Blakes Fourfold Vision

It was not just the factory system, the Mills of Satan as he calls it, that Blake wrote of so penetratingly, but war, ecclesiasticism, the tyrannies of family life, wrong conceptions of love and marriage. On all these he anticipates astoundingly the criticism of our own time. Hard-headed critics who scorn Blake as a harmless idiot and dreamer should remember this. But while his diagnosis is identical with ours, his prescription is totally different. Don't you think the remedy of a man who foresaw the course of the diseases so clairvoyantly is entitled to attention?

Everything Blake says of art is in the superlative degree: "You must leave Fathers and Mothers and Houses and Lands if they stand in the way of Art." "Art is the Tree of Life." "The Whole Business of Man Is The Arts." The business of redeemed man, he means, just as the whole business of fallen man is empire and war. "Empire against Art." Into those three words Blake condenses his social and political philosophy. Force cannot be overcome by reason. Force can be overcome only by a higher order of force. Imagination is that force. And Blake believed from the bottom of his heart that if a nation of warriors were confronted by a nation of imaginative men the weapons of the former would fall unlifted from their hands.