Blake & Boehme: Imagination, Experience & the Limitations of Reason
The whole outward visible World with all its being is a signature of the inward spiritual world . . .. This [inward] world has manifested itself . . . with this visible world, as a visible likeness, so that the spiritual being might be manifest in a corporeal comprehensive essence . . . the internal holds the external before it as a glass, wherein it beholds itself . . . the external is its signature.80
In a similar vein Blake argued, in a passage touched on above, that
This World <of Imagination> is Infinite & Eternal whereas the world of Generation or Vegetation is Finite & <for a small moment > Temporal[.] There Exist in that Eternal World the Permanent Realities of Every Thing which we see reflected in this Vegetable Glass of Nature.81
In other words, the external reflects the inner life back to itself. Boehme wrote, ‘Without the light of Nature there is no understanding of divine mysteries’.82 In the same spirit, Blake responded to Lavater’s statement that ‘Whatever is visible is the vessel or veil of the invisible past, present, future—as man penetrates to this more, or perceives it less, he raises or depresses his dignity of being’; declaring it ‘A vision of the Eternal Now’.83 The outward world is a mirror of the great omnipotence and omniscience of God. ‘To the Eyes of the Man of Imagination Nature is Imagination itself.’84
In this sublime interrelationship, the inner spiritual life is primary.
Boehme believed that in Paradise the first man ‘saw with pure eyes . . ..
The inward man, that is the inward eye, saw through the outward.’85 This pure and ‘inward eye’ looks out at the end of Blake’s A Vision of the Last Judgment: ‘I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight[.] I look thro it & not with it.’86 The inner spiritual self looks out and sees through the outer. When this imaginative eye is engaged with the world, that which has been drained of life by habit and over-familiarity, by the ‘ratio’, the ‘dull round’ of what we already know, is seen and experienced anew, as if for the very first time. Blake’s much-quoted maxim, ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would