To generalize is to be an idiot. To particularize is the alone distinction of merit—general knowledges are those knowledges that idiots possess.

This remark is from William Blake’s private notebook commonly called the “Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses” (c. 1798–1809), written as Blake reacted against the Royal Academy’s influential aesthetic theory. Reynolds, the Academy’s first president, urged artists to pursue “general” or idealized forms rather than minute particularities. Blake—poet, engraver, and visionary artist—rejected that program as spiritually and artistically deadening. His marginalia are polemical, aphoristic, and often deliberately abrasive, defending imagination, individuality, and the concrete “minute particulars” of lived and perceived reality against academic generalization.

Blake attacks “generalizing” as a lazy habit that flattens reality into abstractions and rules. For him, genuine understanding and artistic greatness come from attention to the irreducible specificity of things—what he elsewhere calls “Minute Particulars.” The insult (“idiot”) is rhetorical: it signals that general knowledge, detached from imaginative perception, is not wisdom but a lowest-common-denominator grasp of the world. The line also expresses Blake’s broader resistance to Enlightenment rationalism and academic classicism: truth is not reached by averaging or idealizing, but by intense, imaginative engagement with the particular, where the infinite can be apprehended in the finite.

1) “To generalize is to be an idiot; to particularize is the alone distinction of merit.”
2) “General knowledges are those knowledges that idiots possess.”