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seem to vary:/If the Perceptive Organs close: their Objects seems to close also’.72 With this, reductionism is born, ‘comprehending great, as very small’.73 Exiled from the best part of his inner nature, man shrinks accordingly. Blake repeatedly writes of his characters, ‘they became what they beheld’.
Conversely, when the imagination is properly at work in the outer and inner worlds, both come more to life. As Boehme declared, the soul is ‘powerful . . . it can by magic alter all things whatsoever they are in the outward world’s essence, and introduce them into another essence’.74 Every ‘Man is free, and is as a God to himself’.75 And ‘God is no Creature, also no Maker, but a Spirit and an Opener ’.76 Blake understood this: ‘there is no Limit of Expansion! there is no Limit of Translucence’.77 To put this in another way, through imagination we experience more; and what we experience—and so understand —grows, expands. Again, imagination puts us more in touch with — embeds us in—more of reality, and we appreciate better that it is inexhaustible, and ever-expanding. Vital to this is the understanding that the outward world and the inner are not separate, but involved in a dynamic and profound interrelationship. Existence is not finally reducible to the fixed categories of subject and object. For Boehme and Blake the spiritual life is not isolated within the individual, separate from an external world that remains impassive and untouched by it, nor is it mere solipsism. They perceived that the spirit cannot truly be apprehended as either an object of knowledge or a merely subjective state. It lives through the interplay of man’s apparently separate internal and external worlds, enabling us to realise that, as Blake saw, ‘everything that lives is Holy’.78
There is a spirit of dynamic paradox at work here, namely that the divine is and is not at work in the world. Boehme writes of this in Treatise of the Incarnation: ‘God dwells not in this World in the Outward Principle, but in the Inward; he dwells indeed in the Place of this world, but this world apprehendeth him not.’ Similarly, ‘Paradise springs no more through the Earth, for it is become a Mystery, and yet is continually there . . . It is in this World, and yet is out of this World.’79 Approaching this from another angle, Boehme writes in The Signature of All Things, in one of his better known passages, that