A philosophical aphorisms series challenging empiricist thought through Blake’s innovative relief etching
What the Work Is
There is No Natural Religion is a series of philosophical aphorisms by the English poet, painter, and printmaker William Blake, written in 1788. Alongside its companion work All Religions are One, it represents Blake’s first successful attempt to combine image and text through relief etching, making it one of the earliest of his illuminated manuscripts. The work exists in a complex bibliographic state, with plates printed in two distinct sessions in 1794 and 1795, and no definitive copy assembled by Blake himself surviving.
What the Book Is About
The work presents a philosophical argument about human perception, desire, and the nature of knowledge. It engages directly with the empiricist philosophy of the eighteenth century—particularly the tradition associated with John Locke—which held that all human knowledge derives from sensory experience. Blake’s series of aphorisms first pushes this empiricist position to its logical extreme, then dramatically refutes it, offering instead a vision of human infinitude rooted in the imaginative faculty he called the “Poetic Genius.” The work thus serves as an early and fundamental statement of Blake’s philosophical beliefs, expressed in the rational language of eighteenth-century philosophers.
Key Ideas and Themes
The two series of aphorisms that make up the work stand in direct opposition to one another. The first series declares an extreme form of empiricism, going further than any empiricist theorist ever took it. It asserts that man is purely physical, a natural organ subject to sense, and cannot perceive except through his natural or bodily organs. Because of this limitation, man can only understand what he has already encountered—he cannot conceive of anything beyond his sensory experience. He cannot deduce a fourth or fifth sense from a perception of only three, and his thoughts and desires are equally bounded by his organic perceptions. A man cannot desire what he has not perceived.
The second series completely refutes these basic concepts. It begins by declaring that man’s perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception—he perceives more than sense, however acute, can discover. Reason, understood as the ratio of all that is already known, will not remain the same when we know more. Blake argues that man is fundamentally desirous of moving beyond the bounds of his specific physicality, which is nothing more than a restriction. The bounded is loathed by its possessor, and less than all cannot satisfy man. Yet man should never desire more than he can possess, for if any could desire what he is incapable of possessing, despair would be his eternal lot. Since man’s desire is infinite, however, his possession must also be infinite, and man himself must be infinite. From this, Blake concludes that man can see the Infinite, and that to see the Infinite is to see God. He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God; he who sees only the Ratio sees only himself. The work ends with its most hopeful and religious concept: God becomes as we are that we may be as he is.
The work also introduces the concept of the Poetic or Prophetic character. Without it, Blake argues, the Philosophic and Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things and stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again. Man is made to do more than perceive and experience through the senses only. This imaginative faculty offers an alternative to the rational empiricism of eighteenth-century deism or “natural religion,” which looked to the material world for evidence of God’s existence.
Structure and Approach
The work consists of a series of numbered aphoristic plates, each presenting a single proposition. The first series comprises plates numbered I through VI, preceded by a frontispiece, title page, and an Argument plate. The second series contains plates numbered I through VII, followed by a Conclusion, an Application, and a final “Therefore” plate. The plates are small, roughly 5.4 by 4 centimeters in the 1795 printing, though the pages themselves are much larger.
The images in the work are not necessarily literal depictions of the text. The philosophical propositions offer little visual imagery or even named objects, and the designs maintain a relative independence from the accompanying text. The links between image and word are thematic and metaphoric rather than direct and literal. One notable visual feature is the relationship between the final plate of the first series and the first plate of the second: the former depicts a prone figure with his head on the right, while the latter is a mirror image, a figure with his head on the left. This visual reversal complements the sudden change of philosophical perspective in the accompanying text.
Significance and Influence
The work represents a significant milestone in Blake’s career. As Peter Ackroyd has noted, Blake’s newly invented form of relief etching changed the nature of his expression and enlarged his range. With relief etching, the words inscribed like those of God upon the tables of law, Blake could acquire a new role. The method allowed him to serve as artist, engraver, printer, and publisher, overcoming the division of labour that had previously separated these roles.
