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This Chapter investigates the origins of Blake’s anthropology in the Poetic Genius of his first illuminated books, All Religions are One and There is No Natural Religion [a] and [b]. These reveal the author to be a Baconian revisionist who thought the main current of eighteenth-century British philosophy had betrayed the open inductivism of its founder. Blake’s attack on “the Ratio” targets how Bayes’s Theorem turns empirical bodily experience into a mathematical theory to support divine Design. Here, Blake’s distinctly Humean skepticism toward organized religion signals his distance from Berkeley’s immaterialist view of nature as a language where God speaks to man through the eyes. At the same time, his anthropomorphic idea of God flies in the face of Hume’s critique of superstitious “anthropomorphites” in his History of Religion (1757) and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779).

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Blake’s Early Tractates: Hume, Bayesianism, and Divine Analogy

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  • 发表日期：

    2026年

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  • Andrew M. Cooper

摘要

This Chapter investigates the origins of Blake’s anthropology in the Poetic Genius of his first illuminated books, All Religions are One and There is No Natural Religion [a] and [b]. These reveal the author to be a Baconian revisionist who thought the main current of eighteenth-century British philosophy had betrayed the open inductivism of its founder. Blake’s attack on “the Ratio” targets how Bayes’s Theorem turns empirical bodily experience into a mathematical theory to support divine Design. Here, Blake’s distinctly Humean skepticism toward organized religion signals his distance from Berkeley’s immaterialist view of nature as a language where God speaks to man through the eyes. At the same time, his anthropomorphic idea of God flies in the face of Hume’s critique of superstitious “anthropomorphites” in his History of Religion (1757) and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779).