[In the following essay, Peterfreund examines the direct relationship of William Blake's Milton to the Principia, demonstrating that Blake's work reveals the poet's opposition to Newton's physics and his conception of the universe.]

There has been a good deal of discussion recently, by George S. Rousseau and others, about the status of the relationship between literature and science as modes of discourse.' Interestingly enough, much of what has been written about literature and science has been focused on the relationship of the two modes as viewed in the context of the eighteenth century, when the relationship of the two, clearly defined or otherwise, seems to have been the strongest. Problems with defining the status of the relationship seem to have arisen from the variety of its "surface" manifestations. These range from the implicit relationship of Book III of Gulliver's Travels to Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, so astutely perceived and documented by Marjorie Hope Nicolson,² to the highly explicit relationship of Blake's Milton to Newton's Principia, with which this essay will be principally concerned. But before entering into the substance of the discussion, it would seem proper to raise a question begged by the preceding remarks: on what basis or common ground may literature and science be discussed, with the purpose of understanding their relationship?

One answer to this question is that literature and science may be viewed as artifacts of rhetoric—as arguments, in other words. One who begins from such a view proceeds in the study of the relationship between literature and science with the understanding that, when any argument, either literary or scientific, speaks to the issues raised by another argument with the goal of overturning that other argument, the critical argument in question proceeds from a rhetorical position no less well defined and interested than that of the argument it seeks to overturn. Seen in this perspective, the General Scholium of the Principia differs from the "conversation" of the "Visionary forms dramatic" that takes place at the end of Blake's Jerusalem³ not so much in terms of what it argues for as in terms of its refusal to acknowledge its status as argument—with the corollary refusal to acknowledge that what is being said, or argued for, must ultimately be reflexive to the interested position of the person mounting the discussion. Newton, for example, having disposed of the Cartesian model of vortical planetary motion, is not content to rest on his calculations, nor is he content to regard those calculations as evidence brought forth in support of his argument. Instead, by disclaiming any personal interest in elaborating the model of the solar system based on the principle of elliptical rotation, Newton is able to deny that there is any argument on his part in the first place, averring instead that "this most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being."⁴ This "Being," happily enough for Newton, is also the source of the language and rhetoric that Newton "discovers" for the purpose of propagating his (His?) celestial mechanics, just as Newton "discovers" the system of mechanics itself. Blake's Four Zoas, by way of contrast, do not discover, in their use of language, the space and time that are the parameters of Newton's system. Rather, the Zoas are seen "Creating Space, Creating Time according to the wonders Divine / Of Human Imagination." The consequence, which would be an abhorrence to Newton, with his allied conceptions of absolute time and absolute space, is the "variation of Time & Space / Which vary according as the Organs of Perception vary."⁵

To be sure, many of the eighteenth-century writers active before the 1790's, when Blake came to intellectual and artistic maturity, recognized the rhetorical and ontological status of Newtonian argument, as argument, and they evinced a shared concern about the full significance of that argument and the limits to which it might be made, by analogy, to serve in other fields of inquiry. Writers as far apart in politics as Addison and Pope and as far apart in temperament as Desaguliers and Doctor Johnson all had something to say about the impact of Newtonian mechanics and optics and the implications to be derived therefrom. These responses have already been dealt with in several fine studies, including book-length treatments by Nicolson, Richard B. Schwartz, and Margaret C. Jacob,⁶ and need only be mentioned here in passing to emphasize the crucial difference between Blake's response to Newton and the responses of English writers before him. Addison, Pope, Desaguliers, Johnson, et al. may have disagreed over the extent to which Newtonian physics could, by argument from analogy, be used to help see the "subjective" aspects of the universe in an orderly manner. But these and other writers of the eighteenth century were of one mind concerning the "objective" truth of Newtonian physics per se. Pope may have taken issue with Addison over how far Newtonian argument might be extended in the areas of perceptual psychology and political economy, but both writers agreed on the paramount importance of the physics itself to Western thought. And although Johnson may have placed less emphasis on the discovery of physical truths than on the discovery of moral and religious ones, he still considered Newton a model of scientific thought and conduct.⁷ Up to Blake's time, the response of eighteenth-century literature to Newtonian science is unanimous in its belief that Newton's mathematics and physics are fully disinterested, inductive, impartial, and authoritative. It is only in the question of how far Newtonian thought might be extended into other spheres of inquiry that there is any real debate.

For Blake, however, the painful and oppressive conditions of human existence, which he viewed as being in part descended from the "reasonable" assumptions of Newtonian physics, translated into Newtonian metaphysics and implemented as social policy, meant that there was something wrong with the physics itself. Blake seems to have understood, as we now do, that the metaphysics might precede the physics as well as follow from it. Accordingly, Blake undertook the critique and demonstration, whose record is to be found throughout the Prophetic Books, especially in Milton, a critique and demonstration anticipatory, in the essentials, of the insights set forth by relativity physics concerning the space-time continuum and other matters in the latter physics' correction of the Newtonian model of the universe.⁸

Lest it be objected, however, that the present strategy is to turn Blake into an ur-Einstein, the point should be made that Blake's insights about, and critique of Newtonian physics—indeed, his critical responses to many of the language-bound activities of the age—owe a good deal to his grasp of the nature and function of language, as well as of the way in which one reads that language. Blake's senses of language and reading depend upon his understanding that all texts, as the artifacts of specific individuals writing in specific contexts of time and place, are rhetorical, or argumentative, and that the situation could not be otherwise, since all language is produced by individuals speaking from positions more or less clearly defined, but always definite.⁹ Accordingly, there is no such thing as disinterestedness, only concealed or dissembled interest; no such thing as pure induction, only induction with a concealed or impure hypothesis, usually disguised as an "axiom" or "truth"; no impartiality, only imperfectly revealed partiality; and no authority, only usurped freedom.

