Poem of the week: Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau

William Blake was no enemy of science, but he also recognised the limits to Enlightenment rationality, as this poem shows
Image of William Blake in St Mary's Church, Battersea
Seeing through the eye ... stained glass image of William Blake in St Mary's Church, Battersea. Photograph: The Art Archive

"We are led to believe a lie /When we see not thro' the eye," wrote William Blake (1757-1827) in his compendium of radical aphorisms, Auguries of Innocence. The couplet could be read as a warning against blind credulity. But perhaps there is a deeper interpretation.

For the visionary American poet, Hart Crane (1899-1925), Blake is asking us to see "through" the eye as opposed to "with" the eye. (Crane actually misquotes the couplet, but that doesn't rule out his interpretation). The writer's eye may merely record the surface of consciousness, something Crane describes as "the impressionistic method". His own Blake-like task, he declares, is to use "our 'real' world somewhat as a springboard and to give the poem as a whole an orbit or predetermined direction of its own … Such a poem is at least a stab at a truth, and … may be differentiated from other kinds of poetry and called 'absolute'."

Crane's manifesto (General Aims and Theories, 1925) has helped me understand Blake better, and to be less puzzled by such concepts as "innocence". Blake's mental capacities allowed astonishingly fruitful collisions of reason and imagination. He was far ahead of his time in his perception of psychological realities and their significance for our moral constructs. It's as crass to reduce him to a 21st century "how-to" pundit as a 1960s counter-culture icon, but I can't resist asking if anyone has ever written a better "recipe" for happiness than that of "Eternity": "He who binds to himself a joy/ Does the winged life destroy/ But he who kisses the joy as it flies/ Lives in eternity's sunrise." Blake's illustrated poems, mingling and reconciling the engraver's art and the poet's, are symbolic of his unifying vision.

If Blake were "living at this hour", doubtless he would have been as enthralled and imaginatively stimulated as anyone by "Big Bang Day" and the activation of the Large Hadron Collider, never mind that much of the action is invisible, and certainly imperceptible to the naked eye. When Blake appears to oppose Enlightenment values, (in which his own thinking has a formative part), it is surely not because he opposes the evidence-based sciences but because he appreciates that human consciousness, for good or ill, seeks grand designs as well as facts. We are interested in the why of our origins, as well as the how.

The impulse to perceive and understand includes the creative imagination, of which religious myth-making is inevitably part. This is uncomfortable for scientists, yet it is fundamental to a science of human cognition.

I imagine Blake countering today's Voltaires with a scepticism based not on scorn for science but on his sense that there is a hard-wired propensity to see through, as well as with, the eye, and that this, too, is part of the irreducible, insatiable, magnificent particle collider that is human intelligence.

Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau

Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;
Mock on, Mock on, 'tis all in vain.
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.

And every sand becomes a Gem
Reflected in the beams divine;
Blown back, they blind the mocking Eye,
But still in Israel's paths they shine.

The Atoms of Democritus
And Newton's Particles of light
Are sands upon the Red sea shore
Where Israel's tents do shine so bright.