Turn'd outward, barr'd, and petrify'd against the infinite.

The only way out of this self-made prison is through the Human
Imagination, which is thus the Saviour of the world. By "Imagination"
Blake would seem to mean all that we include under sympathy, insight,
idealism, and vision, as opposed to self-centredness, logical argument,
materialism and concrete, scientific fact. For him, Imagination is the
one great reality, in it alone he sees a human faculty that touches both
nature and spirit, thus uniting them in one. The language of Imagination
is Art, for it speaks through symbols so that men shut up in their
selfhoods are thus ever reminded that nature herself is a symbol. When
this is once fully realised, we are freed from the delusion imposed upon
us from without by the seemingly fixed reality of external things. 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