Life & Wisdom Quote by William Blake

Blake is gutting the fantasy of neutral perception. “As a man is, so he sees” lands like a proverb, but it’s really an accusation: your vision is not a window onto the world; it’s a portrait of your inner life. The punch comes from the shift to anatomy. “As the eye is formed, such are its powers” sounds empirical, almost medical, and that’s the trap. He borrows the language of optics to argue a spiritual point: perception is constructed, trained, warped, liberated. The “eye” isn’t just the organ in your skull; it’s the whole apparatus of imagination, desire, fear, ideology.

The subtext is a direct challenge to the Enlightenment confidence in reason as a universal solvent. Blake lived amid the early Industrial Revolution, when measurement and mechanism were being sold as progress and when London’s misery was being normalized as the price of modernity. In that climate, claiming that the mind shapes what it can even register becomes a political statement. If the eye is “formed” by institutions, by habit, by poverty, by religion, then what we call common sense is often just an engineered limit.

What makes the line work is its circular, rhythmic certainty: it performs inevitability while insisting on agency. If who you are determines what you see, then changing what you see requires changing who you are - expanding the imaginative faculty. Blake isn’t offering relativism for its own sake; he’s demanding renovation of perception as a moral act.