Blake's idea of language has been discussed at some length previously by Robert F. Gleckner and this writer. These discussions emphasize that fallen humanity uses a fallen language that is at best partial in its grasp of phenomena and at worst tyrannous in its insistence on the authority of that partial grasp.'" But neither of the discussions deals with the relationship between language and reading, or with the role of reading as an instrument of language reform. Blake has a vision of how language functions when properly used, and that vision is closely tied to his idea of how one should read. Before turning to the way in which Blake reads and responds to Newtonian language specifically, it might be helpful to develop an understanding, in general terms, of the relationship between language properly spoken and reading properly practiced.

Blake's most complete account of language properly spoken is found at the end of Jerusalem, in his rendering of the "conversation" dealt with briefly above. The Four Zoas

   conversed together in Visionary forms dramatic which bright
Redounded from their Tongues in thunderous majesty, in Visions
In new Expanses, creating exemplars of Memory and of Intellect
Creating Space, Creating Time according to the wonders Divine
Of Human Imagination, throughout all Three Regions immense
Of Childhood, Manhood & Old Age [;] & the all tremendous unfathomable Non Ens
Of Death was seen in regenerations terrific or complacent varying
According to the subject of discourse & every Word & every Character
Was Human according to the Expansion or Contraction, the Translucence or
Opakeness of Nervous fibres such was the variation of Time & Space
Which vary according as the Organs of Perception vary.
(98.28-38)

The language spoken by the Four Zoas creates what it refers to rather than merely describing something thought to have been created previously. "Exemplars of Memory and of Intellect," up to and including space and time themselves, are created in the course of such speech. But the overall qualities of any given "Exemplar" are entirely reflexive to the qualities of the speaker in question: "Human Imagination," the speaker's age, "the subject of discourse," and the variables having to do with differences in "the Organs of Perception" from speaker to speaker. In a "conversation" of the sort described by Blake, no one speaker lays claim to, or is accorded, the authority that would make that speaker's position the only "right" or "reasonable" one among other "wrong" or "unreasonable" alternatives. Authoritative meaning under such circumstances is comprehensive meaning, which takes the form of a living body of utterance, augmented by each additional utterance but never completed by it. Thus the sense of the verb redounded, as Blake uses it, meaning in the context of Jerusalem, pl. 98, "to add, yield, cause to accrue" (OED, VIII.309).¹¹

In order to use language as the Four Zoas do at the end of Jerusalem, it is necessary to relinquish the coercive authority implicit in point of view and usually identified in Blake's lexicon as set/hood. Selfhood is Blake's cardinal sin, replacing the more usual pride and posing a threat to the individual far greater than might be posed by pride alone, since selfhood is an amalgam of pride and of deceit that denies the existence of that very pride, a powerful amalgam indeed. As Albion faces the prospect of putting off his selfhood, for example, he comments on the powerful bond between pride and deceit, a bond which gives the resultant selfhood the power of a mighty army.

   O Lord what can I do! My Selfhood cruel
Marches against thee deceitful from Sinai & from Edom
Into the Wilderness of Judah to meet thee in his pride.
(96.8-10)

Albion must put off selfhood in order to be united with the paragon of selfless energy, Jesus. The goal of doing so is one proposed by Blake for all of creation in the Greek epigraph to Jerusalem, μovoϛ o Ï∈ϛvϛ (one in Jesus), and describes as occurring at the end of the epic, when the triumphant "All Human Forms identified" is pronounced and those forms are described as "Awaking in his [i.e. Jesus's] Bosom in the Life of Immortality" (99.1, 4).

As Enitharmon notes slightly earlier in the poem, the putting off of selfhood must necessarily entail the repudiation of Bacon, Newton, Locke, and others like them—those who worship a "natural" order they both have created and have refused to take responsibility for creating.

 We shall not die! we shall be united in Jesus.
Will you suffer this Satan this Body of Doubt that Seems but is Not
To occupy the very threshold of Eternal Life. If Bacon, Newton, Locke,
Deny a Conscience in Man & the Communion of Saints & Angels
Contemning the Divine Vision & Fruition, Worshiping the Deus
Of the Heathen, the God of This World, & the Goddess Nature
Mystery Babylon the Great, the Druid Dragon & hidden Harlot[,]
Is it not the Signal of the Morning which was

told us in the Beginning?
(93.19-26)

How does one go about repudiating those who champion the empirical mode of observation and, the argument by induction, while at the same time worshiping the horrible Antichrist under its several names and guises? Blake's answer is that one reads the texts produced by these and other usurpers—all texts, for that matter—in what he calls the "infernal or diabolical sense." This reading strategy is described in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

The speaker of Blake's mixed media polemic has just shown an "Angel" that the Gospels, although written by men of genius about a man of genius,¹² have been misread consistently because of the interpositions of the priesthood in the reading process. These interpositions have perverted Christianity, until it has become an organized religion along typically tradition-bound lines.

…a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract mental deities from their objects; thus began Priesthood.

Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronouncd that the Gods had orderd such things.
Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.
(p1. 11)

In the sense that both are attempts to exercise spiritual sovereignty in the name of an absent, originary "other," priesthood and selfhood are synonymous. Both are interested points of view that pretend to disinterestedness, calling on "Jehovah," "Nature," or suchlike to bear witness to the impartiality with which they hold sway. Both priesthood and selfhood are in fact argumentative positions that deny the existence of any argument whatsoever, in light of their self-image of authoritativeness and permanence.

