THE ORIGINS OF MORAL REFORMATION: William Godwin and William Blake’s Simultaneous Dialogue with John Locke’s AN ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING

In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke famously introduced the notion of ‘tabula rasa’, deeming the infant mind to be “void of all character” until furnished by experience (Locke 56). Both William Godwin and William Blake expand on this notion of the mind as an empty slate in their respective works, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. William Godwin adopts an ultra-necessitarian view of cause and effect in Political Justice, championing a philosophical doctrine of necessity to emphasize his belief that history is not random or unpredictable. Godwin argues that we must fully absorb a radical understanding of cause and effect in order to truly reform morally. Blake, however, disputes this fixed concept of ‘the empty slate’. Instead, he advocates for a metaphysical understanding of the world around us– he posits that we must optimize our senses in order to transcend their limitations when developing our perception of the world. Godwin's emphasis on the necessity to understand the conditions that provoke action and Blake’s counter-argument for the soul as preeminent establish their simultaneous dialogue with John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. It is necessary to dissect exactly how Blake and Godwin engage with John Locke’s notion of ‘tabula rasa’ in order to decipher what these authors are trying to convey about moral reformation, perception, and the origins of change.

To contextualize Godwin’s philosophies of the mind and Blake’s emphasis on the soul, we must examine the philosophy that both authors expand on within their respective works: John Locke’s theory of the mind as an empty slate. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke poses the famous principle:

“Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast storewhich the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this, I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE” (Locke 56).

Locke’s notion of experience imprinting the mind provided intellectuals with a foundation of thought to expand upon. While it is never directly stated in Political Justice and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that Godwin or Blake were directly responding to Locke’s essay, Locke’s philosophy of the empty slate directly relates to Godwin’s philosophical doctrine of necessity in that Godwin adopts and repurposes Locke’s philosophy, while Blake advocates in direct opposition to it. Both authors use Locke’s principles as a basis for their own beliefs, whether as a foundation to expand upon or as an argument to rebut.

Godwin expands on the Lockean notion of ‘tabula rasa’ by arguing that recognizing the chain of events that catalyze action constitutes real, productive introspection and is at the foundation of honest moral reform. In his article, “Shelley, Godwin, Hume, and the Doctrine of Necessity” Professor Frank Evans writes that Godwin channels David Hume’s philosophy of necessity, as Godwin acknowledges “that matter is actuated by a necessary force; the basis of this belief is the observed uniformity of events in nature, and the consequent inferences made by the mind about cause and effect” (Evans 632). Through the lens of necessitarianism, experience possesses our conscience and begets action, choice, opinion, and prejudice. Godwin’s doctrine, however, offers the solution to humanity’s supposed lack of agency, presupposing that all human beings have the capacity to use reason as a way to combat this almost karmic mode of existence. In Book IV, Chapter IV of Political Justice, Godwin argues that “there is no such thing as action”, and that man is merely “the vehicle through which certain antecedents operate, which antecedents, if he were supposed not to exist, would cease to have that operation” (Godwin 488). He then likens the process of cause and effect to billiards, stating:

“When a ball upon a billiard-board is struck by the mace, and afterwards impinges upon a second ball, the ball which was first in motion is said to act upon the second, though the results are in the strictest conformity to the impression received, and the motion it communicates is precisely determined by the circumstances of the case”(Godwin 488-489).

