Locke, Blake, and Wordsworth: Understanding Experience Noah Bader - Fourney College

William Blake, in his work There Is No Natural Religion, and William Wordsworth, in his poem 1799 Prelude, challenge John Locke’s understanding of the nature of the self by offering alternative theories as to the ways in which we as humans perceive and interpret our experiences. Blake—and to a lesser extent Wordsworth—refutes Locke in his work An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, offering contrasting opinions as to how the self is formed. Locke’s view of the self is rooted in his belief that humans are born into the world as tabula rasa, a blank slate. He believes formation of the self is passive and empirical in nature, consequent of tangible experience. This suggests that as we perceive our experiences with the objective facts of the material world, our mind is passively constructing complex ideas from our perceptions, resulting in a reality that is limited to what has been directly experienced. Wordsworth and Blake oppose Locke’s tenet of a passive mind, asserting a mutually exclusive theory: the presence of an active mind. Through the presence of an active mind, a creative imagination emerges, therefore allowing perceptions beyond Locke’s empirical worldview to appear. Thus, while Wordsworth and Blake agree with Locke...