TWO SIDES

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There is No Natural Religion
Plate 4

To Blake the distinction to be made between the mind's ability to assimilate information was between sense data and spiritual sensation. Sense data came from external sources, spiritual sensation came from the inner man - the Poetic Genius. The senses originate in the Mortal Body. From his Immortal Spirit comes the awareness of Spiritual Truth. However Blake realized that Body and Soul were one unit working together and exchanging the information they discerned.

Our analytic minds, too, divide the information supplied by the senses and that supplied by internal sources. Psychology recognizes a reasoning mind and an intuitive mind which can be associated with the two sides of our brains. Blake might call the left rational side of the brain Reason. The Right side he might label Soul. In our culture the analytic reasoning function is thought to originate in the left side of the brain which frequently dominates. The right side, which is less valued, is often called intuition, without any association with Soul or Spirit. 

When Blake read Berkley' Siris he made comments which show his understanding of the two ways in which the mind is functioning in regard to reason based on sensation, and on vision based on immediate perception.

Annotations to Berkley' Siris, (E 664)
Berkley: 
"By experiments of sense we become acquainted with
the lower faculties of the soul; and from them, whether by a
gradual evolution or ascent, we arrive at the highest.  These
become subjects for fancy to work upon.  Reason considers and 
judges of the imaginations.  And these acts of reason become new
objects to the understanding."
Blake:     
"Knowledge is not by deduction but Immediate by Perception or
Sense at once Christ addresses himself to the Man not to his
Reason   Plato did not bring Life & Immortality to Light Jesus
only did this"  

Berkley:
"There is according to Plato properly no knowledge,
but only opinion concerning things sensible and perishing, not
because they are naturally abstruse and involved in darkness: but
because their nature and existence is uncertain, ever fleeting
and changing.
Blake:
"Jesus supposes every Thing to be Evident to the Child & to
the Poor & Unlearned Such is the Gospel 
     The Whole Bible is filld with Imaginations & Visions from
End to End & not with Moral virtues that is the baseness of Plato
& the Greeks & all Warriors  The Moral Virtues are continual
Accusers of Sin & promote Eternal Wars & Domineering over others  

Berkley:
"Aristotle maketh a threefold distinction of objects
according to the three speculative sciences.  Physics he
supposeth to be conversant about such things as have a principle
of motion in themselves, mathematics about things permanent but
not abstracted, and theology about being abstracted and
immoveable, which distinction may be seen in the ninth book of
his metaphysics."
Blake:
"God is not a Mathematical Diagram"  

Berkley:
"It is a maxim of the Platonic philosophy, that the
soul of man was originally furnished with native inbred notions,
and stands in need of sensible occasions, not absolutely for
producing them, but only for awakening, rousing or exciting, into
act what was already preexistent, dormant, and latent in the
soul.
Blake:
"The Natural Body is an Obstruction to the Soul or Spiritual
Body  

Berkley:
" . . . Whence, according to Themistius, . . . it may
be inferred that all beings are in the soul.  For, saith he, the
forms are the beings.  By the form every thing is what it is. 
And, he adds, it is the soul that imparteth forms to matter, . ."
Blake:
"This is my Opinion but Forms must be apprehended by Sense or
the Eye of Imagination 
     Man is All Imagination  God is Man & exists in us & we in him"

Blake:
"What Jesus came to Remove was the Heathen or Platonic
Philosophy which blinds the Eye of Imagination  The Real Man"

The immediacy of Blake's response to the visions which welled up from his inner discernment of spiritual realities are revealed in this little poem enclosed in a letter to a friend.

Letters, (E 708)
Enclosed poem. 
"To my dear Friend Mrs Anna Flaxman

     This Song to the flower of Flaxmans joy
     To the blossom of hope for a sweet decoy
     Do all that you can or all that you may
     To entice him to Felpham & far away

     Away to Sweet Felpham for Heaven is there
     The Ladder of Angels descends thro the air
     On the Turret its spiral does softly descend
     Thro' the village then winds at My Cot it does end

     You stand in the village & look up to heaven
     The precious stones glitter on flights seventy seven
     And My Brother is there & My Friend & Thine
     Descend & Ascend with the Bread & the Wine

     The Bread of sweet Thought & the Wine of Delight
     Feeds the Village of Felpham by day & by night
     And at his own door the blessd Hermit does stand
     Dispensing Unceasing to all the whole Land
                                              W. BLAKE"