The first step in Godwin’s philosophical doctrine of necessity is the recognition that action provokes consequences in the same way that motion generates a ball in billiards, a recognition of action as a link in a chain of events. To Godwin, we are purely vessels for action in the sense that we do not just catalyze action, but are catalyzed by previous actions. Cause and effect is the foundation by which people develop their morals and perceptions of the world around them (and themselves), and acting with an understanding of this chain reaction will provoke action that is in alignment with justice and moral development. The doctrine of necessity reduces the process of introspection to a simple form. Godwin proposes his philosophies unwaveringly and with total resoluteness, as he states that we must establish “firmness and simplicity in our conduct, not wasting itself in fruitless struggles and regrets, not hurried along with infantine impatience”, but “seeing actions with their consequences, and calmly and unreservedly given up to the influence of those comprehensive views which this doctrine inspires” (Godwin 168 ). Godwin proposes that we must adopt a radically impartial lens when dissecting our history. We must study our history with an understanding that, without consciousness of the covert psychology that informs our actions, we have had no agency in the experiences that shape us. Godwin’s Political Justice reduces the process of introspection as one grounded in sheer reason and basic formula, expanding on the Lockean notion of ‘tabula rasa’ by arguing that the progression of moral development and perception is at the hands of probability, experience, and introspection. Though Godwin adopts Locke’s notion of ‘tabula rasa’ as the foundation of his philosophy of the mind in Political Justice, Locke and Godwin’s arguments for the process of perception differ slightly. As Dana Ward establishes in “William Godwin: An Intellectual History”, Godwin “goes beyond the Lockean epistemology” in Political Justice, arguing that the mind plays an active role in the origins of perspective, not just experience (Ward). The Godwinian logic necessitates a “distinguishing between two faculties of perception, sensation, and understanding, the latter of which has qualities which are not derivable from experience”, a distinction that isolates Godwin’s philosophy from Locke (Ward). As exhibited in the aforementioned quote from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke establishes that experience is the sole arbiter in the development of one’s selfhood. To Godwin, however, the mind plays an active role in the organization and reflection of experience, thereby contributing to the development of one’s perception and morality. To Godwin, the mind ultimately mobilizes us, not experience; however, experience promotes the involuntary formation of our opinions and morals by imprinting us with judgment, prejudice, and predilection. Godwin’s integration of Locke’s notion of ‘tabula rasa’ is only a component of his exposition, as he establishes that “ideas can be brought to life either through external stimulus as in the Lockean epistemology, or internally through active processes of construction” (Ward). Godwin directly counters Locke’s emphasis on experience purely furnishing our sense of self by integrating his philosophies of the mind, establishing the distinction between his doctrine of necessity and Locke’s notion of experience.

Godwin argues that human beings are ultimately caused by the mind, as the mind renders “an indispensable link in the great chain of the universe; but not, as has sometimes been supposed, a cause of that paramount description, as to supersede all necessities, and be itself subject to no laws and methods of operation” (Godwin 489). Godwin posits that though the mind is the cause, it is still subjected to history– the past generates the mind to develop reason within the bounds of history. The doctrine of necessity begs the question: how do we evolve from our insular mode of existence? According to Godwin, we must use this understanding of history to generate reason and should “accustom ourselves not to forget the reasons that produced our determination, but be ready upon all occasions clearly to announce and fully to enumerate them” (Godwin 493). Godwin does not argue that we are victims of history, but instead champions an understanding of history to promote self-awareness. Godwin promotes a consciousness of individual action, removing “ourselves to the furthest distance from the state of mere inanimate machines, acted upon by causes of which they have no understanding” (Godwin 493). Instead, he believes that “we should be cautious of thinking it a sufficient reason for an action that we are accustomed to perform it, and that we once thought it right” (Godwin 493). Consciousness and self-awareness are pivotal in Godwin’s doctrine. According to Godwin, we must become conscious of our history in order to break free from the confines of it– we must repurpose our history as a guide for our own behavior. To Godwin, we can only truly reform through reason and reflection, through an understanding of action as consequential. Then, with that understanding, we must act according to reason and with a consciousness of the consequential nature of our actions. This is the foundation of Godwin’s belief regarding the development of morality and how our perceptions of ourselves and the world around us can only evolve through self-awareness and an understanding of cause and effect. Godwin’s doctrine provides a structural guide for the development of the human consciousness, where the only way for us to defy history is to absorb it through reason and reflection.

