Edmund Burke was even more scathing: "there's the keeper, the spider in the web." Recent com. Brissot that it was "a mill for grinding rogues honest and idle men industrious," and yet confessed in private that it was "a haunted house." For William Hazlitt, the Panopticon was a "glass beehive," a scheme marked by luminous clarity, impractical idealism, and deadly obsession. Its author helped himself to the language of a secularized theology: the Panopticon combined "the apparent omnipresence of the inspector (if divines will allow me the expression)" with "the extreme facility of his real presence." He told his Girondin admirer J. It has always invited allegorical interpretation. Spectacularly unsuccessful in reformed Britain, the scheme was initially drafted for the enlightened despotism of Russia and greeted with rapture in Revolutionary France. The Panopticon was an "enlightened" project, concerned with rational order and moral reform, deriving its authority from the natural philosophical understanding of the work of the mind. The right distribution of light, air, and space prompted the right associations: every inmate would "conceive himself" to be under constant surveillance. The Panopticon relied on the link between the bodily situation of its inhabitants and their state of mind. The plan was to be fitted to prisons or factories, schools or workhouses-in short, any model polity that demanded the supervisory power of an "invisible eye." The members of such a polity were to be governed through the complete management of their atmosphere and their surroundings. From the tower, the warden could survey every denizen of the "inspection house" but would always remain invisible to these inmates. He claimed that in his Panopticon a remakable architectural arrangement of bodies allow the possibility of the "power of mind over mind." In this visionary building, a concentric ring of cells was to be arranged around a central guard tower and a chapel. So, pastiching Emmanuel Swedenborg's visionary cosmology, Blake proposed a new Code, the "Bible of Hell" directed against old penology and old morality: "Prisons are built with Stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion." Bentham also proposed a new Code to replace old penology and morality, and he also represented this radical reform through an appeal to the relation of bodies and minds. Rutt, ed., The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, 25 vols. The destruction of the Bastille was figured as the action ofīowring: John Bowring, ed., The Works of Jeremy Bentham, 11 vols. Blake wrote against "the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul." He said that this false notion bred a self-imposed imprisonment of the mind: "man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern." Political liberty went hand in hand with spiritual liberty. The slogans composed by Blake and Bentham in the early 1790s are good examples of this imagery. The relationship between mind and body provides graphic political images of knowledge and power. JEREMY BENTHAM, Panopticon or, The Inspection-House, 1787-1791 If it were possible to find a method of becoming master of everything which might happen to a certain number of men, to dispose of everything around them so as to produce on them the desired impression, to make certain of their actions, of their connections, and of all the circumstances of their lives, so that nothing could escape, nor could oppose the desired effect, it cannot be doubted that a method of this kind would be a very powerful and a very useful instrument which governments might apply to various objects of the utmost importance. WILLIAM BLAKE, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790-1793 That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies. That Energy, call'd Evil, is alone from the Body & that Reason, call'd Good, is alone from the Soul.ģ. That Man has two real existing principles: Viz: a Body & a Soul.Ģ. Enlightenment and Natural Philosophy Simon Schaff erĪll Bibles or sacred codes have been the cause of the following Errors:ġ.
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