Page:Aesthetic Papers.djvu/138

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128
Correspondence.

all by themselves. And, not to pursue the enumeration, the body, wishing to be at home in the world, must build up in the world a medium corresponding to itself, for itself to dwell in. This medium is the house; which is a correspondence, because it extends the active and passive powers of the human frame to the general system of nature, and is a defence as well as a medium. The precise uses of the house, and all it contains, are the parts of this correspondence: they are the handles by which the body holds the house; and the form of the use need only be stated to explain the mode of the connection.

Strictly speaking, however, the connection between two things is subsequent to their correspondence, and is the use or fruit of the latter; and we therefore return, for the present, to the consideration of correspondence, and proceed to remark, that, whenever one thing is to a higher sphere what another thing is to a lower, correspondence has place between the two. Correspondence is, therefore, definite proportion between different spheres. Thus truth is to the spiritual world what light is to the natural world; wherefore truth and light are correspondences. Love is to the spiritual world what heat is to the natural; therefore love and heat correspond to each other. The understanding is to the soul what the lungs are to the body; therefore the understanding and the lungs correspond to each other. This is the formula of that high kind of correspondence which is identical with the law and order of creation, whereby the Divine Ideas are embodied in the creatures. For the threefold world is a celestial equation, always co-ordinated from above and below, and fluent in a widening stream from node to node, and from immensity to immensity.

I have said that the lungs correspond to the understanding; and, to exercise abstraction, which is the ghost of thought, let us draw out the uses of the two a little particularly, that we may see with our eyes that they correspond, or that the one is in the body what the other is in the mind. Now, the understanding gives distinct division, or shapen general force, to the affections of the man: it is those affections formed from without, as the will is the same actuated from within. The