Godwin expands on the Lockean notion of ‘tabula rasa’ by advocating that we must gain consciousness of our experience in order to repurpose it. In “The Romance of the Impossible: William Godwin in the Empty Place of Reason”, Professor David Collings writes that Godwin argues “that people should live under the immediate authority of reason itself,carrying out an almost total violence against the complex fabric of social life” (Collings 847). Reason is established as a mode of enlightenment in Godwin’s doctrine, where the only way for us to break free of the confines of our conditioned existence is to view our complexities as mere factors of history. In “GODWIN’S PHILOSOPHY: A REV ALUATION”, Michael H. Scrivener writes that Godwin “pivots around human fallibility” in his doctrine of necessity (Scrivener 617). He writes that Godwin illustrates this fixed mode of existence “because the human condition is problematic and because truth is so difficult to ascertain”, forging a doctrine of consequentialism as an effort to gauge how we can recycle our complex history as a mode of introspection (Scrivener 617). Godwin essentially trivializes the human condition in reaction to the boundless chaos of our experience, proposing that the only way to confront our experience is to depersonalize and exteriorize it. This is what makes Godwin’s rhetoric so radical; while he is channeling the philosophies of Hume, Locke, and other philosophers who pioneered the philosophies of necessity, Godwin advocates for the ultimate intellectualization of our experience. By “making humanity the best judge of how well one safe-guarded its happiness, Godwin avoids the impasses of purely external or purely internal modes of punishment” (Collings 852). Reason is humanity’s ethos in the development of morality; Godwin positions reason as the impartial arbiter of our complex existence, as reason is anchored in pure objectivity and truth. Ironically, Godwin’s text is riddled with paradox, as he initially implies that we are victims of the necessitarian timeline of experience, yet offers a solution that detaches him from the dogma of necessitarianism. By positing that we can defy our circular and repetitive patterns of action, Godwin detaches himself from these bodies of thought, as necessitarians notoriously view our actions as pure, undefiable products of history. While Locke and many other philosophers who operate under the lens of necessitarianism argue that we are purely vulnerable and susceptible to our experience, Godwin elevates reason as the safeguard. The Godwinian notion of reason champions pure objectivity in recognizing and analyzing our history, ultimately safeguarding us from internal or external forms of judgment or prejudice. Godwin advocates for the total intellectualization of our history, where the only way for us to not be bogged down by the chaos of our existence is to ground it in rationale.

The Lockean epistemology and necessitarian dogma are mere variables in Godwin’s formula of morality. Godwin illustrates the progression of human perception, morals, and the origins of change as a fixed process provoked by cause and effect. He believed that recognizing this philosophy of cause and effect “presents us with an idea of the universe as connected and cemented in all its parts, nothing in the boundless progress of things being capable of happening otherwise than it has actually happened” (Godwin 166). Godwin establishes a mind-body duality in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, where the mind is materialized as a variable in Godwin’s formula, and experience is funneled through it. The recognition of this interconnectedness between our experience and patterns of behavior is the first step to establishing this mind-body duality, as Godwin advocates for a consciousness of the mind in the process of executing an action. Godwin makes the process of moral reform tangible, as it is grounded in an understanding of the physical causes that have preceded action. To Godwin, the universality of history is rooted in the physical events within it, not the soul, and not the spirit. There is nothing metaphysical about Godwin’s argument because it is ultimately rooted in the material chain of events that catalyze action. Godwin’s solution for the macroscopic reform of humanity begins with individual reconciliation with history, reason, and reflection. He states that “efforts for improvement of society must therefore be aimed at the improvement of each individual in it”, and “until each individual is made more rational, and therefore more moral, social institutions will not become more just” (Godwin 167). Godwin advocates for the reformation of the world through rationality and reflection. He establishes a direct connection between morality and rationality by implying that aperson’s ability to rationalize governs the scope of their morality. Locke positions experience, the mind, and the self as one body functioning in a cycle of cause and effect; Godwin, however, posits a mind-body duality by advocating for a consciousness of this cycle, a testament to the distinction between Locke’s notion of experience and Godwin’s philosophies of the mind.