Scholars have interpreted the work as part of Blake’s lifelong quarrel with the philosophy of Bacon, Newton, and Locke. Denise Vultee argues that both All Religions are One and There is No Natural Religion reject the rational empiricism of eighteenth-century deism, which looked to the material world for evidence of God’s existence, and offer instead the imaginative faculty or “Poetic Genius” as an alternative. S. Foster Damon suggests that the first series states John Locke’s philosophy of the five senses until it becomes self-evidently absurd. The work is thus a mockery of rationalism and an insistence on man’s potential infinitude.
The bibliographic complexity of the work has generated considerable scholarly debate. Geoffrey Keynes’s 1971 editorial decision to divide the two printing sessions into distinct series has been followed by most modern editors, though some scholars argue that the work should be understood as a single entity, with the 1794 printing representing an abridged version of the whole. The work’s text was not published in facsimile until 1886, when William Muir produced an edition, and it has since become recognised as a foundational statement of Blake’s philosophical and artistic vision.
The 1794 printing of the work consists of 87 known impressions of a total of twelve plates. These impressions comprise the majority of several named copies, including Copy A (British Museum), Copy B (Yale Center for British Art), Copy C (Library of Congress), Copy D (Houghton Library), Copy G (Morgan Library & Museum), and Copy M (Victoria and Albert Museum). All 87 impressions from this session were colour printed in reddish-brown ink on the same type of paper. However, only Copy G contains impressions of all 12 plates, and this copy was not assembled by Blake himself but by John Linnell after Blake’s death, using unbound leaves found amongst Blake’s possessions.
It was once thought that impressions from the 1794 print made up the majority of plates in other copies, but in 1993, Joseph Viscomi proved that all but five of the plates in these copies are imitations. Copy E, Copy J, and Copy K are composed entirely of imitations. Copy F and Copy H have two original impressions each, with the rest being imitations. Copy I has one original plate. Viscomi believes the imitations may have been commissioned by the publisher Basil M. Pickering in the early 1860s.
From the 1795 printing, there is only one known set of impressions, Copy L, now held in the Morgan Library. Although this second printing also contains 12 plates, only four plates from the 1794 print were reprinted; the remaining seven plates are known only in this single impression. The black ink framing lines in Copy L are thought to have been added at a later date, possibly in 1818, just prior to when Blake gave the plates to John Linnell. It has been suggested that the framing lines may have been added due to the discrepancy between the size of the plates and the size of the paper, as each plate is roughly 5.4 by 4 centimeters while each page is 37.8 by 27 centimeters. In all copies other than Copy L, the plates are roughly 14 by 11 centimeters.
In numerous cases in both printings, it seems as if the acid has eaten away too much of the relief, and Blake has had to go over sections with ink and wash, often touching the text and design outlines with pen. This ink and wash work may have been executed in 1818, along with the addition of the frame lines, although this cannot be ascertained for certain. Several of the plates also bear evidence of rudimentary colour printing, a method with which Blake was experimenting in the 1790s, and these plates may represent his first attempts at this technique. Several of the plates also feature examples of white line engraving, a technique where Blake would literally cut into the stop-out to create tiny furrows, which would be eaten away by the acid, creating a streak effect in the final print.
All known copies of the work were assembled from loose plates sold anonymously at Sotheby’s on April 29, 1862, to Richard Monckton Milnes, and as such, there is no definitive order except where the plates are numbered. Despite this lack of definitive order, the sequence of the plates from the 1794 print is generally agreed to be the frontispiece, followed by the title page, then the Argument, then the plates numbered I–VI, followed by the plates reprinted in 1795. The order of the twelve plates from the 1795 print is generally agreed to be the frontispiece, followed by the title page, then the plates numbered I–VII, followed by the Conclusion, Application, and the ‘Therefore’ plate. Traditionally, scholars tended to place the Conclusion after the Application, but since Mary Johnson and John E. Grant in 1979, this has been reversed.
The Relief Etching Process
Blake’s great innovation in relief etching was to print from the relief, or raised, parts of the plate rather than the intaglio, or incised, parts. Whereas intaglio methods worked by creating furrows into which the acid was poured to create ‘holes’ in the plate and the ink then poured over the entire surface, Blake wrote and drew directly onto the plate with an acid-resistant material known as a stop-out. He would then embed the plate’s edges in strips of wax to create a self-contained tray and pour the acid about a quarter of an inch deep, thus causing the exposed parts of the plate to melt away, and the design and/or text to remain slightly above the rest of the plate, in relief, like a modern rubber stamp. The acid was then poured off, the wax was removed, and the raised part of the plate was covered with ink before finally being pressed onto the paper in the printing press.
