Page:Aesthetic Papers.djvu/133

Rh analogy between the Word and the Works, and correspondence between both and the end. In fine, Revelation and Creation are the means of God, answering to and carrying out the Divine End or Idea.

Man is the subject to whom the Divine care applies, and hence the above end and means generate the very potencies of man; the great movement of the universe enters his body, and becomes his constitution. The world lives in him, and fits him to live in the world. Not a stone, or a plant, or a living creature, but carries up its heart's thread into his loom, there to be wound into human nature, and therefrom and thenceforth, in its form and fortunes, to obey the progress of his own immortal destinies. For, as was said before, while creation is the work of God, modification is the function of man; or, in other words, the world is continually created by God through man, that is to say, co-ordained to humanity.

Such are some of the preliminaries of a doctrine of particular correspondences: let us now look a little more closely at what it is that makes correspondence. We have seen, that the created universe consists of chains of specific correspondences, reaching from heaven to earth. What, then, is the condition of correspondence between any two things in these different spheres? To this it may be answered, that gradation or subordination of use is the first principle of the law, and that the same also is the universal principle of connection between spirit and nature, and particularly between the soul and the body. Thus, in studying correspondence, we are virtually studying the connection between the soul and the body, and between the natural world and the spiritual. This, the pressing difficulty of human thought for thousands of years, turns out to be only soluble upon the neglected theory of correspondence.

The body corresponds to the soul. Why so? it will be asked. Simply because the body is the soul over again, or is the vicegerent of the soul in a new sphere whither the soul itself could not penetrate. The body is a form co-ordained to the service of the soul, shapen into usefulness by forces emanating from the soul. As the human hand shapes the pen, and then writes with it, so the soul forms the body, and