Page:Aesthetic Papers.djvu/129

Rh and transitional, and will require a new general state before they can become ruling influences in the world. Meanwhile, nothing could be more destructive to existing limitations and prejudices than a doctrine of correspondences, which might be inferred from the dread wherewith our thinkers regard analogical reasoning, although, by the way, reasoning and analogizing are fundamentally one process.

What is the first postulate for the successful prosecution of a science of correspondence? Evidently this, that there be at least as much detail in the higher sphere, as the mind or the senses discern in the lower, with which the higher is to correspond. Otherwise it is clear, that the two spheres can not compare with each other in the way of apposite particular equivalents. For example, if light is the lower term, and truth the higher; and if light embraces the phenomena of reflection, refraction, polarization, &c.; then truth cannot correspond to light, unless there be modes of truth answering to reflection, refraction, &c. &c. and to the other exhibitions of which light is the ground. Where the two fail to tally, the higher is occult, or its series is confused into uniformity, in which case it is impossible to say what it corresponds to. The beginning of mystery coincides, therefore, with the cessation of correspondence.

We may go a step further than this, and declare that the highest object of knowledge, or the divine nature, must be capable of presenting to the mind as many truths as equal the totality of things; or otherwise there can be no correspondence. Indeed, in point of number, there never was, or can be, a polytheism which furnished a sufficiency of detail in this respect alone. It is therefore of primary importance to receive a doctrine of God sufficiently ample to provide all the principles of correspondences, at the same time that is sufficiently unitary to contain them, and all things else, in one Divine Idea. This doctrine can be no other than that of the Humanity of God. For, according to the maxims of the philosophers themselves, all nature is combined in man, so that he is a microcosm, or miniature world, and man himself must be comprised in a Divine Man; which shows that the Divine Humanity is a doctrine co-extensive with all