"Soul" in Blake's writing: redeeming the word

Wordsworth Circle, Wntr, 2002 by Nancy Moore Goslee

Contrasting to this group of unengraved works, which manifests an often ironic interplay between soul as Ossianic affect and soul as immortal spirit, a group of early engraved works presents a monistic imaginative body that approaches an exuberant materialism. The tiny tractates use the word "soul" only once: "More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul, less than All cannot satisfy Man." Here, in There Is No Natural Religion [b] v, "soul" means a living person, if a person not living quite energetically enough (Erdman 2; Clark 142-3). "Poetic Genius" seems at first glance to occupy the place in Blake's generally anti-empiricist argument that "soul" would occupy if the attack were mounted by conventional revealed religion (Peterfreund xv). Yet in contrast to revealed religion's view, this "body or outward form of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius" and is continuous with it. In No Natural Religion [a] and [b], Blake argues against a materialist or organic limit to "perception" and bases his playful monism on what Mary Hall and Simon Schaffer suggest is a Berkeleyan idealism. I would argue, however, that in spite of his satire of Priestley in Island in the Moon, Blake also draws upon that scientist's volatilized materialism as a model. (Hall 13, 19, 32; Shaffer 242, 276-80).

This affirmation of a visionary yet material monism is even stronger in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, where he continues to play with the language of Hartley, Priestley, and their orthodox, Christian and somewhat dualist opponents as they debate the nature of soul. In his Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit, Priestley argues that matter possesses penetrability and a kind of energy: "matter has, in fact, no properties but those of attraction and repulsion" and therefore "make[s] a nearer approach to the nature of spiritual and immaterial beings" than has been generally recognized. Soul, he argues, consists of a materiality so refined that it will reappear with the resurrected body (Priestley 101; Stafford 422-3). As Stuart Peterfreund and Mary Lynn Johnson have pointed out, though with differing emphases, Priestley's "Attraction and Repulsion" become one pair of Blake's dialectic of contraries (Peterfreund 100; Johnson 116). Through this dialectic, he attacks traditional dualism: "Man has no Body di stinct from his Soul for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age" (Erdman 34, 4). This vocabulary of the senses as "inlets of Soul" is common to both parties in the debate, and Blake evokes both sides of the argument. (5) Though apparently stating the materialist position in the opening contrary, Blake modifies it with "chief" and "in this age"; thus other ages have done better at admitting non-sensory, non-organic perceptions, and body becomes a temporary historical phenomenon, a cultural product. (6) In the devil's claim that Energy is "from the Body" and is "Eternal Delight" (contraries 2 and 3), the afterlife becomes a joyous material present.