Abstract
I read Burkes Treatise when very Young at the same time I read Locke on Human Understanding & Bacons Advancement of Learning on Every one of these Books I wrote my Opinions & on looking them over find that my Notes on Reynolds in this Book are exactly Similar. I felt the Same Contempt & Abhorrence then; that I do now. (E660)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the ‘Two Treatises’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969);
and Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s “Two Treatises of Government” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).
See John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994) p. xxi.
John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975; rev. 1982) 1:4:23; 3:10:9.
See ‘Blind Mans Buff (66–70 E421) and ‘Edward III’ (194–203 E413); and compare ‘The Bonds of this Subjection are like the Swadling Cloths they are wrapt up in’, Two Treatises of Government (ed.) Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960; rev. 1963) 2:55 322) with ‘Infant Sorrow’ (5–6 E28) and ‘Auguries of Innocence’ (63 E491).
For a survey of recent debate on Locke’s transatlantic influence, see Barbara Arneill, John Locke and America: the Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996) pp. 1–20.
Locke’s denunciation of slavery did not preclude his own indirect involvement in the slave trade; see Wayne Glausser, ‘Three Approaches to Locke and the Slave Trade’, JHI 51:2 (1990) pp. 199–216.
W. J. T. Mitchell comments that once Los ‘is enclosed in Urizen’s world, he begins to act the part of Urizenic prophet’ (1978, p. 121);
Paul Mann observes that ‘by creating the fallen world … Urizen provides for and indeed generates Los’s activity: Los’s antithetical posture toward Urizen is belied by the fundamentally Urizenic nature of his activity’ (1986, p. 54);
Steven Vine explores the doublings whereby ‘Los’s creative labour ineluctably repeats Urizen’s troubled creation’ (1993, p. 71);
and Stephen Cox notes ‘Los’s apparently unavoidable resubstantialization of Urizen’s dialectic’ (1994, p. 152).
See John Richetti on the ‘enforcing concreteness’ of ‘half-dead metaphors’, and the ‘subsequent busyness’ of the mind after the ‘initial reception of simple sensations’: Philosophical Writing: Locke, Berkeley, Hume (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983) 81–2, 84;
and William Walker, Locke, Literary Criticism and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) for links between the epistemology and the political thought (pp. 45–56).
‘In effect a sort of conceit, doing no philosophical work’, according to Michael Ayers, John Locke 2 vols (London: Routledge, 1991), 1: 18.
On original sin in Locke, stressing his early Calvinist background, see W. M. Spellman, John Locke and the Problem of Depravity (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988).
Cathy Caruth, in Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991) notes of the Essay that ‘its apparent subject, the limitation of reason, really tells of a new and unbounded power of reason over its own territory’ (p. 5).
On the common ground between Locke’s famous denunciation of the ‘firmness of perswasion’ of enthusiasts (4:14:12) and Blake’s ‘firm perswasion’ which ‘removed mountains’ (MHH pl. 12 E38–9), see S. H. Clark, “The Whole Internal World his own”: Locke and Metaphor Reconsidered’, JHI 58 (1998) pp. 241–65.
Epistola de Tolerantia: A Letter on Toleration, ed. Raymond Klibansky and trans. J. W. Gough (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968) p. 125.
For comparable instances of this reduction, see John W. Yolton, Locke and French Materialism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991) p. 4. However, Urizen’s ‘self-contemplating’ (pi. 3 21–2 E70) makes explicit reference to Locke’s other ‘fountain of knowledge’, ‘the internal Operations of our Minds, perceived and reflected on by our selves’ (2:1:2).
‘The Adventurer’, no. 120 (29 December 1753), in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 14 vols (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1958–78), vol. 2, ed. W J. Bate, John M. Bullitt and L. F. Powell (1963) pp. 469–7.
The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965) no. 580 4: 585–6.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1999 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Clark, S. (1999). ‘Labouring at the Resolute Anvil’: Blake’s Response to Locke. In: Clark, S., Worrall, D. (eds) Blake in the Nineties. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27602-8_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27602-8_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-27604-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-27602-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)