Art. VII.—CORRESPONDENCE.
The fact that nature answers to spirit is one which is confined to no new or narrow circle of experiences. The world at large is the school which believes in it; and daily life, in all its immense detail, is the theatre of its exemplification. The young child acts upon it spontaneously, when the changeful play of the mother's countenance is interpreted into gentle love or gentle rebuke; and mankind, in the main, are satisfied with the living face, as the natural representative of the soul. Love and dislike attach to the human countenance as though it were the inner man. Moreover, the whole body, in its obedience to the will, is known universally as answering to the spirit; and its actions are not regarded as mechanical, but as spiritual, by virtue of the correspondence. The difficulty under which the learned labor, of conceiving a connection between virtues and machines, is no difficulty at all for the common faith; which, in truth, embraces the learned themselves, and maintains that the bodily good deeds of good men are noble, and that their willing arms are the real extending of their spiritual powers and inclinations. It is the same with the Arts, which comprehend all rational actions, as contradistinguished from divine or natural operations; for whatever arts we learn and practise, answer to particular ends for which they are acquired and exercised, and are estimated, by all who understand them, in proportion to their correspondence with the design in the mind of the inventor, and to the requirements of those for whose sake they are applied. 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.
If the face, the body, the actions, and the inventions of mankind are always interpreted by an instinctive application of the law of correspondence, the frame of nature itself is also
