perceiv'd.

The desires and perceptions of man untaught by anything but organs
of sense, must be limited to objects of sense.

The solution of the difficulty is given in large script on the last of
the tiny pages of the volume:

Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is.

According to Blake, the universe as we know it, is the result of the
fall of the one life from unity into division. This fall has come about
through man seeking separation, and taking the part for the whole. (See
Jacob Boehme's view, pp. 94, 95 above, which is identical with that of
Blake.) "Nature," therefore, or the present form of mental existence,
is the result of a contraction of consciousness or "selfhood," a
tendency for everything to shrink and contract about its own centre.
This condition or "state" Blake personifies as "Urizen" (=Reason) a
great dramatic figure who stalks through the prophetic books,
proclaiming himself "God from Eternity to Eternity," taking up now one
characteristic and now another, but ever of the nature of materialism,
opaqueness, contraction. In the case of man, the result of this
contraction is to close him up into separate "selfhoods," so that the
inlets of communication with the universal spirit have become gradually
stopped up; until now, for most men, only the five senses (one of the
least of the many possible channels of communication) are available for
the uses of the natural world. Blake usually refers to this occurrence
as the "flood ": that is, the rush of general belief in the five senses
that overwhelmed or submerged the knowledge of all other channels of
wisdom, except such arts as were saved, which are symbolised under the
names of Noah (=Imagination) and his sons. He gives a fine account of
this in _Europe_ (p. 8), beginning--

Plac'd in the order of the stars, when the five senses whelm'd
In deluge o'er the earth-born man, then turn'd the fluxile eyes
Into two stationary orbs, concentrating all things.
The ever-varying spiral ascents to the heavens of heavens
Were bended downward, and the nostrils' golden gates shut,
Turn'd outward, barr'd, and petrify'd against the infinite.

The only way out of this self-made prison is through the Human
Imagination, which is thus the Saviour of the world. By "Imagination"
Blake would seem to mean all that we include under sympathy, insight,
idealism, and vision, as opposed to self-centredness, logical argument,