Page:Aesthetic Papers.djvu/130

120 things, and therefore an adequate origin for the whole existence of correspondences.

But, quitting the ground of number or measure, we may assert on other grounds, that the positive root of the doctrine of correspondences, as of all universal doctrines, lies in the admission of the Divine Humanity. For, apart from this, we have no right, save as a convenience of thought, to attribute ends, or Divine Ideas, or even a Divine Mind, to the Creator; failing which, the idea of God becomes altogether closed or occult, and can answer to no series of existence, either successive or simultaneous. Ignorance of correspondence depends, then, mainly upon ignorance or denial of the Divine Humanity; and, conversely, the possibility of our knowledge of the doctrine depends expressly upon the quantity and quality of our knowledge of the love and other attributes of the same intelligible humanity. It is not to be understood, that this doctrine of God need always be consciously admitted, in order to a belief in the unity of creation, and the universality of correspondence; but only that, for this purpose, it must always be accepted, either tacitly or openly, before the laws of Divine Order can be deduced from their genuine fountain. We know, however, that many simple men do really live an unconscious life, upon this glorious reception; nor is it to be doubted, that its bright rays have streamed down often for a few moments upon the pages of philosophers; nay, have been habitually though invisibly present, wherever worthy and open conceptions of nature and human destiny were the staple thoughts of the good or great in our own and other generations.

The Divine Humanity, then, is the only refuge from abstractions on the one hand, and from idolatry on the other. It is the only doctrine of God which involves neither mystery nor mental degradation; therefore the only doctrine which can be central to the whole of human knowledge. It is the sun, of which all the objects of science are the correspondences; even that brightness of wisdom by which the worlds were made. Radiant in the depths of the human soul, it makes our finite nature the delegated centre of the correspondential world; and as it constitutes man the image of