Ralph Dumain: "The Autodidact Project": Quote: Maurice Cornforth: William Blake on imagination vs. the fetish of facts

Maurice Cornforth
on William Blake
on imagination vs. the fetish of facts

It may be added, as a point of interest, that the poet and artist William Blake was particularly insistent on the element of “imagination” contained in all human thought, even in the simplest statements of “given facts”—for instance, he expressed it by declaring that “my streets are my streets of my imagination”. His dislike for certain contemporary exponents of empirical science was largely due to his considering them as denying human imagination, and wanting to “bind” us with nothing but “facts” instead.

SOURCE: Cornforth, Maurice. Communism and Philosophy: Contemporary Dogmas and Revisions of Marxism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980), Part Two: The Theoretical Foundations of Marxism; Chapter 4: The Empiricism of Marxist Theory; section 4: The myth of the factual data; p. 131.

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