every atom of the cosmos was literally spiritual and holy; the divine
and the human, the soul and the flesh, were absolutely one; God and Man
were only two aspects of pervasive "mercy, pity, peace, and love."
Nothing else had genuine reality. The child, its vision being as yet
unclouded by false teachings, saw the universe thus truly; and Blake,
therefore, in _Songs of Innocence_, gave glimpses of the world as the
child sees it,--a guileless existence amid the peace that passes all
understanding. He hymned the sanctity of animal life: even the tiger,
conventionally an incarnation of cruelty, was a glorious creature of
divine mould; to slay or cage a beast was, the _Auguries of Innocence_
protested, to incur anathema. The _Book of Thel_ allegorically showed
the mutual interdependence of all creation, and reprehended the maiden
shyness that shrinks from merging its life in the sacrificial union
which sustains the whole.

To Blake the great enemy of truth was the cold logical reason, a
truncated part of Man's spirit, which was incapable of attaining wisdom,
and which had fabricated those false notions that governed the practical
world and constrained the natural feelings. Instances of the unhappiness
caused by such constraint, he gave in _Songs of Experience_, where _The
Garden of Love_ describes the blighting curse which church law had laid
upon free love. To overthrow intellectualism and discipline, Man must
liberate his most precious faculty, the imagination, which alone can
reveal the spiritual character of the universe and the beauty that life
will wear when the feelings cease to be unnaturally confined. Temporarily
Blake rejoiced when the French Revolution seemed to usher in the
millennium of freedom and peace; and his interpretation of its earlier
incidents in his poem on that theme[2] illustrates in style and spirit
the highly original nature of his mind. More than any predecessor he
understood how the peculiarly poetical possibilities of sentimentalism