If thou humblest thyself, thou humblest me. 
    Thou also dwellst in Eternity. 
    Thou art a man:  God is no more: 
    Thy own humanity learn to adore,
    For that is my Spirit of Life.[75]

Similarly the union of man with God is the whole gist of that apparently most chaotic of the prophetic books, Jerusalem.

The proof of the divinity of man, it would seem, lies in the fact that he desires God, for he cannot desire what he has not seen.  This view is summed up in the eight sentences which form the little book (about 2 inches long by 11/2 inches broad) in the British Museum, Of Natural Religion.  Here are four of them.

     Man’s perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception, he
     perceives more than sense (tho’ ever so acute) can discover.

     None could have other than natural or organic thoughts if he had
     none but organic perceptions.

     Man’s desires are limited by his perceptions, none can desire what
     he has not perceiv’d.

     The desires and perceptions of man untaught by anything but organs
     of sense, must be limited to objects of sense.

The solution of the difficulty is given in large script on the last of the tiny pages of the volume: 

     Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is.

According to Blake, the universe as we know it, is the result of the fall of the one life from unity into division.  This fall has come about through man seeking separation, and taking the part for the whole. (See Jacob Boehme’s view, pp. 94, 95 above, which is identical with that of Blake.) “Nature,” therefore, or the present form of mental existence, is the result of a contraction of consciousness or “selfhood,” a tendency for everything to shrink and contract about its own centre.  This condition or “state” Blake personifies as “Urizen” (=Reason) a great dramatic figure who stalks through the prophetic books, proclaiming himself “God from Eternity to Eternity,” taking up now one characteristic and now another, but ever of the nature of materialism, opaqueness, contraction.  In the case of man, the result of this contraction is to close him up into separate “selfhoods,” so that the inlets of communication with the universal spirit have become gradually stopped up; until now, for most men, only the five senses (one of the least of the many possible channels of communication) are available for the uses of the natural world.  Blake usually refers to this occurrence as the “flood “:  that is, the rush of general belief in the five senses that overwhelmed or submerged the knowledge of all other channels of wisdom, except such arts as were saved, which are symbolised under the names of Noah (=Imagination) and his sons.  He gives a fine account of this in Europe (p. 8), beginning—­