This method allowed expressive effects which were impossible to achieve via intaglio. The major disadvantage was that text had to be written backwards as whatever was on the plate would print in reverse when pressed onto the paper. The dominant theory as to how Blake solved this problem is simply that he wrote in reverse. Another theory, suggested by David Bindman, is that Blake wrote his acid-resistant text on a sheet of paper the correct way around, and then pressed the paper onto the plate, thus reversing the text and producing the same result as if he had written it backwards in the first place.
Blake could also colour the plates themselves in coloured inks before pressing them or tint them with watercolours after printing. Because of this aspect, a major component of relief etching was that every page of every book was a unique piece of art; no two copies of any page in Blake’s entire oeuvre are identical. Variations in the actual print, different colouring choices, repainted plates, accidents during the acid bath, all led to multiple examples of the same plate.
Blake himself referred to relief etching as “printing in the infernal method, by means of corrosives […] melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.” A contemporary description of the method was provided by Blake’s friend, J.T. Smith, who described Blake as “writing his poetry, and drawing his marginal subjects of embellishments in outline upon the copper-plate with an impervious liquid, and then eating the plain parts or lights away with aquafortis considerably below them so that the outlines were left as Stereotype.”
Relief etching was the same basic method used for woodcutting, and copper relief etching had been practised in the early 18th century by Elisha Kirkall, but Blake was the first to use such a method to create both words and designs mixed together on the same plate. Apart from the unique aesthetic effects possible, a major advantage of relief etching was that Blake could print the material himself. Because the text was in relief, the pressure needed for printing was constant, unlike in intaglio printing, where different pressures were needed to force the paper into the furrows, depending on size. Additionally, intaglio etchings and engravings were printed with great pressure, but in relief etching, because the printed material was a raised surface rather than incised lines, considerably less pressure was required. As such, relief etching tackled the problem of the division of labour of publishing. Blake’s new method was autographic, permitting a seamless relationship between conception and execution rather than the usual divisions between invention and production embedded in 18th-century print technology, and its economic and social distinctions among authors, printers, artists, and engravers. Like drawings and manuscripts, Blake’s relief etchings were created by the direct and positive action of the author/artist’s hand without intervening processes. Blake served as artist, engraver, printer, and publisher.
The Dating Debate
Until 1971, most editors tended to consider All Religions are One as later than There is No Natural Religion. For example, in his 1905 book The poetical works of William Blake; a new and verbatim text from the manuscript engraved and letterpress originals, John Sampson places No Natural Religion prior to All Religions in his ‘Appendix to the Prophetic Books’. However, in 1971, Geoffrey Keynes argued that All Religions are One was the earlier of the two, based on what he saw as its “greater technical imperfection.” In his 1978 book, The Complete Graphic Works of William Blake, David Bindman initially disagreed with Keynes, arguing that the imperfections in All Religions are not because of an earlier date of composition, but because of the increased complexity of the plates, with such complexity demonstrating Blake growing in confidence from the more rudimentary plates for No Natural Religion. Most scholars however support Keynes, and All Religions are One precedes There is No Natural Religion in almost all modern anthologies of Blake’s work.
Further evidence for Keynes’s hypothesis is discussed by Eaves, Essick, and Viscomi, who, in counterpoint to Bindman, see the style of No Natural Religion as more confident than that of All Religions. They especially cite the use of upright roman lettering in All Religions contrasted with the italic, cursive writing on several plates of No Natural Religion; italic text was easier to execute since it required fewer independent strokes, and since the resulting dense matrix of lines provided better support for the inking dabber, italic permitted a shallower etch. Blake introduced italic script on plate a3 of No Natural Religion, a script which he would use throughout the 1790s. Other evidence for an earlier dating of All Religions is that many of the individual letters themselves lean to the left, unlike in No Natural Religion. This was a common problem in mirror writing, and its presence in All Religions but not No Natural Religion suggests Blake was only learning how to overcome it as he worked.
