‘THE Four Senses are the Four Faces of Man & the Four Rivers of the Water of Life.’—BLAKE, annotations to Berkeley’s Siris.
The poet’s mind has become a central sense, interpreting and controlling the other five senses; (E. S.) for we have rediscovered the truth uttered by Blake, that ‘Man has no Body distinct from his soul, for that called Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age’.—BLAKE, Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
‘By the very right of your senses you enjoy the world. Is not the beauty of the Hemisphere present ‘to your eye? Doth not the glory of the Sun pay tribute to your sight? Is not the vision of ‘the world an amiable thing? Do not the stars shed influences to perfect the Air? … Prize these first, and you shall enjoy the residues: Glory, Dominion, Power, Wisdom, Honour, Angels, Souls, Kingdoms….’—TRAHERNE, Centuries of Meditation.
‘… it is asserted, that God invented and bestowed sight on us for this purpose, that, on surveying the circles of intelligence in the heavens, we might properly employ those of our own minds, which, though disturbed when compared with the others that are uniform, are still allied to their circulations; and that, having thus learned, and being naturally possessed of a correct reasoning faculty, we might, by imitating the uniform revolutions of divinity, set right our own wanderings and blunders.’—PLATO, Timaeus.
‘By experiments of Sense we become acquainted with the lower faculties of the Soul, and from them, whether by a gradual evolution or ascent, we arrive at the highest.’—BERKELEY, Siris: quoted by Blake, Marginalia.
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‘The inmost kernel of all genuine and actual knowledge is a perception; and every new truth is the profit or gain yielded by a perception…. Merely abstract thoughts, which have no kernel of perception, are the cloud-structures, without reality.
‘Wisdom and genius, those two summits of the Parnassus of human knowledge, have their foundation not in the abstract and discursive, but in the perceptive faculty; Wisdom proper is something intuitive, not something abstract. It does not consist in principles and thoughts which one can carry about ready in his mind.’—SCHOPENHAUER, The World as Will and Idea. Trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp.
‘Helvétius forced on Rimbaud the conception of the mind as the product of the senses, which, to one of such sensual activity as Rimbaud, gave great comfort. Even Memory, Helvétius demonstrated, is simply a continuation of sensation, weakened but conserved, so that the mind, whether in itself it be material or not, is completely the product of the nervous sensibility.
‘One of the examples chosen by Helvétius to illustrate his theory is the low mentality of animals such as the horse. The extremities of these creatures, their hoofs, are covered with insensitive horn, and if we consider how much knowledge we owe to the delicacy of our hands, the reasoning of Helvétius appears most plausible. This, I imagine, was the starting point of Helvétius’ reasoning: “Let us refine our fingers, that is all our points of contact with the external world, and all our minds will become proportionally superior to those of ordinary men, as theirs are now to horses’.”’—EDGELL RICKWARD, Rimbaud: The Boy and the Poet.
‘The poet makes himself a seer by a long, immense, and reasoned unruliness of all his senses.’—RIMBAUD, Letter to Delahaye, 1872.
This is only true of a certain kind of poetry. But it is true that where the language of one sense is insufficient, we use that appertaining to another.—E. S.