ABSTRACT
To set the name of William Blake beside that of Berkeley is in itself to remove discussion from the order of philosophy, of which Berkeley was so pure an exponent. To introduce as a third term the apocalyptic concept of a new age must seem an unthinkable degradation of Berkeley's serene thought. The difference between Berkeley's calm challenge to the philosophy of Bacon, Newton, and Locke and Blake's embattled zeal is that between a declaration of war and war itself. Berkeley had published his Principles of Human Knowledge, 'wherein the chief causes of Error and difficulty in the Sciences, with the grounds of Scepticism, Atheism and Irreligion are inquired into' in 1710. There is pleasant eighteenth-century coolness in Berkeley's immaterialism, a world away from Blake's impassioned defense of essentially the same point of view in a letter to an unimaginative patron who had complained that his work was too visionary.
