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Correspondence.

dispensable in both spheres; and, if there were no actual experience of the spiritual world, there could be no safe conclusion, except a negative one, from the natural world to the spiritual. Therefore correspondence does not engender, but simply follows experience; and analogies illustrate, but do not demonstrate. As an intellectual fact, correspondence subsists between the known and the known, and not between the known and the unknown. And the notion of sameness excludes that of correspondence.

Correspondence, moreover, is a science to be worked; not a bare general intuition to be speculatively particularized. It cannot be drawn out of ignorance by any fineness of deduction. The philosophy that pursues it must be content to study it in the school of facts, with industry, or, what is the same thing, with induction. Even its true results, with the exception of a very few general cases, cannot be confirmed by an appeal to self-evidence; so little attestation of the majority of truths does "the self" at present carry with it. 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. Otherwise we should suspend our judgment absolutely, until either the assertion were confirmed or denied by numerous true or false results, or by our repetition of the process by which it was arrived at. For, in contradicting it, we are supplanting something by nothing, and arguing that the first appearance of unlikeliness is justly condemnatory of all assertions; than which nothing can be more contrary to fact; for truth is stranger than fiction, and spirit and nature are more exquisitely modish and formal than human artificiality.

And what is the way to extend the science of correspondences, or rather to develope the general idea into a science? Undoubtedly, by studying the uses of all things to whatever is around and above them, and so pressing inwards from