A Bastard Kind of Reasoning: William Blake and Geometry (The SUNY Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century)

What do Einsteinian relativity, eighteenth-century field theory, Neoplatonism, and the overthrow of three-dimensional perspective have in common? The poet and artist William Blake's geometry —the conception of space-time that informs his work across media and genres. In this illuminating, inventive new study, Andrew M. Cooper reveals Blake to be the vehicle of a single imaginative vision in which art, literature, physics, and metaphysics stand united. Romantic-period physics was not, as others have assumed, materialist. Blake's cosmology forms part of his age's deep reevaluation of body and soul, of matter and Heaven, and even probes what it is to understand understanding, reason, and substance. Far from being anti-Newtonian, Blake was prophetically post-Newtonian. His poetry and art realized the revolutionary potential of Enlightened natural philosophy even as that philosophy still needed an Einstein for its physics to snap fully into focus. Blake's mythmaking exploits the imaginative reach of formal abstractions to generate a model of how sensation imparts physical extension to the world. More striking still, Cooper shows how Blake's art of vision leads us today to visualize four-dimensional concepts of space, time, and Man for ourselves. Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction Geometry and Blake’s Newton Print Chapter 1 “Oh, but you’re just analogizing ...” Chapter 2 Learning to Read in a Force Field: Songs of Innocence, Hartleyan Psychology, and the Physics of R. J. Boscovich Boscovich’s Proto-field Theory and Priestley’s “Matter in a Nutshell” Fractal Vision, Miracles, Bayesian Probability, and Hume in Innocence Hartleyan “Decomplex” Ideas in Reading “Secondary Vocality” and Potential Association in Innocence and Experience Chapter 3 The Book of Urizen as a Vortex of Perception Chapter 4 A Brief Particular History of the Fourth Dimension of Space, with Special Reference to Milton: A Poem Blake’s Kleinian Four-Dimensional Space and Some English Literary Antecedents Dante, Milton, and the Gluing Together of Two Spheres Henry More: “Spissitude,” the Multidimensional Ogdoaz, and Blake’s Vortex Chapter 5 The Neoplatonism of Blake’s Mundane Soul More’s Materialism Plato’s Receptacle and the Nonsensation of Anaisthesis The Four Zoas as Plotinean Contemplation, Whitehead’s “Extensive Continuum” The Influence of Abraham Tucker and “The Vision” Chapter 6 Berkeley: Very Close, but No Cigar Conclusion The Unified Space-Time of The Vision of the Last Judgment Notes Works Cited Index "Ranges widely and deeply across William Blake's oeuvre to show how his post-Newtonian vision of space-time anticipates Einsteinian relativity"-- Provided by publisher