ABSTRACT
Satan is the selfhood or, as Emanuel Swedenborg says, the proprium, which, when so cut off, considers itself as a self-sustained and independent person. Love of self rules in Swedenborg's hells, and his Satan is the sum or aggregate of all self-loving spirits, a composite figure. William Blake's specter Satan is "a ratio of the five Senses," and "a ratio of memory," since sense-data alone are available to consciousness cut off from imaginative influx. Nature, Satan supposes, being a simpler mechanism than the human mind, must be "easier" to guide and safely left to the irrational; to control human conduct, only he himself, the principle of reason, is, so he thinks, fitted. The fall of Satan, as Blake reinterprets the myth, comes about through no splendid gesture of rebellion. His sense of injured merit is sincere; for he believes in his own laws.
