Page:William Blake in his relation to Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1911).djvu/7

— 7 — Influence of W. Blake's Philosophy.

As a philosopher William Blake is a pupil of Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish mystic whose many religious books appeared between the years 1745 and 1771. Already as a child William Blake had adopted many of the doctrines of Swedenborg on mere hearsay. His father, an Irish dissenter, as Alexander Gilchrist (1828—61, Blake's biographer) calls him, and his eldest brother James were both ardent followers of Swedenborg. The principal doctrine which Blake never abandoned, which was more and more approved of by his imagination, which was constantly affirmed by his visions, changed every idea that he otherwise would have found in religion, and affected the standard of his poetry, was Swedenborg's doctrine of universal correspondence. This theory teaches that bodies are the generation and expression of souls; it makes all things into signs as well as powers, and the smallest things as well as the greatest are omens, warnings, and instructions. In his book the "Doctrine of the Sacred Scripture" Swedenborg gives the following explanation about the meaning of correspondences. From the Lord proceed three degrees: the Celestial, the Spiritual, and the Natural, one after another. What proceeds from the divine love is called celestial, what proceeds from the divine wisdom is called spiritual; the natural is from both and is their complex in the ultimate. The divine which comes down from the Lord to men descends through these degrees and contains these three degrees in it; these degrees are entirely distinct from one another like end, cause, and effect and yet make one by correspondence; for the natural corresponds to the spiritual and also to the celestial. The "Word" is written in the style of the Prophets and the Evangelists, which, though it appear common, yet conceals within it all divine and angelic wisdom "Each and all things in nature correspond to spiritual things."