Plac’d in the order of the stars, when the five senses whelm’d
    In deluge o’er the earth-born man, then turn’d the fluxile eyes
    Into two stationary orbs, concentrating all things. 
    The ever-varying spiral ascents to the heavens of heavens
    Were bended downward, and the nostrils’ golden gates shut,
    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 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.

    Auguries of Innocence.

When we feel like this, we will go forth to help, not because we are prompted by duty or religion or reason, but because the cry of the weak and ignorant so wrings our heart that we cannot leave it unanswered.  Cultivate love and understanding then, and all else will follow.  Energy, desire, intellect; dangerous and deadly forces in the selfish and impure, become in the pure in heart the greatest forces for good.  What mattered to Blake, and the only thing that mattered, was the purity of his soul, the direction of his will or desire, as Law and Boehme would have put it.  Once a man’s desire is in the right direction, the more he gratifies it the better;