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Correspondence.

upwards, and the point of perfection is the point of cessation, must give place to columnar progress, in which the length and breadth of the spiritual world will be recognized as the top of worldly knowledge, and the solidity of all things in and from their first principles will be guaranteed by our distinct perception of the inalienable spaces that are occupied by their spiritual beginnings. Then will idealism and materialism be shouldered over the verge of the world by the exceeding fulness thereof; and the fitness of things for their perceived Divine ends will again engender, as at first, the profound study of correspondence, as the beginning and end of knowledge, or the Science of sciences.

For, properly speaking, the uses of things are the principal knowledges, or the principles of knowledge, and the uses of things are the reasons of usage, or the grounds of correspondency; and as all things, whether ends, causes or effects, also have specific uses, so all things are made into ends by the first end, and are the subjects of correspondence. Thus correspondence is transferred outwards, with ends, from sphere to sphere, and is omnipresent in the great circle of the universe. Its science is thus the crown of those sciences which show the adaptation of nature to the developments of humanity; and the analytic investigation of uses or ends is the point of union between the ancient and the modern worlds,—between the physical sciences as now studied, and the ancient science of correspondence.

The doctrine of correspondence teaches the value and the limits of circumstances in affecting our minds and actions, and shows in what powerful spiritual streams outward situations and events may place us. Without in the slightest degree perilling the doctrine of free-will, it rather makes the strength of that freedom an object of statistic and experimental, than of a priori knowledge. It shows that circumstances are the nidus of both heaven and hell; and that the presence of the innermost good depends upon the presence of an order corresponding to it, in the disposition of society, and the distribution of the world; for every corporeal being, of whatever kind, is used or animated by the spiritual world according to its form, and its form is the essence which pro-