PLANTEAMIENTOS DE REFORMAS AL PROCESO JUDICIAL

In plate 19 of the Marriage, the speaker, after pronouncing the Swedenborgian angel’s misperception of the Leviathan to be owing to his metaphysics, flings himself “directly into the body of the sun,” where he takes into his hand “Swedenborgs volumes” (E 42). What follows is a vertiginous descent, accompanied by the angel, from that “glorious clime” through “all the planets,” stopping for a rest at Saturn. From there they leap into an Epicurean “void,” which the devil claims is the angel’s “lot.” In that space, “if space it may be calld,” they come to a church, on the altar of which an open bible reveals “a deep pit,” prompting a second descent to “seven houses of brick.” The pair enter one of the houses to discover chained monkeys and baboons savagely cannibalizing each other. “[T]erribly annoyd” by the stench, the angel and devil enter a mill, “& I in my hand brought the skeleton of a body, which in the mill was Aristotles

Analytics.” There the devil declares that the angel’s works “are only Anayltics” (E 42). Thus, Swedenborg’s volumes become – via a rapid imagistic metamorphosis – a monkey (or baboon) skeleton, and finally Aristotle’s Analytics. What do the two works have to do with each other? In

light of the metaphysics discussed in previous sections of this chapter, Blake’s dizzying narrative takes on significant philosophical implications.

The devil’s plunge into the “body” of the sun makes explicit reference to Swedenborg’s dualist influx theory, which posits a living/spiritual and dead/bodily sun. Blake’s opposition to this metaphysics in his annotations to the “dead sun” passages in Divine Love and Divine

Wisdom attest to his awareness of this specific image, and because the devil finds Swedenborg’s works in the bodily sun, the implication is that they – like the sun itself – are dead. This would certainly be consistent with the aesthetic dimension of Blake’s critique of Swedenborg, whose works are “mechanical” copies lacking originality and the imagination of the Ancient Poets; they are, in short, dead writings. That they literally become a monkey skeleton drives the point home with poetic force. Moreover, in assigning the angel’s “lot” to be the void, Blake links

Swedenborg’s ontology of a dead material world to the soulless atoms and void described by Lucretius.132 In effect, the entire universe that the devil presents to the angel in this Memorable Fancy – from the sun to the skeletons in the pit – is dead and godless. The church is of course no exception, when one recalls the “system” described on plate 11, wherein “Priesthood”

contributes to the Swedenborgian dualist ontology by abstracting deities from their objects, thus rendering the material universe lifeless.

Blake’s designs on plate 11 signals the contrast between such a metaphysics and that which his devilish narrators proclaim (illus. 16). The bottom of the plate depicts Swedenborg’s dualist mechanism: a diminutive naked human figure flees a bearded, transcendent sky god, whose arms are extended. Here the separation between man and divine creator is clearly represented; the human form appears to be energetically repulsed by the god, flying headfirst away from him. The larger design at the top of the plate does not portray any transcendent

creator. Rather, the elements are personified in postures of delight, just as they were animated by the Ancient Poets. The naked childlike form is here raising its arms to embrace the matronly mermaid representing water, who leans protectively over the babe. On the left, the element of fire rises from the earth in the form of a female nude, arms also raised ecstatically, her head surrounded by sun-like rays. This is also the body of the sun, but unlike the one containing Swedenborg’s dead volumes, she is alive and holy, an emblem of Blake’s pantheistic metaphysics.

Although one can find dualist passages in Aristotle’s De Anima, such as his retention of the Platonic immaterial rational soul, his predominant theory of the hylomorphic soul-body entity has much in common with the corporeal soul described in the Marriage. It is significant, then, that Blake compares Swedenborgian dualist philosophy not with De Anima, but with another Aristotelian work, the Analytics, which treats at length of the syllogistic process by which knowledge is acquired via external demonstration and logical induction based on limited sensory experience. In this regard, the Analytics is one of the earliest works in the Western empirical tradition, and though sensory perception and reason are crucial to it, like Swedenborg’s works, Arisotle’s also lack imagination on Blake’s view.133 Thus, the Marriage continues the critique of empirical epistemology begun in No Natural Religion, but in the later work Aristotle is cited as the representative empiricist, rather than Locke. The appearance of the Analytics

within the mill in the Memorable Fancy strengthens the connection, since the mill appears in No Natural Religion – and in Leibniz’s Monadology – as the symbol of empirical and mechanistic

133 _{Another reason that Aristotle belongs in Swedenborg’s company could be found in the Poetics, in which Aristotle} declares imitation, and not expressive, imaginative creation, as the function of poetry. See Abrams, 9-10, 78, 90.

epistemology.134 Just as for Leibniz the non-sentient parts of the mill can never give rise to perception, so the Marriage’s dead mill (containing the skeleton) emblematizes dualist ontology and the “same dull round” of limited Aristotelian epistemology, wherein perception is

unsupplemented by divine Poetic Genius, or imagination.

