⁰ that fruit is not to be found in Green’s subsequent chapters. I pursue here those intersections and overlaps—not only between Blake and Spinoza but also between Blake and a wide range of natural philosophers not covered in Green’s account.

Arguing for Blake’s artistic elaboration of a metaphysics wherein a living material universe dynamically reciprocates with the human imagination places this project within the critical tradition of Green Romanticism. Initiated by Jonathan Bate’s Romantic Ecology, which countered New Historicist and deconstructivist trends in criticism by claiming that the Romantic (particularly Wordsworthian for Bate) treatment of nature was neither escapist nor apolitical but rather an effort to enable readers to more imaginatively dwell in their natural environments, Green Romanticism emphasizes the animated or vital characteristics of the earth and its nonhuman forms, which elicited sublime awe and respect from the Romantic poets. Karl Kroeber’s Ecological Literary Criticism furthered Bate’s argument and articulated the Neoplatonic roots of this perspective. For Kroeber, the intellectual precursor to Romantic proto-ecological thought was Spinoza, and Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s early poems explore the implications of such a hylozoic, interconnected universe permeated by the animistic world-soul of Plotinus and others. In Kroeber’s telling, God became both man and nature for the British Romantics, who borrowed from Schelling’s Neoplatonically derived Naturphilosophie, and man’s unimaginative perception of nature as an inanimate and alien other was a sign of man’s fall into sin. However, as with other literary criticism that emphasized the Romantic poets’ philosophical inclinations, Blake is absent from these two founding works of Green Romanticism, as well as from more recent ecocritical studies. I believe Blake’s work deserves as much discussion in such a critical tradition as Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s.⁵¹

Arguments made by contemporary Green Romantics like Timothy Morton point to the relevance Blakean metaphysics has for philosophy today.⁵² Morton allies himself with other Object-Oriented Ontologists, such as Bryant and Graham Harman, who attempt to deflect philosophy from its anthropocentric preoccupations—which for them were initiated by Immanuel Kant’s critical revolution—to formulate an ontology based on what they posit are active properties of material objects, which cannot be exhausted by or reduced to human perception of them. As Harman writes, inanimate objects are not just manipulable clods of matter, not philosophical dead weight best left to ‘positive science,’ but rather, beneath the surface, every entity—be it chipmunk or propane tank—harbors its cryptic dynamism.⁵³ Blake likewise gives dynamic poetic agency to clods and pebbles, as well as to lilies and lions; for him a bird harbors infinite powers closed to the five senses. Given that we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimps and 35 percent with daffodils, Morton claims that the metaphysics informing his ecological argument eats through the life-nonlife distinction.⁵⁴ Object-Oriented Ontology is one branch of the wider movement of Speculative Realism, whose representatives—from Iain Hamilton Grant to Quentin Meillassoux to Isabelle Stengers—are once again, despite the linguistic turn of the late twentieth century, engaged in competing brands of metaphysics, long considered an unpopular practice in philosophy after Kant, for whom metaphysics is older than all other sciences, and would remain even if all the others were swallowed up by an all-consuming barbarism.⁵⁵ Though most of these thinkers disavow a spiritual component to their ontology and do not proclaim themselves to be vitalists (and certainly not pantheists), their various theories of matter and life resist the mechanical and reductive philosophies that have dominated Western thought since Descartes and Newton. Jane Bennett, for instance, explicitly places herself in the Spinozist tradition and in her work attempts to give voice to a vitality intrinsic to materiality, in the process absolving matter from its long history of attachment to automatism or mechanism.⁵⁶ Blake was engaged in a similar project centuries earlier, using the vehicle of philosophic poetry and art.

In other words, the Neoplatonically influenced pantheism that I find in Blake’s work has not died, despite what historians of science see as the triumph of mechanism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁵⁷ Critiques of reductive mechanism abound in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, and not just from speculative realists. For instance, Stuart Kauffman draws on contemporary theories of emergence to argue that mechanical laws and traditional notions of causality are insufficient to explain or predict what Henri Bergson would call the creative evolution of the biosphere.⁵⁸ In Mind and Cosmos, Thomas Nagel seeks a middle way between what he calls reductive naturalism and theism, claiming that contemporary research in molecular biology leaves open the possibility of legitimate doubts about a fully mechanistic account of the origin and evolution of life.⁵⁹ Another philosopher of mind, Galen Strawson, goes further than Nagel in claiming panpsychism as the only solution to the mind-body problem. To be a physicalist, one who asserts only the existence of physical objects and forces in the world, Strawson argues, entails panpsychism: All physical stuff is energy, in one form or another, and all energy, I trow, is an experience-involving phenomenon.⁶⁰ And by experience Strawson means conscious experience.⁶¹ Additionally, Peter Canning acknowledges the Romantics as crucial to debates in contemporary metaphysics:

The force of Romanticism, however, is to affirm the reality of life and mind and defend it against the bizarre temptation to reduce their powers to epiphenomenal manifestations of fundamental laws and initial conditions. The Romantics […] wondered what demon possessed the scientific mind to claim that life was a machine.⁶²

Though Romantic perspectives are called upon in these contemporary debates, Blake’s is sorely missing, and this project aims to demonstrate its relevance to contemporary metaphysics.⁶³

Blake’s early manuscript, An Island in the Moon, is foundational for his self-conception as a metaphysician. Critical attention to this work has focused on its place in the satirical tradition dating back to Menippus, as well as on its debt to eighteenth-century theatrical forms and the literary tradition of moon-voyage narratives. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi, the editors of the William Blake Archive, echo previous dismissals of the incomplete work with their assessment that its farcical mockery is "a self-undermining scramble that deflates nearly