Priesthood and selfhood have their antithesis in the authentic voice of religious vision, that of the prophet. The nature of the antithesis is made clear in Blake's account of a "dinner conversation" with Isaiah and Ezekiel, in which Blake asks the two Prophets why they should not be charged with the same crime of selfhood attributed to the priests. Isaiah answers that he "was then perswaded, & remain[s] confirm'd; that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for the consequences but wrote" (pl. 12). Thus emerges the doctrine of "firm perswasion," which furnishes a useful gloss on Blake's statement, also in The Marriage, "that all deities reside in the human breast" (pl. 11). As a state of mind, "firm perswasion" is characteristic not only of Isaiah and Ezekiel, but of the Four Zoas at the end of Jerusalem as well. In such a state, the fact that language is always argument, always coming from an interested position, is openly acknowledged, and the creative, verbal energy liberated by that very acknowledgement is of a magnitude comparable to that of the Zoas as they create and recreate space add time in their respective images. Blake inquires as to the potential for such energy through the acknowledgement of one's interested position, and Isaiah tells him that there is no reality without that acknowledgement.

Then I asked: does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so?

He replied. All poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing.

(p1. 12)

Reading in "the infernal or diabolical sense" proceeds on the understanding that the primary difference between prophecy (inspired poetry) and the literature of doubt ("philosophy," "rational discourse," "dogma," etc.) is that the former affirms, even celebrates, its "perswasion," or interested position, while the latter denies the very existence of such a position. Blake's venture in reading, then, is to "converse" with the text in order to locate and identify the human form responsible for producing it and its point of view. This venture is made clear in The Marriage and even clearer in Blake's Annotations of various authors, where his designedly ad hominem stance is aimed at producing from behind his words the writer who has refused to take full responsibility for the substance and implications of his text. "Conversing" in this context is Blake's reading strategy for prophecy and the literature of doubt alike, for the locus of rhetorical interest in each is alike in its need for elaboration and clarification. Blake therefore reads prophecy and the literature of doubt in precisely the same way, and in each case he fully acknowledges the status of his own discourse in the process of doing so. With specific reference to Blake's reading of Newton, it should be noted that Blake's adversary position is not held with the hope of "destroying" Newton. Blake acknowledges the power of the scientist's intellect; moreover, he wishes to "save" the intellect in much the same way that he wishes to "save" Milton's creative genius: by having both Newton and Milton acknowledge that their texts are the creations of a self-interested position, then having them cast off the selfhood that ordains and disguises the self-interest inherent in the position.

Blake does indeed "save" Newton in much the same way that he "saves" Milton. In the case of the latter, the process of this "salvation" is clearly chronicled in the brief epic that bears his name. In the case of Newton, however, the process is less clear, being carried forward by means of what might be termed "Christian association": the use of Christlike, visionary avatars, whose putting off of selfhood is done both for their own good and, by example, for the good of others. Milton functions as one such avatar for Newton, as does Albion, who functions in this capacity for Milton and Newton alike. Near the end of Jerusalem, shortly after Albion has confronted Jesus and participated in the "Mysterious / Offering of Self for Another" (96.20-21), the time of the fallen world ends, and all those immured in that time reappear in their eternal forms. "The innumerable Chariots of the Almighty appeard in Heaven / and Bacon & Newton & Locke, & Milton & Shakspear & Chaucer" (98.8-9).

Salvation of the sort Blake practices and preaches depends upon criticism, the sort of "Opposition" that "is true Friendship" (MHH, pl. 20). Blake's criticism of Newtonian physics is one instance among many of Blake's friendly opposition to what he conceives of as being deluded thinking. At this point it is time to turn to an examination of Blake's criticism of Newton, in order to see how well the former understands the latter's physics and metaphysics. If Blake's criticism is to be considered cogent, it may only be so if his understanding is equal to Newton's, in much the same way that the unceasing "Mental Fight" that Blake announces in Milton, 1.13, must occur between equally matched antagonists if it is to be successful in redeeming them from error.

The evidence for Blake's having read widely and deeply in Newtonian literature is extensive, both in Blake's own writing and in discussions of it by Donald D. Ault and F. B. Curtis, among others.¹³ There is accordingly no need to reargue the issue of Blake's degree of familiarity with Newtonian thought. What does need to be argued, however, is that Blake's reading of Newton led him to focus on the Principia as much if not more so than on the Optics, the primary source of Newtonian thought for Blake, according to Ault and Nicolson before him.¹⁴ The importance of Blake's knowledge of the Principia for the creation of Milton will be demonstrated in the discussion below. A general reason for such having been the case may be ventured at this point, however. The reason "that the English poets who wrote about science in the eighteenth century put greater emphasis on the Principia than on the Optics," according to William Powell Jones, is that "the poets knew … that Newton had mathematically demonstrated the order of the universe.… They used this idea over and over in numerous variations, not only when they mentioned Newton by name but when, in their illustrations of various branches of science they devoted more space to celestial order … than to the physics of light and color."¹⁵ It is precisely on this issue of celestial order—where ideas of it come from and what force they ought and do have—that Blake confronts Newton. Blake's understanding is that such "celestial order" is in fact the order of Newton's mind, projected outward and argued for subtly but powerfully for the purpose of compelling the very consensus of opinion commented on by Jones above.

