Page:William Blake (IA williamblake00ches).pdf/179

 foolish old women. Blake had no sympathy with this mere flinging of facts at a great conception. In a really powerful and exact metaphor he describes the powerlessness of this earthly and fragmentary sceptical attack.

Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau, Mock on, mock on, 'tis all in vain, You throw the sand against the wind And the wind blows it back again.

An excellent image for a mere attack by masses of detail.

There were some of Blake's intellectual conceptions which I have not professed either to admire or to defend. Some of his views were really what the old mediæval world called heresies and what the modern world (with an equally healthy instinct but with less scientific clarity) calls fads. In either case the definition of the fad or heresy is not so very difficult. A fad or heresy is the exaltation of something which, even if true, is secondary or temporary in its nature against those things which are essential and eternal, those things which always prove themselves true in the long run. In short, it is the setting up of the mood against