Abstract

This thesis is a comparison of William Blake's 'Doctrine of Contraries' and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 'Principle of Polarity' . I noted, during the course of my study, that although isolated from one another in their native countries, as two contemporaries Blake and Goethe almost simultaneously rose up against the mechanistic treatment of existence undertaken by the thinkers of the Enlightenment. In doing so, each turned to similar alternative sources in Renaissance philosophy in what was an attempt to affirm a shared belief in the spirituality of human existence. Indeed, it was through their contact with such thinkers as Jakob Boehme and Paracelsus that arose two distinct, yet related, philosophies, each of which was founded on the belief that in spiritual being exists a fundamental unity, a unity expressed in the interplay of polar opposites. ;Yet the two theories of opposites which emerged from the spiritual interest of these two poets were very different in kind. Whereas Blake moved from the world within to the world without, making all that was about him a reflection of the divine presence of the God contained in the human Imagination, Goethe found in the outer world of Nature divine principles which he then applied to the inner spiritual life of man, thus moving from the would without to the world within, as it were. From this I concluded that the 'contraries' to which Blake refers in his poetic works pertain to one realm only, that is, to the spiritual 'reality' of human existence. Goethe, on the other hand, who considered man co-extensive with natural process, gave a much more global account of the interplay of opposites. Goethe's 'contraries' I described as taking part in an 'organic' dialectic, a process whereby all things continually evolve to higher, more complex, levels of spiritualization and the ideal of unimpeded perfectibility. These two conceptions I subsequently contrasted, finding Blake's metaphysical scheme a closed, inflexible system of thought relative to Goethe's open approach to man and Nature