As Blake assesses it, the net effect of the Newtonian argument in the Principia is to create the universe in Newton's image, an act of creation for which Newton refuses to take responsibility, assigning it instead to a God with whom Newton and no one else is able to communicate on an intimate, father-son basis.¹⁶ It is in response to this Newtonian move and all the implications to be derived from it that Blake frames the narrative of Milton, in which the poem's namesake must fight off not only the implications of the Newtonian model of the universe, but also the implications of the continuing cast of mind that is always ready to fabricate such models. That cast of mind may be viewed in the context of a tradition that embodies it, a tradition known as the prisca sapientia, or prisca theologia, and recently discussed by Ault in relation to Blake.¹⁷ This tradition of ancient, or pristine wisdom, or theology is what Blake has in mind when he derides "The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid: of Plato & Cicero. Which all Men ought to contemn" (pl. 1). Milton's goal in condemning this ancient tradition, as all ought to, according to Blake, is to be reunited with his "emanation," Ololon, who represents space just as Milton represents time. Ololon, for example, is described as being "Sixfold" (2.19), a multiple unique to her in all of Blake's number symbolism, at least in part because Blake associates her spatialized being with Newton's conception of the "six primary planets."¹⁸ Seen in a larger frame, the reuniting of Ololon with Milton is but one in a series of similar reunions, including those of Enitharmon with Los, Vala with Luvah, and Jerusalem with Albion, the overall purpose being to reunite fallen time, which Blake sees as being male, with fallen space, which Blake sees as being female and somehow being "generated" by time. Out of this multiple reconstitution of the space-time continuum Blake hopes to see established conditions under which space and time, energy and matter, approach identity at the speed of light itself.¹⁹

But any such reconstitution must begin with a taking stock of what conditions are like in the fallen world and how they have come to pass. Blake does so in Milton by retelling the story of the Creation, which he had told several times previously, for example in The Book of Urizen and The Four Zoas (1794, 1797). Implicit in such a retelling is the awareness that the Creation and Fall have been as fully multiple as the reconstitution that corrects them must be. For Blake, the story of the Creation is the story of a fall into finitude, brought about by the sort of God Newton talks about in the General Scholium of the Principia. Creation in Milton begins when Los, Blake's avatar for all poets and prophets, is unable to "identify" Urizen, whom Ault associates with Newton,²⁰ such "identification" being a matter of giving Urizen an eternal form or an eternal name.

Los siezd his Hammer & Tongs; he labourd at his resolute Anvil
Among indefinite Druid rocks & snows of doubt & reasoning.
Refusing all Definite Form, the Abstract Horror roofd. stony hard
And a first Age passed over & a State of dismal woe!
(3.7-10)

Urizen's "Refusing all Definite Form" cuts at least two ways, given the Newtonian background of Milton. On the more obvious level, Urizen is Newton's God, "utterly void of all body and bodily figure" (p. 545). But on a subtler level, Blake's description—or non-description—goes right to the core of the Newtonian argument. Blake senses the relationship between the attributes of Newton's God and the habits of Newton's thought. "Refusing all Definite Form" is also a gibing reference to Newton's claim to "frame no hypotheses" (p. 545). Blake, who by his own account knew how to read Latin tolerably well by 1803,²¹ seems to have in mind a pun on the Latin original of Newton's statement about framing hypotheses: "hypothese non fingo."²² "I frame no hypotheses" is an adequate translation of the Latin, but it is by no means the only adequate one. Fingo, which may mean to form or to frame in the sense usually understood of Newton, may also have other meanings of interest in light of the present discussion. Two other translations of the verb are possible on the basis of the definitions of the Latin root, which discuss it in terms" of the plastic art, to form or fashion by art … to mould or model, as a statuary," and "with the access. notion of untruth, to alter, change, for the purpose of dissembling."²³

The net effect of such a pun is to show that Newton's God and Newton are one and the same, and that a God who refuses definite form is the creation of a man who dissembles about the fact that he has created God in his own image and refuses to acknowledge the responsibility for exercising the creative initiative that would lead him to do so, since by the standards of such a mind being found out would mean being caught lying, not caught in the act of creating art. This particular set of circumstances accounts for Urizen's continual disavowal, here and elsewhere throughout the Prophetic Books, of form. It also accounts for the confrontation that occurs later in Milton proper, in which Milton marches against Urizen at the River Arnon and attempts to give him form through the sculptorly act of moulding to his fortnless bones the red clay of Succoth (pls. 19-20). Urizen must realize his own full presence, of body as well as of mind, before he can experience the full presence of the God he creates—and realize that such a God is only as powerful and good as its creator. The applicable text, from Blake's "The Everlasting Gospel," is "Thou art a Man God is no more / thy own humanity learn to adore" (pp. 52-54, II. 75-76).

A far cry from the Four Zoas who, at the end of Jerusalem, freely create space and time in their own images with dazzling rapidity, Urizen/Newton denies responsibility for creating what is "out there," much as Newton before him had denied responsibility for the hypothesis that placed God, invisible, at the center of a universe composed of very visible, very dead, atomistic matter. Somehow, even though he wishes to disavow any knowledge of, or responsibility for it, creation—or anti-creation—of a universe of dead matter centered by a materialistic sun possessed of invisible force(s) is a direct result of Urizen's refusal to assume form. After the "first Age," in which Urizen is characterized as "Refusing all Definite Form,"

Down sunk with fright a red round Globe hot burning. Deep
Deep down into the Abyss. Panting: conglobing: trembling
And a second Age passed over & a State of dismal woe.
(3.11-13)

Because he disavows any responsibility for voluntarily creating a centered, materialistic universe, Urizen suffers the fate of all Blake's self-denying artificers who refuse to take responsibility for their creations: the process appears to be reversed, and the created appears to have created the creator. Nor will the creator correct this misapprehension, owing to his ulterior motives. Thus Urizen/Newton postulates a universe that is centered by "a round red Globe hot burning," denies responsibility for doing so, and instead appears to become what he beholds, his organs of vision appearing to have been formed by the sun at the center of that postulated universe, when that sun in fact has been looked into place by eyes that do the bidding of a will. And that will exercises a fiat every bit as powerful, within its own sphere, as the first such fiat: fiat lux.

