ABSTRACT
In Visions of the Daughters of Albion, William Blake made his most passionate assertion of the rights of instinct, and there the persistent cry of Oothoon is that individuality is its own justification. Thus Blake parts company for ever with those who live in fear of instinct, just as he parts company with those who believe that the expression of instinct is the whole purpose of life. In Blake’s conception duality is an inherent condition of human life; for at birth man is separated from God-as-essence in order that man may have consciousness of individual life. Blake too is to be measured by his attitude to love. Blake’s idea of passion as a heightened and enlarged state of the soul forbids the notion that he could be the advocate of the weak and craving desire for spiritual props. They do not “learn to bear the beams of love” whose love is the flickering light of will-o’-the-wisp.
