Science & Tech Quote by William Blake

Blake isn’t offering a tidy arts-versus-STEM bumper sticker; he’s staging a revolt against an era that treated measurement as morality. “Tree of life” and “tree of death” piggyback on biblical symbolism (Eden’s Tree of Life, the Tree of Knowledge) to make a provocation: the modern worship of “knowledge” can become a spiritual poison. For Blake, art isn’t decoration. It’s a way of seeing that keeps the world animate, erotic, and morally charged. It restores the soul’s capacity for awe, which he treats as a form of truth, not a mood.

The sting comes from how he frames science: not as curiosity, but as reduction. Blake lived through the Industrial Revolution’s early churn and the Enlightenment’s confidence that the universe could be mastered by calculus and instruments. In his illuminated books and poems, he repeatedly mocks the “single vision” of rationalism: a mindset that dissects reality until the patient is dead, then congratulates itself on precision. Calling science a “tree of death” is less anti-experiment than anti-ideology: he’s attacking the kind of empiricism that flattens human experience into data and then uses that flattening to justify social control, factory discipline, and spiritual resignation.

The line works because it’s aggressively unfair in a way that reveals its target. Blake isn’t debating scientists; he’s naming a cultural mood. Art, for him, is generative imagination - the faculty that makes freedom thinkable. Science, when enthroned as the only authority, becomes a machine for disenchantment: it can explain the world and still drain it of meaning.