Rolling around into two little Orbs & closed in two little Caves
The Eyes beheld the Abyss: lest bones of solidness freeze over all
And a third Age passed over & a State of dismal woe.
(3.14-16)

The "creation," which is in fact a fall into a state of fragmented materialism, continues apace. Urizen/Newton's failure to assume responsibility for framing the first hypothesis causes the division of the creative consciousness into a fragmented, materialistic world "out there" and five contracted senses with which to perceive it. Stunned momentarily by doubt, Los believes that the "creation" taking place "out there" has a spiritual as well as a material reality. His doubt leads to Los's recapitulation, willy-nilly, of the fall of Urizen into generation. With no sense, momentarily, of his own creative energy, no sense that voids and absolute space exist only for those who do not fill them with plenitude by perceiving through them to the infinite, Los becomes fearful. As Blake elsewhere notes, "One thought fills immensity" (MHH, pl. 8.36). But when fear leads the individual to cease thinking creatively, the process reverses and immensity fills the thinker. In this particular case, instead of Los filling the void, the void fills Los, fragmenting him into the fallen categories of Newtonian space and time.

Terrified Los stood in the Abyss & his immortal limbs
Grew deadly pale: he became what he beheld: for a red
Round Globe sunk down from his Bosom into the Deep in pangs
He hoverd over it trembling & weeping. Suspended it shook
The nether Abyss in tremblings. He wept over it, he cherish'd it
In deadly sickening pain: till separated into a Female pale
As the cloud that brings the snow: all the while from his Back
A blue fluid exuded into Sinews hardening in the Abyss
Till it separated into a Male Form howling in Jealousy.
(3.28-36)

The "Female pale" is of course Enitharmon. She is "pale," as is Los, because of an act of self-deception fundamental to the process of "creation" in which both are involved. When the void fills and fragments Los, it causes him to fragment into his likeness. Paleness in Blake usually connotes desire restrained or repressed.²⁴ In restraining his creative energies, Los does not totally abdicate his role as a creator—not any more than Urizen/Newton does, in fact. Instead, Los creates Enitharmon in the image of his restrained desire—pale creator, pale creation. His "trembling & weeping" are also symptomatic of the creative drive sublimated, and these symptoms are likewise passed along in the creation of a female who shakes "the nether Abyss in tremblings.

The creation/fragmentation that occurs leads Los to believe that he and Enitharmon are separated by some insurmountable obstacle, a "Male Form howling in Jealousy." Like Enitharmon, however, this male form is the creation of Los's own mind and body, and is separated from Los when, because of fear, he refuses to do anything to halt or control the fragmentation. In this particular case, the spectre that is created bears a striking resemblance to Newtonian absolute space, a resemblance that is hardly accidental. The idea of "A blue fluid … hardening in the Abyss" is derived from at least two of Newton's concealed axioms concerning the nature of space. The first of these states "That the centre of the system of the world is immovable" (p. 419),²⁵ that is, that absolute space is rigid. The second of these states that "the matter of the heavens is fluid" (p. 549). The fact that the locus maledictus of Los's activity is described alternately as an abyss or a void has to do with Newton's description of absolute space as being "void of resistance" (p. 68). Space, absolute or otherwise, of course appears to be blue to the earthbound observer.

Los assumes, as Newton seems to assume, that all the materialistic fragmentation he encounters is "really" going on "out there," that is, that it arises because of an external, "natural" cause that is responsible for all instances of fragmentation, perceived as external, "natural" effect. In doing so, Los is only being "reasonable," in the sense of following the line of logic laid down by Newton in the "Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy" that preface the third book of the Principia.²⁶ The result of Los's being "reasonable" on the basis of his assumptions is bitterly humorous. Believing the cause to be external and doubting his ability to stem the fragmentation, the deluded Los makes fragmentation the law of the universe, using a distinctly Newtonian style of inductive reasoning to do so. And in his longing and lusting after Enitharmon as a discrete being forever fragmented and apart from him, Los participates in the further fragmentation of the universe, by begetting on Enitharmon children who add to the force of the "selfhood explosion," by means of which the universe is populated with discrete little bodies, which are, at least in this context, Blake's visionary rendering of what is implied by Newton's corpuscular theory of matter. A corpuscle is, in the root sense of the Latin, a little body. The irony underlying the whole of Los's project is that he causes additional fragmentation in the very attempt, albeit a deluded one, to end the process by somehow transcending and comprehending what is already deployed in the depths of spectral, rigid, absolute space.

Within labouring, beholding Without: from Particulars to Generals
Subduing his Spectre, they builded the Looms of Generation
They Builded Great Golgonooza Times on Times Ages on Ages
First Orc was Born then the Shadowy Female: then all of Los's Family
At last Enitharmon brought Forth Satan Refusing Form, in vain

The Miller of Eternity made subservient to the Great Harvest
That he may go to his own Place Prince of the Starry Wheels
(3.37-43)

The reference to the idea of moving "from Particulars to Generals" is Blake's gibing allusion to Newtonian inductive method and summary of it as it, for example, generalizes, in the "Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy," about the particular, or particle-like nature of matter. The third of the rules would seem to be the one Blake has explicitly in mind. By the use of inductive method, Newton concludes, in the third Rule of Reasoning dealing with matter, that "the hardness of the whole arises from the hardness of the parts, we therefore justly infer the hardness of the undivided particles not only of the bodies we feel but of all others" (p. 399).

