Page:Aesthetic Papers.djvu/152

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142
Correspondence.

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.


POSTSCRIPTUM.

From what has been said we may infer, that the relation of cause and effect, as of end and cause, is no other than the relation of correspondence; and that the perception of causation depends primarily upon our perception of the uses of effects as carrying out causes. This applies to that which is strictly causation. The continuity of the principle reaches, however, to the relation of prior and superior to posterior and inferior effects. 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. Besides the alteration or qualification of will into motion, there is also the expansion and vibration of motion into widening natural spheres, or the transference and transmission of motion from one subject to another. This is the only kind of cause and effect recognized by one class of metaphysicians. It also is, however, only the continuity of a single principle through different circumstances; and that principle is force, and that force is will, the unimpaired transference and account of which fall under the head of the mechanical and dynamical, and not of so-called metaphysical sciences. 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