channels whereby it circulates humanely through all things. I believe that the construction of only six such tables would be such a wide gate of knowledge, such an oil of flexibility, such a clue to more than Cretan labyrinths, such a highway to the acknowledgment of God, that it. would open an age of new intellectual power, and form indeed the veritable beginning of the inductive study of the spiritual sciences.
We said before, that it requires experience of both the terms, in order to perceive their reciprocal correspondence: we may now add, that it will also require genius, according to the express declaration of Swedenborg, that great inductive student of correspondences. Both these assertions are indeed but truisms; for where is the science, or where the part of any science, how physical soever it matters not, which has not had to wait for the celestial gifts of experience and genius, before it could take its seat in the Congress of Knowledge?
Genius, in the sense of mental fitness for this study, implies especially a harmony of mind with the ends of creation, and an entrance thereby into the streams of causative wisdom; and as correspondence is the connection of things, so also it is their delight and love, and delight and tranquillity and sweet opportunity are the conditions of the soul which are the most generative of the perceptions of correspondence. Therefore the poets hitherto have dwelt in this bond more than others, because they have been resigned and childlike, and have walked with God in liberty, and been content to drink of the river of his pleasures.
Correspondence, we said, is the nexus of creation, and it will therefore be especially manifest in what Lord Bacon calls transitive instances, when, in point of fact, creation is taking place. For example, if, when thoughts were arising in the mind, birds of various kinds were invariably to arise in the heavens or upon the earth, the mind would be at no difficulty to assign the minute correspondence between the two things thus emerging piecemeal into visibility together. Such new creations would be startling evidences to common-sense perception. It is, however, clear that nature upon this planet is far less active now than in earlier ages, when the