Satan's refusal of form is a trait that helps the reader trace his lineage back to Urizen/Newton, as indeed Los and Enitharmon do later in Milton, when they discover that "Satan is Urizen / Drawn down by Orc & the Shadowy Female into Generation" (10.1-2). The fact that Satan is the last-born of Los and Enitharmon's children is significant, in the sense that his birth indicates that the limits of "particularization," of fragmentation, have been reached. As the "Miller of Eternity," Satan, who is also the most finely-ground grist of his "mill," has witnessed, both in the creation of his own body and that of the world as the body-image he sees from it, the matter of the fallen world divided as finely as it can be divided. Henceforth, in Blake's theatre of visionary action, the forces of particularization and fragmentation are to be made "subservient to the Great Harvest," made to look inward into living, visionary space, rather than outward into dead, Newtonian space. In so doing, all "human forms" will be "identified" and will therefore be able to put off that corpuscular identity which is selfhood. Under such circumstances, seemingly dead corpuscles will be perceived as actually being living seeds, which throw off their dead husks to become grapes and grain, which in turn throw off their individual identities, in the winepress and the mill, to become wine and bread, which in turn give up their identities in a massive and progressive Eucharist. Ultimately, all of creation becomes the flesh and blood of one body, the one seen at the end of Jerusalem walking "To & fro in Eternity as One Man reflecting each in each & clearly seen / And seeing …" (98.39-40). The task of bringing this Eucharist to pass is the task of all of Blake's visionary avatar-heroes, Milton, Los, and Albion among them.

Until such a putting off of selfhood is made to occur, however, Satan presides over all that is to be annihilated, known as the world of the Ulro, an "ultimate ratio" of dead particles acted upon by blind forces, both particles and forces in fact being reflexive to the wills of their self-effacing, self-deceiving creators. Satan's "own place," the very phrase commenting on the solipsistic nature of such a place by echoing Satan's speech in Paradise Lost,²⁷ is that of the presiding spirit, "Prince of the Starry Wheels." This title is yet another gibing reference to the Newtonian model of the universe, in which planets, moons, and comets revolve around "fixed stars" in circular or elliptical orbits, making their motion seem wheel-like. The proprietary role connoted by the phrase "own Place" should also serve to indicate that Satan, rather than being merely the superintendent of these "Starry Wheels," is their creator as well.

The particularization and fragmentation of the universe will never be more complete in any of Blake's other poems than it is at the end of the third plate of Milton. It is at this point that affairs begin to reverse, with the recognition, by Los, of Satan's true identity: the latter is the Supreme Being Newton refers to in the General Scholium, the God Newton creates in his own image through the use of concealed hypotheses and assumptions, all the while denying the existence of these hypotheses and assumptions and asserting that the will has no role in promulgating his view of the matter. In a flash of insight, Los identifies his multifaceted, yet unitary enemy as Satan/Newton/the God of Natural Religion/Locke's God revealed by Reason/Urizen.

O Satan my youngest born, art thou not Prince of the Starry Hosts
And of the Wheels of Heaven, to turn the Mills day & night?
Art thou not Newtons Pantocrator weaving the Woof of Locke[?]
(4.9-11)

The identification of Satan as "Newtons Pantocrator" is a direct reference to the General Scholium, in which Newton has occasion to talk of a "Being" who "governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called Lord God πα̂ντoκράτωρ, or Universal Ruler; for God is a relative word, and has a respect to servants; and Deity is the dominion of God not over his own body, as those imagine who fancy God to be the soul of the world, but over servants" (p. 544). The relevance of the idea of "Newtons Pantocrator" in a poem about Milton has to do with Blake's critique of Milton's allegiances in Paradise Lost, given in full in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 5. In that critique, Blake argues that Milton mistook the real Satan, in all of his dissembling humility, for God, who was actually immanent not in Heaven but in the energy of the fallen angels and in the realm of art they created by dint of that energy. The reason that Milton, Los, and Blake himself are all walking about in the "Eternity" (1.16) that frames Milton is to begin the task that culminates in the announcement of "All Human Forms identified" at the end of Jerusalem. The first step of that task seems to entail calling a pantocrator a pantocrator, thus identifying covert selfhood.

In one important sense, though Milton may have initially been deluded in his allegiances, he saw clearly enough that the Fall was fortunate. For it did lead Adam to turn his gaze from the outer world, which begins to fragment at the very moment that the angels fall, to the inner world, which may be retained as a paradise inviolate, notwithstanding the vicissitudes of "natural," external change. Adam and Eve do have to experience the selfhood that comes from the eating of forbidden fruit in order to realize the limits one faces in attempting to look outward for coherence. The outer world is a realm of fragmentation and particularization; it is the Hell depicted by Milton in Book II of Paradise Lost.

… many a Frozen, many a Fiery Alp,
Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and shades of death,
A Universe of death…²⁸

Outward lies a "Universe of death"; inward lies something else entirely. Surrounded by that universe as the result of eating the forbidden fruit, Adam, at the behest of Michael, looks inward and sees the deeds of all time spread out before him. As the result of this perception, Adam realizes the delusory nature of fallen time and fragmentation, and he heeds Michael's injunctions in the hope of possessing "A Paradise within … happier farr"²⁹ than the materialist Paradise he is about to leave.

