Edward Young (c. 3 July 1683 – 5 April 1765) was an English poet, critic, philosopher and theologian, best remembered for Night-Thoughts Early life. The figure – presumably the personification of Faith – ostensibly finds solace in his book, which Blake represents as a symbol of fallen Reason, though the figure is wholly absorbed in it; his head is immersed in its pages and so the figure cannot see where he is walking so that, in this way, Blake critiques faith led by Reason.The figure’s transition from life to death, if guided by Reason, is an unseen path. He depicts a male figure walking across a bridge, with surging waters underneath, reading a book, which may possibly be the Holy Scriptures. Pic: Eduardo Paolozzi’s bronze statue of Newton, outside the British Library in London. In another world. Moreover, Blake associated Locke’s concept of reflection with Memory– of ideas abstracted from their objects. D. W. Odell argues that Young belongs to the tradition of natural philosophy as it was espoused by Thomas Aquinas, Richard Hooker and the Cambridge Platonists and according to him, Young believed that the natural world was analogous to the Divine Nature – that God is “written in nature” – so that, in it, may be read evidence of human immortality as well as the existence of God. The poem was inspired by the successive deaths of his stepdaughter, in 1736; her husband, in 1740; and Young’s wife, in 1741. The fool represents deists and Nature-worshippers like Young, for whom the natural world becomes a reflection of the Divine Image. (In Nagoya they study everything, but that’s another story.) By Nature's law, what may be, may be now; There's no prerogative in human hours: In human hearts what bolder thought can rise, Than man's presumption on tomorrow's dawn? He asks “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”, that is, he who fashioned Innocence.In the line, “Could frame thy fearful symmetry”, the modal verb ‘could’ connotes the potential for creation: God has the potential ability to create evil if he so wishes. He believed that classicism is the Daughter of Memory and Reason and so lacks Inspiration or Imagination – “We do not want either Greek or Roman Models if we are but just & true to our own Imaginations” – and the separation of Reason and Imagination is expressed in,The Spectre is the Reasoning Power in Man; and when separated,From Imagination, and closing itself as in steel, in a Ratio,Of things of Memory. The illustration on the verso of the title page for Night the Firs.He depicts two aerial spirits carrying a scroll towards an aged, Urizen-like figure sitting under a withered tree – possibly the Tree of Death which Blake associated with Science and Reason – who is transcribing from the scroll onto a tablet of stone. “Enchained under the ‘Philosophy of the Five Senses’, Man’s capacity for Vision is restricted, so that Reason and sensation permits Man to see the ratio of things, which is himself only, and so is confined to the material world by a narrowness of Vision and a constrictive Selfhood, whereas Imagination enables the freedom of perception towards creative self-development.” For Blake, on the the hand, “Man is not fashioned by the impressions he receives external to the mind, but rather fashions himself and his reality through a cognitive and imaginative engagement with the outside world.” One cannot therefore simply be “born into” an outside world that one has already helped to imaginatively construct.Blake’s opposition to Locke has been well documented by scholars and it is indeed a critical commonplace that Blake was generally opposed to Enlightenment thinking, notably the rationalist epistemology of Locke, the empirical philosophy of Bacon, and Newton’s systematic view of the Universe and his notion of God as the Divine Architect which Blake associated with Deism.Blake associated the tyranny of Deism with the Urizenic tendencies of Locke and the materialism of Newton, who worships “The God of This World, & the Goddess Nature, Mystery” as well as the philosophies of Voltaire and Rousseau, precursors of the French Revolution, who are “Frozen Sons of the feminine Tabernacle of Bacon, Newton & Locke”.Urizen is the personification of fallen Reason, and hence the embodiment of Blake’s critique of Deism, of Newtonian science – in that he delimits space via mathematical abstraction, which is the Limit of Contraction – and Lockean rationalism – in that he shrinks the all flexible senses of man until he sees only the ratio of things, which is the Limit of Opacity.Another side-profile of the Newtonian mind.
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