Abstract
Figures derived from the concepts of outline and ‘the bounded’ are to be discovered in every period of Blake’s work. I have suggested elsewhere how important is a certain ambiguity about this, especially in the period before about 1800 (Larrissy, 1985). On the one hand, ‘The bounded is loathed by its possessor’ (There is No Natural Religion [b], E2), on the other, ‘Truth has bounds. Error none’ (Book of Los, 4: 30, E92). One thing that can be inferred from this is that Blake feels an ambivalence about his own activity as an artist. He is committed to definiteness and firm outline, and to the idea — for which he finds some Neoplatonic support — that the Infinite can be apprehended through definite form. At the same time he rejects the more essentially Neoplatonic idea that the Infinite is, in the last analysis, incompatible with boundedness. But he is concerned lest he become a priestly Druid rather than a Bard; lest his influence should set bounds to the Infinite for himself and his readers, becoming the cause of ‘imposition’ — an idea about which he was more concerned than The Marriage of Heaven and Hell passages (plates 12 and 20) might suggest.
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Notes
Robert E. Schofield, Mechanism and Materialism: British Natural Philosophy in an Age of Reason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970) p. 121.
E.A.H. [Hitchcock], Remarks upon Alchemy and the Alchemist (Boston: 1857) p. 106.
James Price, MD FRS, An account of the Some Experiments on Mercury, Silver and Gold (1782; 2nd edn. 1783).
J.H.S. Green, ‘The Last Alchemist’, Discovery 22 (Jan. 1961) pp. 19, 21.
Isaac Frost, Two Systems of Astronomy, the Newtonian and the System in Accordance with the Holy Scriptures (1846).
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in sixteenth and seventeenth century England (London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1971) p. 378.
Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (1972; 2nd edn. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976) pp. 287–305
Henry J. Cadbury, ‘Early Quakerism and Uncanonical Lore’, Harvard Theological Review 40 (1947) pp. 204–5.
S. Foster Damon, ‘De Brahm: Alchemist’, Ambix 24 (July 1977) pp. 78–82.
Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy in Collected Works, trans. R.F.C. Hull, ed. Sir H. Read, M. Fordham and G. Adler, 20 vols (London: Routledge, 1953–79) vol. 12, p. 288.
Richard S. Westfall, Reason, Experiment and Mysticism in the Scientific Revolution, ed. M.L. Righini Bonelli and W.R. Shea (London: Macmillan, 1975) p. 198
See also J.R. Partington, A History of Chemistry, 4 vols (London: Macmillan, 1961–70) vol. 2, pp. 142–8.
Compare Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: an introduction to philosophical medicine in the era of the Renaissance (Basel and New York: J. Prager, 1958) pp. 91–2.
Compare H.J. Sheppard, ‘Egg Symbolism in Alchemy’, Ambix 6 (August, 1958) pp. 140–8.
Lapidus [Stephen Skinner], In Pursuit of Gold: Alchemy in Theory and Practice (London: Spearman, 1976) p. 26.
Compare Jacques Derrida, ‘The Double Session’, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) pp. 212–13.
Hans Holbein, Historiarum Veteris Testamenti Icones (1543) Exodus 33.
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Larrissy, E. (1994). ‘Self-Imposition’, Alchemy, and the Fate of the ‘Bound’ in Later Blake. In: Clark, S., Worrall, D. (eds) Historicizing Blake. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23477-6_4
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