Page:Aesthetic Papers.djvu/145

Rh analytic, has its own limits and advantages, lie between human characters, as wholes, and the objects of nature: thus between the concrete terms of friendship, love, obedience, constancy, inconstancy, pride, vanity, coquetry, or any of the other phrases which express the practical shades of difference observable in private life: also between the various systems, political, social, commercial, with their numberless details, and the same objects of nature; for these systems are but the mechanized aggregates of human characters, gravitating into masses which have such inevitable properties. This species of symbolism is doubtless very ancient; but, as we said before, it has acquired new importance and precision from the labors of the noble-minded Fourier.

Where the powers of inward contemplation or psychological analysis are feeble, this Science of Universal Analogy will be an invaluable substitute for the Science of Correspondences; and it may serve to educate many minds, and even many nations, in the laws of unity, where the material faculties and interests are more developed than the spiritual. In short, it may prove a mighty lever in the hands of a living doctrine of creation and correspondences, co-ordinating the truths of nature for truths of life which are yet to come.

There is, however, one caution which cannot be too often enforced in the prosecution of analogies and correspondences. It is, that both terms of the intellectual equation must lie within some sphere of experience, or no conclusion will be valid from the one to the other. Where the upper term is intangible, there may indeed be &quot;analogical conjectures&quot; respecting it; yet the fact that the lower corresponds to it, will not indicate what the higher is, but rather what it is not; for correspondence subsists where different forms extend the same principles to different spheres. To infer from the lower to the higher, without also having experimental knowledge of the higher, would be like concluding from a staff or walking stick, to the hand and arm, or to the limbs; concluding, in fact, that the arms and legs are superior specimens of wooden manufacture. But this would be to miss out all the difference of the higher correspondent, or to mistake correspondence for useless identity. Experience, therefore, is in-