ich manifestation would not be
possible.[78] These principles, when condensed and limited so as to be
seen by us, may take the form of Reason, Emotion, Energy and Sensation,
or, to give them Boehme's names, Contraction, Expansion, Rotation, and
Vegetative life. These, in turn, are associated with the four states of
humanity or "atmospheres," the four elements, the four points of the
compass, the four senses (taste and touch counting as one), and so on.
Blake seemed, as it were, to hold his vision in his mind in solution,
and to be able to condense it into gaseous, liquid, or solid elements at
whatever point he willed. Thus we feel that the prophetic books contain
meaning within meaning, bearing interpretation from many points of view;
and to arrive at their full value, we should need to be able--as Blake
was--to apprehend all simultaneously,[79] instead of being forced
laboriously to trace them out one by one in succession. It is this very
faculty of "fourfold vision" which gives to these books their
ever-changing atmosphere of suggestion, elusive and magical as the
clouds and colours in a sunset sky, which escape our grasp in the very
effort to study them. Hence, for the majority even of imaginative
people, who possess at the utmost "double vision," they are difficult
and often wearisome to read. They are so, because the inner, living,
vibrating ray or thread of connection which evokes these forms and
beings in Blake's imagination, is to the ordinary man invisible and
unfelt; so that the quick leap of the seer's mind from figure to figure,
and from picture to picture, seems irrational and obscure.

To this difficulty on the side of the reader, there must in fairness be
added certain undeniable limitations on the part of the seer. These are
principally owing to lack of training, and possibly to lack of patience,
sometimes also it would seem to defective vision. So that his symbols
are at times no longer true and living, but artificial and confused.

Blake has visions, though clouded and imperfect, of the clashing of
systems, the birth and death of universes, the origin and meaning of
good and evil, the function and secret correspondences of spirits, of
states, of emotions, of passions, and of senses, as well as of all forms
in earth and sky and sea. This, and much more, he attempts to clothe in
concrete forms or symbols, and if he fails at times to be explicit, it
is conceivable that the fault may lie as much with our d