If we
consider all material things as symbols, their suggestiveness, and
consequently their reality, is continually expanding. "I rest not from
my great task," he cries--
To open the eternal worlds, to open the immortal eyes
Of man inwards into the worlds of thought, into eternity,
Ever expanding in the bosom of God, the human imagination.
In Blake's view the qualities most sorely needed by men are not
restraint and discipline, obedience or a sense of duty, but love and
understanding. "Men are admitted into heaven, not because they have
curbed and governed their passions, or have no passions, but because
they have cultivated their understandings." To understand is three parts
of love, and it is only through Imagination that we _can_ understand. It
is the lack of imagination that is at the root of all the cruelties and
all the selfishness in the world. Until we can feel for all that lives,
Blake says in effect, until we can respond to the joys and sorrows of
others as quickly as to our own, our imagination is dull and incomplete:
Each outcry of the hunted Hare
A fibre from the Brain does tear
A Skylark wounded in the wing
A Cherubim does cease to sing.
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