Godwin’s philosophies are anchored by a faith in human perfectibility. In Book I of Political Justice, he writes:

“Perfectibility is one of the most unequivocal characteristics of the human species. There are three principal causes by which the human mind is advanced towards a state of perfection; literature, or the diffusion of knowledge through the medium of discussion, whether written or oral; education, or a scheme for the early impression of right principles upon the hitherto unprejudiced mind; and political justice” (Godwin 16).

The ultimate goal of Godwin’s Political Justice is to promote a morality of freedom on the individual and macroscopic scope, a freedom that, once achieved, allows humanity to harness their ‘perfectibility’. Godwin wishes to promote a culture of impartialness, a culture that can be achieved by acting in accordance with his doctrine of necessity. To Godwin, true “perfection of mind consists in disinterestedness” (Godwin 154). Disinterestedness acts as a mechanism for achieving the highest form of consciousness in Godwin’s doctrine. To Godwin, humanity has the capacity for sheer perfectibility and happiness because all human beings are capable of neutrality. This, to Godwin, is the meaning of happiness: freedom from history. Happiness and freedom of morality are synonymous in Godwin’s doctrine and constitute the final variables in his impenetrable formula for the human experience. Godwin, unlike Blake, pedestals humanity’s potential state of perfectibility as the ultimate goal of moral reformation. He, unlike Blake, did not view the soul as preeminent and expanded on the Lockean notion of ‘tabula rasa’ by arguing that the chain reaction of action influences the unfurnished mind, a chain reaction that we must conquer to promote true moral reform.

The language of Political Justice establishes Godwin’s firmness in his dogma, a firmness that William Blake challenges in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Though Blake does not directly address Godwin or Locke in his text, the language of The Marriage and Heaven and Hell casts aspersions on all fixed conceptions of the human experience, ultimately voiding Godwin’s wall of reason. As Professor David Steenburg writes in his “Chaos at the Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, Blake, “could not but chafe at the theme of rational order and harmony that pervaded eighteenth-century science, art, and theology” (Steenburg 447). To Blake, “only spiritual blindness could be content with a world reducible to measure and mathematics”, a spiritual blindness that is profoundly evident in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell consists of a mix of proverbs, poetry, illustrations, and prose, demonstrating a boundlessly vast portrait of our morality, ideals, and experience in this 16-page proverbial doctrine. To Blake, there are no limits, rules, or structures that can even begin to encapsulate our experience, a sentiment paralleled by the utter infinitude of the text. Blake “longed for a grander synthesis, a celebration of human living beyond the antinomies of reason and passion, understanding and imagination, order and chaos” (Steenburg 447). In essence, “he longed for the marriage of heaven and hell” (Steenburg 447). The language of the text heavily stresses this sentiment, employing ironic language to mirror the imperfect and paradoxical nature of the human species. Based on this understanding of the fundamental philosophies that informed the language of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, it is already clear that Locke’s notion of ‘tabula rasa’ was too limiting for Blake. Locke and Godwin’s texts were absolutely not in alignment with Blake’s rhetoric, as their language is ultimately too ‘sterile’, restrained, and spiritually deprived to align with Blake’s exposition. To Blake, the origins of perception, moral reform, and change were rooted in our infant being, but his ideas regarding the capabilities of the infant mind and spirit were drastically different from Locke’s and Godwin’s.

