Page:Aesthetic Papers.djvu/143

Rh that all things, good and evil, were and are created. By virtue of the science of correspondences, this will become clear as heaven's light, and the meaning: of evil will be seen to be good, even Divine Goodness itself.

It has been said already, that the first and most intelligible of correspondences is that of the body with the soul, and that the specific uses of the body demonstrate the parts of the soul. Now branching out from the human body, we find two great series of subsidiary or remote correspondences: viz. on the one part, all the works of the hands, the whole world of art and society; on the other part, the forms of the three kingdoms of nature. The first of these spheres is notoriously the prolongation of the powers of man; the second is admitted even by naturalists to be the prolongation of his interior powers, or organization. The first is his own world of finite creation; the second, his divinely co-ordinated world, where he can modify, but not create; or where he is the medium, but not the rational origin, of forms. Herein lie the origin and currency of the law of series; of series which work for each other, and reciprocally gratify each other, through the ample range of the universe. The arts of outward life are to man what the three kingdoms of nature are to the human body: each ensures the secondary omnipresence of its principle in its own arena. Thus, each vegetable, animal, and plant is referable to some province of the human body, and thereby to a corresponding province of the soul, as each invention belongs to some province of human arms, and human wants or wills. For the series runs inwards by many moments, and triple graduations, to the central complex or unit, which corresponds, and offers the series, to the form and mechanism immediately above it, or the unseen soul of the centre, and sun of the extended system. In this way there is a primary correspondence between souls and bodies; between ends, causes and effects; between the spiritual world and the natural; between the centres of life and the centres of intelligence and movement; and a secondary correspondence between the primordial centres and the circumferences of the movement, in so far as the circumferences advance the ends of the centres. So the very stones, or the