Insight plays the crucial role in Adam's realization, as it does in the realizations of Milton, Los, and Blake. Jehovah the tempter must get into Adam and Eve, be ingested as the apple in what is essentially an "anti-Eucharist," in order to force them to look outward with his point of view and see the fragmentation that he sees. Similarly, Urizen must get into Milton, Satan must get into Los, and Newton must get into Blake, the last of these, at least, by means of reading, which is but another form of ingestion, witness Blake's reading of dining with Isaiah and Ezekiel in The Marriage. But whereas Isaiah and Ezekiel are "wholesome," in the sense that their "firm perswasion" on issues vouch-safes against the possibility of any deception on their part, Urizen, Satan, and Newton are not "wholesome," in the sense that they do practice deception in the name of reason. One of Blake's "Proverbs of Hell" is to the point: "All wholsom food is caught without a net or a trap" (MHH, pl. 7.13). The nature of the "poisonous" reason in question is to impose, with few or no symptoms, an alien point of view on the victim, under the guise of being "natural," thus substituting the selfhood of the "poisoner" for that of the "poisoned" and "killing" the "poisoned" individual, as is the case in "A Poison Tree."³⁰

Accordingly, when Los "identifies" Satan, or when Milton and Blake do the same thing to Urizen and Newton, respectively, two steps are involved. The first of these has to do with the recognition that the figure "identified" is only seen to be outside because he has "poisoned," or gotten inside, his victim. Los sees Satan as "Newton's Pantocrator" because Satan has managed to put that "Pantocrator" inside Los by "poisoning" him, either with food for the body or food for the mind, if in fact a distinction can be made between the two in the world of symbolic action of Blake's poetry.

The second step involved in "identifying" Satan has to do with replacing the "poison" of another selfhood imposing its views on its victim with the healthy food of self-nurture. Only by this means can one freely create the world in one's own image and then merge in full plenitude and likeness with that image.

Thus it is, at the point when fragmentation has reached its utmost limit and Satan is "identified" by Los that Blake, by means of a marvelous transposition, is able to turn the dead and potentially "poisonous" Newtonian corpuscles into living seeds of the life of humanity to come. At a later point in Milton, Los will be able to proclaim the plenitude of those seeds, harvested as grain and grape, the stuff of bread and wine, flesh and blood. "Fellow Labourers! The Great Vintage & Harvest is now upon Earth / The whole extent of the Globe is explored" (25.17-18). But at the outset of the struggle in Milton, the outcome seems very much in doubt. The seeds of the humanity to come must be made to grow, which means that they must be regarded and responded to as though there were a life force within their apparently lifeless exteriors, a life force in need of liberation and nurture. Only in such a manner can the collective power of the life force within be revealed, and only in such a manner can that collective life force merge so as to liberate its full apocalyptic energy, "To go forth," as Milton does at the end of the poem bearing his name, "to the Great Harvest & Vintage of the Nations" (43.1).

Notes

¹ The present essay grows out of a discussion and dialogue begun with George S. Rousseau in the meeting of the Literature and Science section of the 1978 MLA convention, where I delivered a paper entitled "Visionary Semantics: Blake, Newton, and the Language of Scientific Authority," currently in circulation. Rousseau himself delivered "Literature and Science: Decoding the State of the Field" in a special session convened to discuss the implications of his paper and the papers of those presenting in the section for new and future directions in literature and science. Rousseau's paper, slightly reworked, appears as "Literature and Science: The State of the Field," Isis, 9 (1978), 583-91. In it, he claims that the current vogue of structuralist and post-structuralist approaches to the history of ideas have rendered traditional approaches to literature and science moribund, if not obsolete. For example, the rise to prominence of Michel Foucault, "all of whose books inherently deal with literature and science," had the result of repelling "most serious students then [i.e., in the sixties] … and had the further effect of transforming old categories, in a sense rendering them obsolete. The question for someone writing about science and literature changed from 'what type of critic are you?' to 'how much self-consciousness do you have about your methodology?'" (p. 589). This essay constitutes a response to Rousseau's gloomy portrayal of the field and, it is hoped, one conceptual approach to the field that can arrogate to itself the close analysis of rhetoric that is at the heart of the structuralist and post-structuralist methodologies, while at the same time dealing with recognizable scientific and literary texts in a manner that is plausible, if not wholly conventional. In its original form, the essay was presented at a seminar chaired by John Neubauer and entitled "Conceptual Approaches to Literature and Science in the Eighteenth Century." The seminar was convened at the 1979 meeting of ASECS, held in Atlanta.

² See Science and Imagination (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1956), ch. V, "The Scientific Background of Swift's Voyage to Laputa," pp. 110-54.

³The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, commentator Harold Bloom (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965), pl. 98, 11. 27 ff. Subsequent references to Blake will be to this text, and will appear in the text of the essay, cited by plate, plate and line, or page and line, as appropriate.

⁴ Newton's conception of absolute space is made clear in Book I, Section II, of the Principia. The passage quoted in the text of the essay may be found in Sir Isaac Newton, Principia, trans. Andrew Motte, rev. Florian Cajori, 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1934), p. 549. Subsequent references to the Principia will be to this edition and will be made by page number only in the text of the essay. The rationale for omitting the volume number is that the Cajori edition uses running pagination, even though it is printed in two volumes. Newton's conception of absolute time, i.e., a framed, six-thousand-year Biblical chronology, is made clear elsewhere, in Observations on the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John in Two Parts, 2 vols. (London: J. Roberts, 1733)…

⁵ See note 4 for Newton on absolute space and time.

