DIARY ACCOUNT OF BLAKE
evil on which he repeated his former assertions more decidedly. He allowed indeed that there is error, mistake &c. And if these be evil—then there is evil but these are only negations. Nor would he admit that any education should be attempted except that of cultivation of the imagination & fine arts.—'What are called the vices in the natural world are the highest sublimities in the spiritual world.' When I asked whether if he had been a father he would not have grieved if his child had become vicious or a great criminal. He ansd. 'I must not regard when I am endeavouring to think rightly my own any more than other people's weaknesses. And when I again remarked that this doctrine put an end to all exertion or even wish to change anything, he made no reply.—
We spoke of the Devil & I observed that when a child I thought the Manichaean doctrine or that of two principles, a rational one. He assented to this & in confirmation asserted that he did not believe in the omnipotence of God. The language of the Bible on that subject is only poetical or allegorical. Yet soon after he denied that the natural world is anything. It is all nothing & Satan's empire is the empire of nothing. He reverted soon to his favourite expression 'my visions.' I saw Milton in Imagination And he told me to beware of being misled by his Paradise Lost In particular he wished me to shew the falsehood of his doctrine that the pleasures of sex arose from the fall. The fall could not produce any pleasure. I answered the fall produced a state of evil in which there was a mixture of good or pleasure. And in that sense the fall may be said to produce the pleasure. But he replied that the fall produced only generation & death. And then he went off upon a rambling state[-ment?] of a Union of sexes in Man as in God, an Androgynous state in which I could not follow him—As he spoke of Milton's appearing to him, I asked whether he resembled
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