William Blake was a harsh critic of the reductionist logic of Enlightenment thinking during his day. The figure in his iconic painting, The Ancient Days, depicts Urizen, Blake’s personification of reason leaning down with a compass to “measure what matters” (as we now would say) in the physical universe. It seems Blake anticipated the dire consequences of trapping humanity in the narrow perception of a mechanical, materialist cosmos of reason and law, intended to impose order and control on the miracle and magic of life and spirit. 

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 “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is — infinite.”   – William Blake