It seems clear, at any rate, that no claim for a ‘consistency’ which would imply freedom from self-contradiction can be validly made for Blake.  His treatment of the problem of evil is enough to show how very far he was from that clarity of thought without which even prophets are liable, when the time comes, to fall into disrepute.  ‘Plato,’ said Blake, ’knew of nothing but the virtues and vices, and good and evil.  There is nothing in all that.  Everything is good in God’s eyes.’  And this is the perpetual burden of his teaching.  ’Satan’s empire is the empire of nothing’; there is no such thing as evil—­it is a mere ‘negation.’  And the ‘moral virtues,’ which attempt to discriminate between right and wrong, are the idlest of delusions; they are merely ‘allegories and dissimulations,’ they ‘do not exist.’  Such was one of the most fundamental of Blake’s doctrines; but it requires only a superficial acquaintance with his writings to recognise that their whole tenour is an implicit contradiction of this very belief.  Every page he wrote contains a moral exhortation; bad thoughts and bad feelings raised in him a fury of rage and indignation which the bitterest of satirists never surpassed.  His epigrams on Reynolds are masterpieces of virulent abuse; the punishment which he devised for Klopstock—­his impersonation of ’flaccid fluency and devout sentiment’—­is unprintable; as for those who attempt to enforce moral laws, they shall be ‘cast out,’ for they ‘crucify Christ with the head downwards.’  The contradiction is indeed glaring.  ‘There is no such thing as wickedness,’ Blake says in effect, ‘and you are wicked if you think there is.’  If it is true that evil does not exist, all Blake’s denunciations are so much empty chatter; and, on the other hand, if there is a real distinction between good and bad, if everything, in fact, is not good in God’s eyes—­then why not say so?  Really Blake, as politicians say, ‘cannot have it both ways.’

But of course, his answer to all this is simple enough.  To judge him according to the light of reason is to make an appeal to a tribunal whose jurisdiction he had always refused to recognise as binding.  In fact, to Blake’s mind, the laws of reason were nothing but a horrible phantasm deluding and perplexing mankind, from whose clutches it is the business of every human soul to free itself as speedily as possible.  Reason is the ‘Spectre’ of Blake’s mythology, that Spectre, which, he says,

    Around me night and day
    Like a wild beast guards my way.

It is a malignant spirit, for ever struggling with the ‘Emanation,’ or imaginative side of man, whose triumph is the supreme end of the universe.  Ever since the day when, in his childhood, Blake had seen God’s forehead at the window, he had found in imaginative vision the only reality and the only good.  He beheld the things of this world ’not with, but through, the eye’: 

    With my inward Eye, ’tis an old Man grey,
    With my outward, a Thistle across my way.