he body and the fallen will,
and so long as it did not call its 'laws of prudence' 'the laws of God,'
was a necessity, because 'you cannot have liberty in this world without
what you call moral virtue'; the other was divine, and established for the
peace of the imagination and the unfallen will, and, even when obeyed with
a too literal reverence, could make men sin against no higher principality
than prudence. He called the followers of the first philosophy pagans, no
matter by what name they knew themselves, because the pagans, as he
understood the word pagan, believed more in the outward life, and in what
he called 'war, princedom, and victory,' than in the secret life of the
spirit; and the followers of the second philosophy Christians, because
only those whose sympathies had been enlarged and instructed by art and
poetry could obey the Christian command of unlimited forgiveness. Blake
had already found this 'pagan' philosophy in Swedenborg, in Milton, in
Wordsworth, in Sir Joshua Reynolds, in many persons, and it had roused him
so constantly and to such angry paradox that its overthrow became the
signal passion of his life, and filled all he did and thought with the
excitement of a supreme issue. Its kingdom was bound to grow weaker so
soon as life began to lose a little in crude passion and naive tumult, but
Blake was the first to announce its successor, and he did this, as must
needs be with revolutionists who have 'the law' for 'mother,' with a firm
conviction that the things his opponents held white were indeed black, and
that the things they held black, white; with a strong persuasion that all
busy with government are men darkness and 'something other than human
life'; one is reminded of Shelley, who was the next to take up the cry,
though with a less abundant philosophic faculty, but still more of
Nietzsche, whose thought flows always, though with an even more violent
current, in the bed Blake's thought has worn.

The kingdom that was passing was, he held, the kingdom of the Tree of
Knowledge; the kingdom that was coming was the kingdom of the Tree of
Life: men who ate from the Tree of Knowledge wasted their days in anger
against one another, and in taking one another captive in great nets; men
who sought their food among the green leaves of the Tree of Life condemned
none but the unimaginative and the idle, and those who forget that even
love and death and old age are an imaginative art.

In these opposing ki