INNER REALITY

Library of Congress

Marriage of Heaven & Hell

Plate 10

As a mental exercise Blake tries to get his reader to look at his world in a different way. He asks us to look at 'reality' as something which is a product of of our own thinking rather than as objective facts which determine our interpretations and our actions. If you are an observer of other people you probably realize that your own mind and the minds of others are not congruent. Take that observation a step further and acknowledge that either individuals see through the lens of generally accepted conventions, or they use their own mental abilities to process the input they receive through their senses from an exterior world. If such is the case, the mind itself creates their 'reality' which does not arrive pre-processed as the events of history or the sights and sounds from outside of the body.

On Page 72, of her biography, William Blake, Kathleen Raine tells us that Blake pushes us to look deeper than surface ills to find ways to make changes to outer circumstances:        

"For Blake, outward events and circumstances were the expressions of states of mind, ideologies, mentalities, and not, as for the determanist-materialist ideologies of the modern world, their causes. Blake's 'dark Satanic Mills', so often invoked in the name of social reform, prove, when we read Milton (the poem in which these mills are most fully described) to be the mechanistic 'laws' of Bacon, Newton and Locke, of which industrial landscapes are a reflection and expression. Man has made his machines in the image of his ideology. So, always, Blake tries to discover the source of social and private ills within man. Only a change of the heart and mind of the nation can create a new society and new cities less hideous than those created by an atheist and mechanistic rationalism."

Descriptive Catalogue, (E 543)
"All had originally one
language, and one religion, this was the religion of Jesus, the
everlasting Gospel. Antiquity preaches the Gospel of Jesus.
The reasoning historian, turner and twister of causes and
consequences, such as Hume, Gibbon and Voltaire; cannot with all 
their artifice, turn or twist one fact or disarrange self 
evident action and reality 
Reasons and opinions concerning acts, are not history. 
Acts themselves alone are history, and these are
neither the exclusive property of Hume, Gibbon nor Voltaire,
Echard, Rapin, Plutarch, nor Herodotus. Tell me the Acts, O
historian, and leave me to reason upon them as I please; away
with your reasoning and your rubbish. All that is not action is
not worth reading. Tell me the What; I do not want you to
tell me the Why, and the How; I can find that out myself, as well
as you can, and I will not be fooled by you into opinions, that
you please to impose, to disbelieve what you think improbable or
impossible. His opinions, who does not see spiritual agency, is 
not worth any man's reading; he who rejects a fact because it is
improbable, must reject all History and retain doubts only."

Milton, Plate 26 [28], (E 123)

"And every Generated Body in its inward form,
Is a garden of delight & a building of magnificence,
Built by the Sons of Los in Bowlahoola & Allamanda
And the herbs & flowers & furniture & beds & chambers
Continually woven in the Looms of Enitharmons Daughters
In bright Cathedrons golden Dome with care & love & tears
For the various Classes of Men are all markd out determinate
In Bowlahoola; & as the Spectres choose their affinities
So they are born on Earth, & every Class is determinate
But not by Natural but by Spiritual power alone, Because
The Natural power continually seeks & tends to Destruction
Ending in Death: which would of itself be Eternal Death
And all are Class'd by Spiritual, & not by Natural power. 
And every Natural Effect has a Spiritual Cause, and Not
A Natural: for a Natural Cause only seems, it is a Delusion 
Of Ulro: & a ratio of the perishing Vegetable Memory."