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his accepted brethren—whom, tyrant, he calls free—lay the bound or build the roof. Nor pale religious letchery call that virginity that wishes but acts not!
    So far Blake is a libertarian, an eighteenth-century radical more vehement, daring and imaginative in his conception of freedom than others, but sharing in a revolutionary tradition. Where he becomes truly prophetic and difficult is in his rejection of materialism. He denounces the Priest, in his “deadly black”; but he warns us not to “lay the bound or build the roof” with our anti-clerical freedom. He sets his thought absolutely against rationalism, scepticism, and experimentalism. He is with the Deists so long as they attack supernaturalism—detestable to Blake not because it is disprovable by reason, but because it implies obedience. He is against the Deists so long as they seek to submit the imagination to reason. Rationalism is dangerous because it leaves man in doubt. When the time-serving Bishop Watson wrote, at the request of the English Tory government, an attack on Tom Paine’s The Age of Reason, Blake scrawled vehement attacks on the Bishop all over the margin of his Apology for the Bible.
    It appears to me Now that Tom Paine is a better Christian than ,the Bishop.
    I have read this Book with attention & find that the Bishop has only hurt Paine’s heel while Paine has broken his head. The Bishop has not answer’d one of Paine’s grand objections.
     
    But in one of his most famous poems, he denounced Voltaire and Rousseau as the arch-Deists seeking to destroy man’s capacity for visionary wonder:
    Mock on, mock on, Voltaire! Rousseaul
Mock on, mock on: ’tis all in vain !
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.
    The sand is the dead particles separated by reason from the true unity of the human vision. Man under the domination of reason is to Blake a creature who has lost his integral nature and has become a dead fragment in himself. Separateness is death; doubt is the child of separateness; the portions which man separates by his reason, in the analysis of natural objects, or by thinking of himself as a natural object, are the mocking ghosts of his dead imagination.
    This impassioned rejection of all that is analytical and self-limiting in modem thought is central to Blake. It underlies all his conceptions, is the psychological background of his life, and falls, sometimes with a dead absoluteness, between his revolutionary thought and the modem world. It is only when we have understood that doubt and uncertainty stand to Blake’s mind as the prime danger of modern life that we can see the main drives of his work, of his personal “queerness,” and what led him to the artistic wreckage and incoherence of the later Prophetic Books. Blake’s whole pattern, as man and artist, is that of one for whom life is meaningless without an absolute belief. He is like the nihilist Verkhovensky, in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, who “when he was excited preferred to risk anything rather than to remain in uncertainty.” Freud spoke out of what is deepest and most courageous in the modern tradition when he said that “Man must learn to bear a certain portion of uncertainty.” That is a great injunction which it is hard to follow: much harder than the authoritarian faiths of our time, the secular, sadistic religions, the phony ecstasy with which a Hitler’s self-mortification is lost in vision of eternal conquest. But Blake is very much a man of our time: one who speaks to us with prophetic insight of our nihilism and insensibility. He was so frightened by what he could already see of it that he found his security only in an absolute personal myth. It is a trait that has become universal politics in our own time. Insecurity has become so endemic, in a society increasingly unresponsive to basic human needs, that men will apparently distort and destroy anything to find their way back to the mystical faith of the child in