The purely mystic element in Berkeley’s philosophy may be illustrated by the charm it had for William Blake, a man of whom Mr. Swinburne says that ’his hardest facts were the vaguest allegories of other men.  To him all symbolic things were literal, all literal things symbolic.  About his path and about his bed, around his ears and under his eyes, an infinite play of spiritual life seethed and swarmed or shone and sang.’[639] To this strange artist-poet, in whose powerful but fantastic mind fact and imagination were inextricably blended, whose most intimate friends could not tell where talent ended and hallucination began, whom Wordsworth delighted in,[640] and whose conversation in any country walk is described as having a marvellous power of kindling the imagination, and of making nature itself seem strangely more spiritual, almost as if a new sense had awakened in the mind of his hearer[641]—­to William Blake the theories of Berkeley supplied a philosophy which exactly suited him.[642] Blake’s ruling idea was that of an infinite spiritual life so imprisoned under the bondage of material forces[643] that only by spiritual perception—­a power given to all to cultivate—­can true existence be discovered.[644] He longed for the full emancipation which a better life would bring.

At the very close of the century, in the year 1798, an elaborate treatise on enthusiasm was published by Richard Graves, Dean of Ardagh, a man of considerable learning and earnest piety.  It is needless to enter into the arguments of his ’Essay on the Character of the Apostles and Evangelists.’  Its object was to prove they were wholly free from the errors of enthusiasts; that in their private conduct, and in the government of the Church, they were ’rational and sober, prudent and cautious, mild and decorous, zealous without violence, and steady without obstinacy; that their writings are plain, calm, and unexaggerated, ... natural and rational, ... without any trace of spiritual pride, any arrogant claims to full perfection of virtue; ... teaching heartfelt piety to God without any affectation of rapturous ecstasy or extravagant fervour.’[645] On the other hand, he illustrates the extravagances into which enthusiasts have been led, from the history of Indian mystics and Greek Neoplatonists, from Manichaeans and Montanists, from monastic saints, from the Beghards of Germany, the Fratricelli of Italy, the Illuminati of Spain, the Quietists of France, from Anabaptists, Quakers, and French prophets.  He refers to what had been written against enthusiasm within the preceding century by Stillingfleet, Bayle, Locke, Hicks, Shaftesbury, Lord Lyttelton, Barrington, Chandler, Archibald Campbell, Stinstra, Warburton, Lavington, and Douglas—­a list the length of which is in itself a sufficient evidence of the sensitive interest which the subject had excited.  He remarks on the attempts made by Chubb and Morgan to attach to Christianity the opprobrium of being an enthusiastic religion, and reprobates the assertions of the younger Dodwell that faith is not founded on argument.  The special occasion of his work[646] arose out of more recent events—­the publication at Geneva in 1791 of Boulanger’s ‘Christianity Unmasked,’ and the many similar efforts made during the period of the French Revolution to represent fanaticism and Christianity as synonymous terms.