James John Garth Wilkinson

“ How amazing our interest in the existence of such a Word, and the ministrations of such a Science! Better, for very hope's sake, to hold to them, than to sit in the seat of the wittiest scorner, or to wrap up the proud soul in the threefold honors of skepticism! Philosophy has nothing but darkness to offer, when it rejects precise and unitary ideas of inspiration, whether for the emptiness of rationalism, or for the incoherency and caprice of the Protestant ideas of the Divine Truth, from which the only safeguard is the blessed inconsequence of those who entertain them. ”

“ The first of these conditions for poetry is, that all things in the world shall be capable of an application to the human heart,—that objects seemingly dead shall still be fitly the objects of love or dislike, from relevancy, whether of harmony or discord, to the affections of mankind. Thus poetry is the complement of our social instincts, as it proclaims that the connection of the soul with nature is not limited to correspondence with the head or the body, or the works of the hands or the inventions of the thought, but extends to the kingdoms of the earth and the entire fabric of the universe ”

“ When church and state, theology and philosophy, forsake the universal verities of existence, then poetry takes them up. In such times, it becomes the church, the provisional spouse of the Father of the fatherless. It is the only faculty to which all facts are welcome in all times. Place the most pinched sectary in the seat of the Muses, and you see his puckered lips expand into round and flowing smiles; and "his eye, in a fine frenzy rolling," communes manifestly with superior beings from all the quarters of the opened heavens. ”

“ To pass over the other senses, we next observe that, the legs are the whole outward art of locomotion, from passive to active, from the nails of the toes to the wheel of the knee, and the globe of the hip; in short, from the cane to the railroad: the real body uses them in nature, whether for the support of its lowliness, or the means of its swiftness, or the equipage of its pride: they are the dignified columns of all movement, material as well as social; the rich soul's carriage, and the poor soul's crutches. ”

“ We may, therefore, now pass on to finite man, as the secondary fountain of correspondence, or the modifying principle of the universe. Let us, then, narrow our field for a time to this convenient limit, and illustrate the law of correspondency from our own familiar actions and objects.
Now, what is the series and procession of all human works? Man undoubtedly lives for a multiplicity of ends, which arise to him one after another; and he proposes them to himself, in the sevenfold ages of his lifetime. These ends, we must repeat, are not abstractions, but objects containing indefinite details. ”

“ An art without an end is an absurdity; a body without a soul is fearful to souls; a face without a mind is idiocy, worse than death. No wonder, then, that we enjoy an intuitive perception of the correspondence of means to ends, and of nature to spirit; for otherwise the universe would be a vast charnel-house, and society upon earth a mere brotherhood of the dead. ”

“ Undoubtedly, by studying the uses of all things to whatever is around and above them, and so pressing inwards from every side to humanity, whose nature is spirit, and whose light is life; also by studying the evolutions of humanity, as it goes out to meet the uses of the creation, and to marry them by correspondence. But it is in the Word of God especially that the study of correspondence may begin, and has begun. For the material elements of the Word are the central symbols of nature; the object of the Word is the universal being, even mankind; and the life of the Word is God. ”

“ The ages of metaphysical philosophy are not ages of spiritual productiveness, but of doubt, fear, and inaction. They cudgel nature for what they gain, and fail of her co-operation. The world is as stubborn as an ass to their elaborate sciences. It is not remarkable that impuissant ages should know nothing of creation, and nothing of correspondence, since they are not themselves creative; and nature reflects, by correspondence, their own barrenness and hypocrisy, and appears therefore to be callous and dead to humanity and the soul. ”

“ Light is to the eye what truth is to the mind; and heat is to the body what love is to the man. Hence heat and light are the natural vicegerents of truth and love; because, by accordance of use, they prolong and extend the empire of truth and love through inferior nature. The Divine Light, per se, cannot enter the material creation; but, by the obsequious arm of light-giving suns, it reaches the lowest world with creative love and power, and becomes omnipresent even through death itself by the perfect correspondence of the instrument to the end. ”

“ By such tables, not one of which, to my knowledge, has ever been framed,—for the corn of nature has had no granary, though the straw has been carefully stacked,—the mind will be led from sphere to sphere, through regions more wide even on this earth than all our present conceptions of universal existence, and will prove the truth of the adage, that any road duly followed up will lead to the end of the world, and that there is a love in all things which enlarges the least spaces to infinity, and that uses are the vessels or channels whereby it circulates humanely through all things. ”

“ The world lives in him, and fits him to live in the world. Not a stone, or a plant, or a living creature, but carries up its heart's thread into his loom, there to be wound into human nature, and therefrom and thenceforth, in its form and fortunes, to obey the progress of his own immortal destinies. ”

“ The soul being assumed as the real body, the natural body will represent all the arts of life, whether economic or æsthetic. Thus the eye is its window, telescope, microscope, and serves for the whole series of media which transparent substances proffer to vision, and which are as curious and exquisite for appearance as they are excellent for use; for the eye receives the finest of impressions from things, and gives the finest of expressions from the soul. So likewise the ear is the hearing trumpet of the real body, which would otherwise be deaf to the sounds of nature ”