Blake denigrates Locke’s notion of “the empty slate” by pedestaling the soul as the ultimate source for moral reform. Like Godwin, Blake forges his own philosophical doctrine in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, illustrating a set of proverbs to reflect our complex code of behavior. Blake advocates for gauging reality beyond the physical history that Godwin’s doctrine is directly rooted in, emphasizing the primacy of the soul in his argument. The soul acts as the ideal source of perception, wisdom, truth, and reflection in Blake’s Marriage, a vessel for insight that is innate within all human beings. He establishes that “the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged”, as “man has no Body distinct from his Soul” (Blake 4). To Blake, the soul is the purest vehicle for sight; he writes that a consciousness of the metaphysical was at the core of honest reflection, as “the soul of sweet delight can never be defiled” (Blake 8). The soul is eternally unperverted, forever uncompromised, thereby our most reliable source of truth. The covering up of the soul (i.e., conditioned modes of thought) begets the perversion of our intrinsic being. To Blake, temporal notions of memory, history, and individual action are merely material components, a fraction of our infinite experience. The primacy of the soul encapsulates the simultaneous vastness and simplicity of our existence; the soul contains our most pure, honest, and simple beings, and restoring our connection to it mitigates the need to incessantly conceptualize our limitless experience. By advocating for a connection to the soul, Blake’s doctrine is essentially the Romantic tutorial for relinquishing over-intellectualization, intense psychoanalysis, and control, a direct contrast from Godwin’s rhetoric. Blake thoroughly negates Locke and Godwin’s belief in ‘the empty slate’ by establishing his argument that human beings contain an innate quality pre-experience. To Blake, our most infant states of being already contain a furnished self. His argument for the preeminence of the soul wholly rejects the Lockean notion of ‘tabula rasa’ in that he directly argues that there is something intrinsic about the human spirit.

Blake makes the ultimate claim that our best access to truth is already within us, but how do we neglect the conditions that imprinted us? In Plate 7 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake asks “How do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way Is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five?” (Blake 5). Blake establishes that we cannot honestly reflect on ourselves or the world around us if we reduce every experience we have with the world as ones sheerly experienced through our physical senses. However, we cannot simply jettison the five senses, as “the portion of Soul” is “discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age” (Blake 4). Blake then vivifies this notion of our senses acting as conduits to our spirit through his printing methods. By “printing in the infernal method by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid” (Blake 11). Ultimately, the senses are only a fragment of our capabilities. Blake argues that “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern” (Blake 12). Blake writes that we must medicine our senses in order to cleanse the doors of perception, as cleansing our access to our physical world is our most effective avenue for restoring our connection to the metaphysical. Our purest beings have ultimately been concealed and corrupted by the conditions that have been imposed on us, and we must rehabilitate our best access to reality (the senses) in order to reveal the evident that was hidden (the soul). Blake ultimately establishes his argument against Locke’s concept of ‘the empty slate’ by physicalizing his belief that we must corrode away the barriers and conditions that pervert our existence. Blake’s printing method engages with the Lockean notion of ‘tabula rasa’ adversarially, as his illuminated texts epitomize his belief that our most ‘unfurnished’ selves contain an innate quality.

Blake argues that imperfection and contradiction are at the heart of our experience, a sentiment that flies directly in the face of Godwin’s notion of perfectibility. Blake negates the dualist mode of thought proposed by writers like Godwin and Locke, using literary tools like irony and antithesis to illustrate his anti-dualist rhetoric. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is obviously rife with contrariety, a literary pattern that is employed within the mere title of the text. There are plenty of contrary axioms within the text that channel his philosophy that contradiction only reflects the infiniteness of our being. In Plate 3 of the text, Blake establishes the ultimate paradox:

“From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the Passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy” (Blake 3).

Where Godwin establishes a radical mind-body duality in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, materializing the human experience, Blake immaterializes concepts like good and evil, like Heaven and Hell, to illustrate our relentlessly intangible experience. In Plate 3 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he writes “without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence” (Blake 3). It is with this recognition of the human condition being riddled with contradiction that one can restore their mind-body-soul interconnectedness, a process that constitutes what Blake considered to be the honest development of one’s selfhood. This process is what Dan Miller defines as “Contrary Revelation”, establishing that “contrariety serves one last function: it is the means and the substance of revelation” (Miller 506). Contrariety serves as the last step of what Blake asserts as true vision: a recognition of all things as they are, infinite. Blake advocates for a radical detachment from dualist modes of thinking, as dualism inevitably negates the sheerly imperfect, contradictory, and limitless nature of our being. Just as our reality contains a boundless, contrary-laden essence, so does our being, reflecting the interconnectedness between us and the world. As Professor David Gross states in his “Infinite Indignation: Teaching, Dialectical Vision, and Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, Blake “produces an active awareness of the interconnectedness of all things and of the appalling necessity that basic relations, disclosed through full awareness, be changed in basic ways” (Gross 180). By displaying the interconnectedness between us, our reality, and all things, “Blake demonstrates the movement of consciousness and conscience” (Gross 180). Blake completely detaches from the Lockean and Godwinian logic by spotlighting the infinitude of our world and our essence, rendering the human experience as utterly imperfect, intangible, interconnected, and infinite.

