CHAPTER V.

HOMOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY.

SWEDENBORG ON THE NATURE OF MAN.

"Here, however, is a science to be undertaken the study of the atmosphere by the earth which it repeats; of the Mosaic pillars of the landscape and climate in the crystal sky; of the map of the scented and tinted winds; and the tracing of the virtues of the ground through exhalation and aroma property, by property into the lungs and the circulating blood. For the physical man himself is the builded aroma of the world. This, then, at least, is the office of the lungs-to drink the atmosphere with the planet desolved in it."-JAMES GARTH WILKINSON, The Human Body, and its Connexion with Man.

"Well said St. Chrysostom, with his lips of gold, 'The true SHEKINAH is Man:' where else is the GOD'S PRESENCE manifested, not to our eyes only but to our hearts, as in our fellow-man?"-THOMAS CARLYLE.

CHAPTER V.

CONTENTS.-Who and What is Man ?-Typology-the Homologies of Man-the Descent into the Human Body-the Spirit makes the Body-a Parable-the World within the World-the Doctrine of the Skin-Doctrine of the Lungsthe Doctrine of the Stomach-the Doctrine of the Spleen-the Doctrine of the Tongue-Science is Dead without Religion-Psychology-the Wonderful Island: a Vision-What is the Soul and its Quality?-Life: not a Vital Principle, but a Divine Influx-the Two Hemispheres of the Human Mind— the Light Power and the Love Power-the Wonderful Shipthe Skeleton without a Heart-Man a Receptacle of Godthe Deserted Temple-the Body is Man's House-Psyche Controversies-Instinct and Reason-no Real Life in the Body--the Sentry Box.

THE next great and interesting question is, What is Man? Who is Man? It may be accepted as certain that that book or teacher giving to us the best and most truthful account of God, will also give to us the best and most truthful account of Man. These are questions of profoundest interest-What is the relation of the body of Man which we see, to the spirit of which we infer the existence. Is man anything more than a body bound by some wonderful magnetic law; the creation and creature of some blind force? Has he any independent and separate existence beyond this "visible diurnal sphere?" and what are the conditions of his existence; and how may that existence be a happy one? and what are the constituents of

his mental and moral being? what is mental being, and what is moral being? Do we not need answers to all these questions.

A most interesting study, and one to which Swedenborg holds a clear and steady lamp, is TYPOLOGY. For many ages hints and suggestions have been thrown out, but it has been reserved for a great Anatomist of our own country and day to give the most lucid illustrations upon the matter. Professor Owen, in his most interesting and important work on the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton, has shown to us most convincingly how the parts of the human form obtain everywhere throughout the living skeleton. Does it not illustrate to us how the whole exists in everything how the macrocosm exists in the microcosm? And whence is this? Professor Sedgwick says, in the fifth edition of his Cambridge Discourses, "If there be an archetype in the vertebrate division of animated nature, we may ask whether there be not a more general archetype that runs through the whole kingdom of the living world? In a certain sense there is. All animals, if we except the radiata, which come close to a vegetable type, are bilateral and symmetrical, have double organs of sense, and have a nervous and vascular system, with many parts in very near homology, even when we put side by side, for comparison, the animal forms taken from the opposite extreme of nature's scale; and even in the radiata, where we at first sight seem to lose all traces of the

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vertibrate type, on a better examination, many of the genera are proved still to be bilateral and symmetrical." And Professor Owen says, "General anatomical science reveals the unity which pervades the diversity, and demonstrates the whole skeleton of man to be the harmonised sum of a series of essentially similar segments, although each segment differs from the other, and all vary from the archetype." gous! man everywhere! this is the idea of modern anatomy: thus demonstrating the unity, the uniqueness of nature. This having been seen, it has been said that nature, all unintelligent as she is, works without a plan, yet ever upward. But Swedenborg, some generations since, when as yet there shone but feeble light from the central places of the animal kingdom, when there was no true science of Comparative Anatomy, proclaimed the Doctrine of Series-the great law of Natural Harmony. But with him the links ran down from the greatest to the least. Very rarely has so powerful an analytic been conjoined to so full and powerful a synthetic; wonderfully he saw things in wholes, and as we have before said, he saw the whole in every part. Не descended into the human body, and through it into the whole animal kingdom: that whole kingdom lay before him like a continent, and every inhabitant of the kingdom was instinctively alive; not a nerve or a fibre, not a muscle or tissue, but he beheld it as if consciously fulfilling its duty and obeying

its law.

T