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William Blake as Natural Philosopher, 1788-1795 takes seriously William Blake’s wish to be read as a natural philosopher, particularly in his early illuminated works, and reveals the way that poetry and visual art were for Blake an imaginative way of philosophizing. Blake’s poetry and designs reveal a consistent preoccupation with eighteenth-century natural philosophical debates concerning the properties of the physical world, the nature of the soul, and God’s relationship to the material universe. This book traces the history of these debates and examines images and ideas in Blake’s illuminated books that mark the development of the monist pantheism, which contends that every material thing is in its essence God, to the idealism of his later period, which casts the natural world as degenerate and illusory. The book argues that Blake’s philosophical thought was not as monolithic as has been previously characterized, and that pantheism is important to understanding his early works because it entails an ethics that respects the interconnected divinity of all material objects – not just humans – which in turn spurns hierarchical power structures.
William Blake’s complex poems and images make formidable demands. The first words that come to mind for most of his struggling reader/viewers may be “religion” or “imagination." But there is a strong critical tradition of approaching Blake’s work from the less expected angle of science and philosophy. Writing In the tradition of such foundational critics as Jacob Bronowski and Donald Ault, Joe Fletcher leaves no question that he is their worthy successor. — Morris Eaves, Professor of English and Richard L. Turner Professor of Humanities, Director, A. W. Mellon Graduate Program in the Digital Humanities, the School of Arts & Sciences, University of Rochester, Co-editor of William Blake Archive and Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly
List of Figures; Acknowledgments; Introduction: “We Who Are Philosophers”: Blake’s Early Metaphysics; Chapter One A Sense of the Infinite: Leibniz, Hume and Panpsychism in the Early Tractates; Chapter Two Soul Matter: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Monist Pantheism; Chapter Three Breathing Dust: Erasmus Darwin and Blake’s Regenerative Materialism; Chapter Four “Horrible Forms of Deformity”: The Urizen Cycle and Vitalist Materialism; Coda: The Ghost of Pantheism; Bibliography; Index.