Blake & Boehme: Imagination, Experience & the Limitations of Reason
as each is endued with the Wisdom; and so also he apprehends and explains it’.33 From the liberating possibilities of this understanding, Blake’s character Los asserts, ‘I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans/I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create’.34 Accordingly, both visionaries’ works are created with a view, in Blake’s words, to opening
. . . the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination35
The eye of imagination not only looks outward, as it were, and so places us more firmly in the world around us, but also within. In many respects, Boehme’s and Blake’s writings provide a profound insight into the workings of the human mind. Their work may be seen, as Friedrich Schleiermacher and Robin Waterfield have said of Boehme, as ‘esoteric psychology’, or ‘psychology of the depths’.36 That which is other than ourselves, beyond the ‘ratio’ of our ‘Reasoning Power’, is also within us, and imagination is an important means of putting us in touch with it. Vitally, both Boehme and Blake understood that there are profound capacities latent in each individual that for the most part remain unexplored and unrealised: immense possibilities that are part of possibilities that are naturally inherent within us, our birthright. Boehme writes, ‘In Man lyes all whatsoever the sun shines upon, or Heaven contains, as also Hell and all the Deeps; he is an inexhaustible Fountain, that cannot be drawn dry’.37 In the same spirit, Blake wrote that Joshua Reynolds
Thinks that Man Learns all that he Knows I say on the Contrary That Man Brings All that he has or Can have Into the World with him. Man is Born like a Garden ready Planted & Sown.38
In response to Reynolds’s assertion that ‘The mind is but a barren soil; a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop’, Blake adds: