empty chatter; and, on
the other hand, if there is a real distinction between good and bad, if
everything, in fact, is _not_ good in God's eyes--then why not say so?
Really Blake, as politicians say, 'cannot have it both ways.'

But of course, his answer to all this is simple enough. To judge him
according to the light of reason is to make an appeal to a tribunal
whose jurisdiction he had always refused to recognise as binding. In
fact, to Blake's mind, the laws of reason were nothing but a horrible
phantasm deluding and perplexing mankind, from whose clutches it is the
business of every human soul to free itself as speedily as possible.
Reason is the 'Spectre' of Blake's mythology, that Spectre, which, he
says,

Around me night and day
Like a wild beast guards my way.

It is a malignant spirit, for ever struggling with the 'Emanation,' or
imaginative side of man, whose triumph is the supreme end of the
universe. Ever since the day when, in his childhood, Blake had seen
God's forehead at the window, he had found in imaginative vision the
only reality and the only good. He beheld the things of this world 'not
with, but through, the eye':

With my inward Eye, 'tis an old Man grey,
With my outward, a Thistle across my way.

It was to the imagination, and the imagination alone, that Blake yielded
the allegiance of his spirit. His attitude towards reason was the
attitude of the mystic; and it involved an inevitable dilemma. He never
could, in truth, quite shake himself free of his 'Spectre'; struggle as
he would, he could not escape altogether from the employment of the
ordinary forms of thought and speech; he is constantly arguing, as if
argument were really a means of approaching the truth; he was subdued to
what he worked in. As in his own poem, he had, somehow or other, been
locked into a crystal cabinet--the world of the senses and of reason--a
gilded, artificial, gimcrack dwelling, after 'the wild' where he had
danced so merrily before.

I strove to seize the inmost Form
With ardour fierce and hands of flame,
But burst the Crystal Cabinet,
And like a Weeping Babe became--

A weeping Babe upon the wild....

To be able to lay hands upon 'the inmost form,' one must achieve the
impossible; one must be inside and outside the crystal cabinet at the
same time. But Blake was not to be turned aside by such considerations.
He would have it both ways; and whoever demurred was crucif