Aristotle’s Prior and PosteriorAnalytics prefigure Lockean empiricism insofar as they stress sensory experience as the foundation of knowledge. In Book II of the Prior Analytics, Aristotle writes that “it is the business of experience to give the principles which belong to each subject” and that “every belief comes either through syllogism or from induction” from such principles (46a17-18, 68b14).135 These ideas are reiterated in the Posterior Analytics: “induction is impossible for those who have not sense-perception” (I, 81b6), and “out of sense-perception comes to be what we call memory, and out of frequently repeated memories of the same thing develops experience; for a number of memories constitute a single experience” (II, 100a4-6). This direct relationship between knowledge and received sensory perceptions combined in memory constitutes what Blake described as the “Ratio” in No Natural Religion; since for Aristotle sensory experience is finite, so is man’s knowledge. And like Locke, Aristotle

concludes that there can be no innate knowledge: “We conclude that these states of knowledge are neither innate in a determinate form, nor developed from other higher states of knowledge, but from sense-perception” (II, 100a9-10). Evidently, then, Blake finds Aristotle to be the foundation for the “same dull round” of the empirical epistemology that Blake had earlier

critiqued in Locke.136 In his annotations to Divine Love and Divine Wisdom, Blake refers to such

134 _{Green claims that the mill here “emblematises the circularity of both the philosophy of the schoolmen and the} empirical method that sought to replace it” (Visionary Materialism 118).

135 _{In the same book Aristotle also makes the hylomorphic claim that “body and soul are affected together” (70b17).} 136 _{Locke did not see his own epistemology as repeating that of Aristotle. In fact, his own critique of Aristotelian} syllogism in Essay 4.14 sounds uncannily Blakean: “The rules of syllogism serve not to furnish the mind with those

empiricism as “[w]orldly wisdom or demonstration by the senses,” and cites such philosophy as the cause of the erroneous belief that God is invisible (E 603).137

Moreover, in Aristotelian epistemology, “sensations are always true, imaginations are for the most part false” (De Anima 428a11). Representations that enter sensibility are unfailingly accurate, since the sensible “species” that enter from the outside are formal copies of the object being perceived, as Michael Ayers writes: on Aristotle’s account, “when I see the sun, one and the same thing, the sun, exists both in reality and in my mind, both formally and objectively” (27).138 In the Marriage, however, the reverse is true: perception is conflated with imagination, and what is perceived – or in the Angel’s case misperceived (an impossibility for Aristotle) – is “owing to” the perceiver’s metaphysics. This is succinctly articulated in the Proverb of Hell, “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees” (E 35). As in chapter one, I wish to clarify that I am not claiming Berkleyan idealism for Blake here. Contra Nurmi’s claim that “Blake often rejected external nature as non-existent” (“Polar Being” 67), he is not stating that there is no tree “out there,” but rather that one’s metaphysics and imagination influence how that tree, which is

out there, is perceived. Here Blake poetically depicts an emanative model of epistemology that elevates imagination as a corporeal faculty crucial to perceiving the infinite.139

In the Memorable Fancy on plate 12, Isaiah represents Blakean epistemology by claiming that all poets hold that a “firm perswasion” that a thing is so makes it so (E 38). And “in ages of

intermediate ideas, that may shew the connexion of remote ones. This way of reasoning discovers no new proofs, but is the art of marshalling, and ranging the old ones we have already” (4.14.6, 679).

137 _{Paley notes that Aristotle “is described sympathetically” in Divine Love and Divine Wisdom, “and Swedenborg} says, ‘Afterwards I discoursed with him, concerning the analytic science’” (“‘A New Heaven is Begun’” 75). 138 _{Rankin reiterates this claim: “Aristotle insists that the special senses are not open to error” (83).}

139 _{Bloom sees this proverb as linking epistemology to ontology: “the wise man, as a creative Devil, sees the tree in} a context more exuberant than any an unvitalized nature could sustain. The fool is self-condemned to a status of minimum vitality in nature” (14).