Page:Aesthetic Papers.djvu/154

144 analogies, whose home shall be the entire globe of knowledge. It is the most superficial in contact with the most deep of the sciences; Analogy in contact with Correspondency; Poetry and Imagination in contact with Divine, Creative Truth; human fancies justified and accepted by God himself: for it is impossible for the most vagrant fancy to fancy half the odd analogies which science reveals; and hence fancy will become but the useful matter of fact, incomprehensive scullery-maid of science. As instances of these analogies, we may cite many things from the superficial parts of the animal kingdom. Thus, for instance,—not to mention man, who is like all the animals, which similitude occasionally blazes out with striking splendor, as in the pig-faced lady,—the Ox tribe, in the buffalo, the bison, the aurochs, &c., by its mane and contour, evidently touches upon the lion, the fountain of the feline; by the Brahmin bull, and other species with humps, it touches upon the camel tribe; by other characteristics, with the deer tribe; and so forth. The ass, by the zebra, touches upon the tiger; and the tiger, and the cats, by their marks, as well as their flexibility, upon the snakes. The camel, very evidently, as Fourier has said, upon the slave; the toad upon the pauper; and so forth. The blushing rose upon the maiden's cheek; the fragrance upon her modesty. Flowers upon sexual characteristics and delights; and so forth. All these analogies, which extend causation laterally, or give breadth to correspondency, are, in our view, as much running lines of the creation as the lines of correspondency, and are not fanciful, unless fancy be admitted as a poor caterer for science. In a word, in the orb of thought, they are, as we said before, the Divine or real lines of latitude; the relation and friendliness of truth subsisting between all things.

It is not going too far to say, that Analogy is the breadth or the truth of truth. It is the intersection of the mountains and rivers and hedgerows of analogy that makes the field of truth to be, not a blank arena with a mathematical diagram, but a living landscape. It is analogy which gives flowing imagery to all ideas; for that which is not the body of a truth, which is not in its immediate sphere, becomes its clothing.