Abstract

William Blake's interest in the origins of scientific thought has received little critical attention. In this dissertation, I attempt to show that Blake was profoundly aware of the ancient sources of many of the ideas current in eighteenth-century scientific discourse, and that he was alert to the consequences of such ideas not only for natural philosophy but for contemporary theology, politics, ethics, and aesthetics as well. Challenging the customary division of Blake's career into an early classical phase followed by a sharp reaction against the classics, I argue that even during the 1790s his work reveals a deep suspicion of Greek philosophy in general and Greek science in particular. I suggest that his antipathy was owing in part to the influence of Hellenistic physics on some of his most formidable contemporary targets, including Newtonian atomism, natural religion, and the moral virtues. English-language sources for Greek science were plentiful by the eighteenth century, and Blake appears to have taken an interest in them from an early date: There is No Natural Religion , The Book of Thel , and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell all contain hints that he perceived a relationship between ancient scientific theories and contemporary problems. In the Urizen books, Blake begins to make concepts from Greek physics an integral part of his mythology; this is best seen in The Book of Los, which I read as a concentrated, visionary history of Greek philosophy, emphasizing the rise of both Epicurean atomism and Stoic pneuma theory and their culmination in a common ethical system based on the four cardinal virtues. The final chapter explores the role of ancient science in Blake's critique of atomism, natural religion, and the moral virtues in Milton and Jerusalem. What emerges is Blake's effort, throughout his works, to expose the ancient roots of the eighteenth-century ideas he found so destructive, while preserving the remnants of vision they still retained