Page:Aesthetic Papers.djvu/144

134 horny nails and terminations of the earth, return by mutuality of services to God, and the creation respires its existence on the perpetual condition of spending alike its worlds and particles, or its days and its very seconds, upon humanity.

This is an analytic view of correspondence: there is also a synthetic view, and the difference between the two may be perhaps thus illustrated. The analytic form traces the series of nature to the living body, and the correspondence of the body to the states of the mind or soul, according to the division which is adopted of those states. As an example of this view, birds are said to correspond to rational thought; for they fly in the aërial series which terminates in the lungs, and the lungs correspond to the understanding. The synthetic form, however, is different: it deals, not with the roots of man, but with his fruits; not with his principles, but with his actions or ends; not with individuals, but with that which is the necessary sphere for individuals, viz. societies; not with the fractions of units, but with the powers of numbers; not with thoughts, but with dramas and representations. Thus it takes the life, arts, and manners of the social man as the one term; and the forms of nature as the other. And although it traces these to ultimate psychological grounds in each individual, yet its method consists in regarding nothing that is more minute than the actions of societies, as parallel to the developments of the creation. This is a very noble form of the study of universal analogy, in no way contrary to the analytic form, though much more concrete, and dealing with masses of thought, and expressing its results in new terms; also criticising man for his politics and social laws, rather than for his religious principles; in a word, judging of ages by their fruits, both in action, and in the representations or tableaux of the universe. The first of these methods is represented in the writings of the penetrating, celestial Swedenborg; the latter, in those of the gigantic and earth-born Fourier. They are the arms and legs of spiritual science, and the five toes of the one are as indispensable as the five jewelled fingers of the other. The first without the last may be part of a dandy bust, but not of a locomotive being.

The analogies of this synthetic method, which, like the