Abstinence sows sand all over
      The ruddy limbs & flaming hair,
    But Desire Gratified
      Plants fruits of life & beauty there.[76]

Only an extraordinarily pure nature or a singularly abandoned one could confidently proclaim such a dangerous doctrine.  But in Blake’s creed, as Swinburne has said, “the one thing unclean is the belief in uncleanness.”

It is easy to see that this faculty which Blake calls “Imagination” entails of itself naturally and inevitably the Christian doctrine of self-sacrifice.  It is in Milton that Blake most fully develops his great dogma of the eternity of sacrifice.  “One must die for another through all eternity”; only thus can the bonds of “selfhood” be broken.  Milton, just before his renunciation, cries—­

    I will go down to self-annihilation and eternal death
    Lest the Last Judgment come and find me unannihilate,
    And I be seiz’d and giv’n into the hands of my own Selfhood.

For, according to Blake, personal love or selfishness is the one sin which defies redemption.  This whole passage in Milton (Book i., pp. 12, 13) well repays study, for one feels it to be alive with meaning, holding symbol within symbol.  Blake’s symbolism, and his fourfold view of nature and of man, is a fascinating if sometimes a despairing study.  Blake has explained very carefully the way in which the visionary faculty worked in him:—­

What to others a trifle appears
Fills me full of smiles or tears;
For double the vision my Eyes do see,
And a double vision is always with me. 
With my inward Eye, ’tis an old Man grey,
With my outward, a Thistle across my way.

* * * * *

Now I a fourfold vision see,
And a fourfold vision is given to me;
’Tis fourfold in my supreme delight,
And threefold in soft Beulah’s night,
And twofold Always.  May God us keep
From Single vision & Newton’s sleep![77]

He says twofold always, for everything was of value to Blake as a symbol, as a medium for expressing a still greater thing behind it.  It was in this way that he looked at the human body, physical beauty, splendour of colour, insects, animate, states, and emotions, male and female, contraction and expansion, division and reunion, heaven and hell.

When his imagination was at its strongest, his vision was fourfold, corresponding to the fourfold division of the Divine Nature, Father, Son, Spirit, and the fourth Principle, which may be described as the Imagination of God, without which manifestation would not be possible.[78] These principles, when condensed and limited so as to be seen by us, may take the form of Reason, Emotion, Energy and Sensation, or, to give them Boehme’s names, Contraction, Expansion, Rotation, and Vegetative life.  These, in turn, are associated with the four states of humanity or “atmospheres,”