While both Godwin and Blake engage with Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which author grants more agency to the individual? Although Blake’s argument for the recognition of our unique, individual spirit establishes his argument for individual agency, moral agency is also a crucial variable in Political Justice. Godwin’s doctrine promotes a consciousness of self-determination. In Book I Chapter V of Political Justice, Godwin writes:

“Thus the man acquires habits from which it is very difficult to wean him, and which he obeys without being able to assign either to himself or others any explicit reason for his proceeding. This is the history of prepossession and prejudice” (Godwin 28).

To Godwin, we develop “prepossession and prejudice” when we act purely by habit; experience and conditioned modes of thinking engender prejudice when we lack consciousness of our individual agency. The problem lies when man is simply a victim of habit and experience, and true moral reform begins when one is no longer subject to the confines of their history. Though Godwin states that experience does influence the mind and that the mind is subject to it, he poses a solution to combat this pattern of existence,establishing that he does grant agency to the individual. To Godwin, when “reason leads us to a conclusion, and other considerations are not present to the mind, its force is irresistible" (Ward). Reason is humanity’s mode of acquiring agency from experience and history because when we invoke reason, we void prejudice, judgment, and subjectivity. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake also relays his method of attaining moral agency. In “A Memorable Fancy”, Blake imparts a vision of himself and the biblical figure Ezekiel:

“I then asked Ezekiel why he ate dung, and lay so long on his right and left side. He answered: The desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite. This the North American tribes practise. And is he honest who resists his genius or conscience, only for the sake of present ease or gratification?” (Blake 13).

Blake advocates for an awareness of the individual spirit, a restoration of our most unperverted and unconditioned selves. Blake’s method for attaining this awareness requires a complete commitment to our innate conscience, renouncing all forms of action in the name of ‘present ease or gratification’. This is the meaning of true genius to Blake: freedom from conditioned modes of thinking, establishing that he also imparts agency to the individual. While their modes of acquiring moral agency are antithetical, Blake and Godwin’s ideas of what constitutes individual agency ironically parallel one another. Both writers advocate for the complete relinquishment of conditioned forms of existence, whether by pedestaling reason as the arbiter of individual freedom or by venerating the restoration of the individual spirit. Locke’s philosophies most certainly do not grant the individual moral agency, as his principles are rooted in man’s total susceptibility to experience. Ironically, both Blake and Godwin express two utterly extreme methods of attaining moral liberty just to form similar conclusions regarding what it means to attain individual agency. Though both Godwin and Blake engage with Locke’s philosophy of ‘the empty’ slate contrastingly, they both reject the notion that human beings are forever susceptible to the conditions that have been imposed onto them.

Ultimately, both Blake and Godwin illustrate two exceptionally in-depth and polarizing philosophies in their respective engagement with Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, while simultaneously concluding that the origins of moral reformation are rooted in honest reflection and a consciousness of our individual agency. While both authors believed that individual reflection was the source of honest reflection and moral reform, their proposed processes of reflection differ entirely from one another. To Godwin, honest reflection is rooted in the finite, in the material, while, for Blake, true reflection is rooted in the infinite, in the metaphysical. Godwin advocates for moral agency by pioneering a radical intellectualization of our experience, isolating his principles from the Lockean rhetoric by proposing that we are not victims of our experience. Blake, however, advocates in direct opposition to Godwin’s methods of rationalization and Locke’s philosophies of experience by emphasizing the primacy of the soul. Regardless of their polarizing schools of thought, it is incredibly clear that both Blake and Godwin are fueled by an ambitious mission to promote a morality of freedom, a form of consciousness that is uninhibited by the conditioned modes of thinking that are imposed onto us.