— 10 —
Like Swedenborg, Blake believed in the "Grand Man". Swedenborg says in "Arcana Coelestia", his most famous book (1749-56), "the whole Heaven is a Grand Man (Maximus Homo) and it is called a Grand Man, because it corresponds to the Lord's divine Human; and by so much as an angel or spirit or a man on earth has from the Lord, they also are men. . . . All things in the human body, in general and particular, correspond most exactly to the Grand Man and as it were to so many societies there." The same idea of a composite individual Blake puts forth in the prophetic Book Jerusalem:
"We live as one man, for, contracting our infinite senses
We behold multitudes, or expanding we behold as one,
As one Man all the universal family and that one man
We call Jesus the Christ."
Besides this one Man, the Divine Saviour, there were lesser "composites", called "states", these come into existence when imagination in the person of some imaginative man perceives them, as sound comes into existence when we hear it and light when we see it.
"We are not individuals but states,
Combinations of individuals."
"Man passes on, but states remain for ever, he passes
through them like the traveller who may as well suppose
that the places he has passed through exist no more, as
a man may suppose that the states he has passed through
exist no more."
In his youth Blake racked his mind over the riddle of human existence. In the Book of Thel, which forms a transition between his lyrical poems and his prophetic books, he laments the limitations of the flesh. All other animate and inanimate things seem happy in the conscious discharge of their earthly duties; why does man alone suffer from a perversion of the senses by