“ The harshness of the Jewish Word, and the hiddenness of much of the Christian, is, then, no more against the indwelling of the Divine Love in these difficult forms, than the savagery and hostility of the creation is against the fact of a beneficent Creator. It is finite man to whom all things ultimately correspond; and it is even for his benefit 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. ”

“ Philosophy was seen to be the protest against theology; science is the protest against both, but proximately and prominently against the former. Hence, for the present, science is opposed to all general principles arising at once from the mind, and bestows its favor only upon its own generalizations, which are so slow in clearing even the material world, that it must be ages of ages before even the existence of correspondence could come before it as a question. ”

“ When we are told by a writer like Swedenborg, that a horse corresponds to intellectual truth, an ass to scientific truth, a camel to general scientifics, the mind makes almost no response to so bizarre a statement, and we even doubt the very existence of the principle which forces us into any such details. And why? Only because we expect to arrive at the truth of these matters by the force of our inexperience; because philosophy is too proud to submit to induction. ”

“ Then the doctrine will be exemplified, not in schools or dry diagrams, but in garden and in grove, in arts like nature, and in growths like art, in new messengers of truth and instruction, growing in the night from the sportive soil, from no seed but heaven, yet with no mystery, because in the fulness of time, and in the attraction of requirement; and, even in the physical world, the use and beauty and completing series of all things will be as an advancing testimony of the correspondence of God with nature, and of that supreme correspondence which constitutes the Marriage of the Lamb. ”

“ Having regarded man in one of his parental functions, let us now regard the Creator under the same type of love, and we shall recognize that the Divine Father has prepared his universe for the spiritual education or sustenance of all his children. The goodness and wisdom of all possible generations in all worlds is the object of his works; a greatest Man, containing all men for ever, and for ever increasing in its correspondence to his own infinite humanity. ”

“ If any one asks what is power, we say therefore that it is originally will, and no abstraction, but embodied in the human arm; and that from this central body and symbol it is transferred to all machineries, and extends through the world as a Divine arm, or Almighty power. For the arts are the comparative anatomy of the will and understanding, the three kingdoms of mind, as the three kingdoms of nature are the comparative anatomy of the soul. ”

“ Thus man is the conductor of correspondences, and also the modifier; for, in making what use of things he pleases, man draws down new and different influences from the spiritual sphere, which give rise to new and appropriate extensions of the creation.
In fine, the science of correspondence is the most mathematical, mechanical, or intellectual of the sciences. The foundation of it is justice or equation, and the working of the law ensures permanent equilibrium in the world. ”

“ Besides justifying the common-sense perceptions of cause and effect, correspondence also justifies the usage of analogies, metaphors, and similitudes, so frequent by the human mind, and so attractive in discourse when fitly used. For the one infinitely manifold principle of creation passes down into the worlds by indefinite streams or series, and yet is but one principle, realizing many uses, tending all to the return to unity. For example, all things in our houses are for the one end of enfranchising man from the wants and forces of nature ”

“ Who can imagine for a moment that any of the gentile or national deities are the infinite ends of creation? But no finite power, and no number of such powers, could even modify the universe correspondentially, still less create it so. The utmost unanimity among a thousand deities would not amount to particular, but only to general unity, and general only for some one district of the planet. ”

“ But the arms and hands are all the finer machineries or inventions which are wielded directly by the arms and hands of the soul; they are the pen and the sword; the instrument of many strings; strength and manipulation in all their bearings ”

“ No wonder that she excludes useless truths from her careful foundations; for her aim is progress, in contradistinction to the immobility of philosophy, and hence she takes no cognizance even of the truth itself, unless it be presently capable of application and enlargement. This is the reason why there is no science of correspondences; the doctrine of correspondence being an abstraction standing by itself, which gains from theology no life or impetus sufficient to make it circulate downwards, and take body and clothing among the things of this world. ”

“ In creation, therefore, while there is absolute correspondence or causation, particular as well as general, subsisting between the Divine Ideas and universal nature, there is on the other hand a modifying power assigned to man as always becoming a partaker in the Divine End, whereby the Creator consents to actualize in the world all the forms, whether good or bad, which man evolves in his mind; precisely to maintain inviolate the creative law of correspondence, whereby the world is the exact habitation of humanity. ”

“ These lines are to be studied by the constitution of a science of universal 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. ”

“ Thus there is the evolution of actual will into forcible motion, in which production the will passes as motion into the dead sphere, or will is the cause and soul of motion, as motion is the effect and body of will. This is a case of genuine correspondence; for will and motion are each the other, or the others. Will is spiritual force, or force raised into the spiritual world; force, or active motion, is will dropped down into the lower world: the difference of cause and effect being therefore only the difference between the two spheres into which one single principle introduces itself. ”

“ Unity of system alone would prescribe, that answerableness or correspondence of use be the tie between all spirit and all nature, and between each particular spirit and its bodily organ, as it confessedly is the tie which unites man to all his works, and the channel which carries forth human ends through the extensive ramifications of our mundane dwelling. ”