⁶ See Nicolson's Newton Demands the Muse: Newton's "Opticks" and the Eighteenth Century Poets (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946); Schwartz's Samuel Johnson and the New Science (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971); and Jacob's The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1 689-1720 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976).

⁷ On Pope and Addison, see Newton Demands the Muse, pp. 123-64. On Johnson, see Samuel Johnson … Science, pp. 59-93.

⁸ A fuller elaboration than can be made here has been made in my "Blake on Space and Time," forthcoming in Science/Technology and the Humanities. Briefly, it might be noted that the Four Zoas, as they approach the condition of instantaneous change at the end of Jerusalem, also approach the condition of light, under circumstances in which the newly merged categories of space and time become one and the same, existing in a continuum. The energy exhibited by the Four Zoas, which appears as consuming fire to the fallen and as delight to the redeemed, is derived from the ability of the "matter" of the Zoas to change instantaneously—with the speed of light, in fact. The space-time continuum Blake is describing in his visionary way, a continuum in which energy is liberated by matter moving at the speed of light, is, in its essentials, very close to the continuum described by Einstein in his world-shaking equation e=mc².

⁹ For a good and pithy restatement of this position for a modern critical audience, see Stanley E. Fish, "Normal Circumstances, Literal Language, Direct Speech Acts, the Ordinary, the Everyday, the Obvious, What Goes without Saying, and Other Special Cases," Critical Inquiry, 4 (1978), 625-44.

¹⁰ For Gleckner's discussion, see "Most Holy Forms of Thought: Some Observations on Blake and Language," ELH, 41 (1974), 555-77. My "Visionary Semantics" is discussed in note 1.

¹¹ The sense is that of a corpus, the term used by linguists to describe a body of utterances made and recorded diachronically, as opposed to the total number of possible utterances in the language deployed synchronically. See Claude Levi-Strauss, Le cru et le cuit (Paris: Plon, 1964), especially the conclusion. See also Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 43 ff.

¹²The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pls. 22-23, makes as much clear. According to Blake, "The Worship of God is. Honouring his gifts in other men, each according to his genius." And "if Jesus is the Greatest man, you ought to love him in the greatest degree." The Gospels were written by those who loved such a "man of genius," and thus the Gospels exhibited the genius of those who wrote them.

¹³ See Ault's Visionary Physics: Blake's Response to Newton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); his "Incommensurability and Interconnection in Blake's Anti-Newtonian Text," Studies in Romanticism, 16 (1977), 277-303; and Curtis's "Blake and the 'Moment of Time': An Eighteenth-Century Controversy in Mathematics," Philological Quarterly, 51 (1972), 460-70.

¹⁴ See Visionary Physics and Newton Demands the Muse.

¹⁵The Rhetoric of Science: A Study of Scientific Imagery and Ideas in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), p. 97.

¹⁶ For a full discussion of this "father-son" relationship, see Frank E. Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 23-35, 51-67.

¹⁷ See "Incommensurability and Interconnection," cited above. See also J. E. McGuire and P. M. Rattansi, "Newton and the 'Pipes of Pan,'" Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 21 (1966), 108-43, also cited by Ault, p. 277n.

¹⁸ Newton begins by talking of the 'five primary planets, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn" (p. 403), then proves that the earth exhibits similar properties of motion, talking finally of the six in the General Scholium, p. 543.

¹⁹ See note 8.

²⁰Visionary Physics, pp. 96-140.

²¹ In a letter to his brother James, dated January 30, 1803, Blake writes that he goes "on Merrily with my Greek & Latin … as I find it very Easy…" (in Blake, ed. Erdman, p. 696).

²² For a fuller discussion of Newton's meaning and his dilemma, see Colin Murray Turbayne, The Myth of Metaphor (1962; rpt. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1970), pp. 44-45.

²³Harper's Latin Dictionary, eds. Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, rev. ed. (1879; rpt. New York: Harper Brothers, 1907), p. 750.

²⁴ The connotation is consistent and of long standing, going all the way back to Blake's earliest preserved writings. See, for example, the Ossianic fragment "then She bore Pale desire," contemporaneous with Poetical Sketches (1783), in Blake, ed. Erdman, pp. 437-39.

²⁵ For Ault's comments, see Visionary Physics, pp. 155-56.

²⁶ These rules, found on pp. 398-400, attempt to standardize the causes of apparently similar phenomena, the covert motivation being to move toward a view of the universe in which formal cause and efficient cause proceed from one and the same source—God.

²⁷ "The mind is its own place, and in it self/Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n" (II.254-55).

²⁸ Li. 620-22.

²⁹ XII.587.

³⁰ The speaker of that poem puts his selfhood into the seemingly selfless task of tending a tree, rather than confronting the friend who angers him. As the result of his choice of strategies, the tree produces an apple which, like the apple in the Garden, is a deceptive form of selfhood.

And I waterd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with my smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles
(II. 5-8)

When the speaker's friend steals, and presumably eats, the apple, he is seen to be "outstretched beneath the tree" (I. 16)—"dead," in the sense of having been deprived of his free and autonomous selfhood. For the speaker, now "inside" his erstwhile friend, has taken over that selfhood. Without the full Gothic trappings, the concept seems very much like that of the vampire, interest in which grew and evolved during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. On the other hand, Blake may be viewed as being caught up in the same currents of thought that led Sade to write of the utter possession of one individual by another. See Michel Foucault, "Language to Infinity," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 53-67, esp. 60-63, 65-66.