Ralph Dumain: "The Autodidact Project": Quote: Maurice Cornforth on William Blake vs. the Fetishism of Language

Maurice Cornforth
on
William Blake vs. the Fetishism of Language

But this role of abstract words, this “tyranny of words,” is no new discovery of semantics. It has been recognised for a long time, and eloquently expressed by many progressive writers—by William Blake, for example, when he wrote:

In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear.

But whence these “mind-forged manacles,” and to what do they owe their power? Is it because of the improper use of language and men’s ignorance of semantics? Blake was a poet who never gave a thought to semantics, but he already knew better than that. These “mind-forged manacles” are the reflection in men's consciousness of the material conditions of their social existence. And the “manacles” which Blake was writing about, and which still attract the attention of Stuart Chase and others in the United States of America, were produced by and owe their influence to—as Blake knew, and expressed in some of his poems—the exploitation of man by man.

SOURCE: Cornforth, Maurice. Science Versus Idealism: In Defence of Philosophy Against Positivism and Pragmatism (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975), p. 309. (Reprint of 1962 ed., originally published 1955.)

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Maurice Cornforth on Partisanship and Objectivity by Ralph Dumain

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Offsite links:

Partisanship and Objectivity in Theoretical Work by Maurice Cornforth
(also on The Autodidact Project web site)