Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/284

270 Family," of Los, and the Divine Vision in the second book of "Jerusalem," and of the formation of Urizen into personality in the fourth book of "Urizen and Vala.")

P. 7, ll. 8 to 12. Imaginative Will — Rintrah in order that the enemies of Imaginative Impulse may be open and not pretended friends, and in order that those who will not defend truth may defend a lie — namely, assert the existence of corporeal life separated from mind, descends into Satan, or the opaque, so that he appears to be among the reprobate, instead of more passive and lifeless matter, as he really is. (Now is seen the meaning of the Reprobate. They are those who sin imaginatively or enthusiastically, either by indulgence or by fierce strictness. Among these Blake would perhaps have put his "brother John, the evil one," reserving for James a place in the "elect," who surrender themselves to the opaque without enthusiasm. It was in contrast to this latter class that he spoke to Mr. Crabb Robinson of "the vices" as "highest sublimities.")

P. 7, ll. 13 to 19. Mind rises against the opaque, and in its struggles collections of mental "states," or nations, and collections of mental "spaces," or continents, are moved aside from their old positions, and the vegetative sensations, "oceans," are compelled to give way before him, and the Zoas revolve. But he keeps mental space separate from all other things which happen in corporeal and reasoning spaces.

P. 7, ll. 19 to 29. The reason of his rage is that Imaginative Will, which has now entered into Satan, accuses Imaginative Impulse of making disorder, and invents a punitive law of the mind and a bodily law of restriction, and the war of bodily forces and the diseases of mind and body, and by their means perverts the divine voice, which is its own enthusiasm, and cries that it rends away the divine families of loves and emotions, and will belong wholly to the covering cherub or nature.

P. 7, ll. 30 to 35. By thus making a law against imaginative freedom, Satan is shut off wholly from imagination, and