“Alas! we cannot understand each other on any point.  We are separated by an abyss.  You are on the side of darkness, while I—­I live in the light, the true Light!  Is this the word that you ask of me?  I say it with joy; it may change you.  Know this:  there are sciences of matter and sciences of spirit.  There, where you see substances, I see forces that stretch one toward another with generating power.  To me, the character of bodies is the indication of their principles and the sign of their properties.  Those principles beget affinities which escape your knowledge, and which are linked to centres.  The different species among which life is distributed are unfailing streams which correspond unfailingly among themselves.  Each has his own vocation.  Man is effect and cause.  He is fed, but he feeds in turn.  When you call God a Creator, you dwarf Him.  He did not create, as you think He did, plants or animals or stars.  Could He proceed by a variety of means?  Must He not act by unity of composition?  Moreover, He gave forth principles to be developed, according to His universal law, at the will of the surroundings in which they were placed.  Hence a single substance and motion, a single plant, a single animal, but correlations everywhere.  In fact, all affinities are linked together by contiguous similitudes; the life of the worlds is drawn toward the centres by famished aspiration, as you are drawn by hunger to seek food.

“To give you an example of affinities linked to similitudes (a secondary law on which the creations of your thought are based), music, that celestial art, is the working out of this principle; for is it not a complement of sounds harmonized by number?  Is not sound a modification of air, compressed, dilated, echoed?  You know the composition of air,—­oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon.  As you cannot obtain sound from the void, it is plain that music and the human voice are the result of organized chemical substances, which put themselves in unison with the same substances prepared within you by your thought, co-ordinated by means of light, the great nourisher of your globe.  Have you ever meditated on the masses of nitre deposited by the snow, have you ever observed a thunderstorm and seen the plants breathing in from the air about them the metal it contains, without concluding that the sun has fused and distributed the subtle essence which nourishes all things here below?  Swedenborg has said, ’The earth is a man.’

“Your Science, which makes you great in your own eyes, is paltry indeed beside the light which bathes a Seer.  Cease, cease to question me; our languages are different.  For a moment I have used yours to cast, if it be possible, a ray of faith into your soul; to give you, as it were, the hem of my garment and draw you up into the regions of Prayer.  Can God abase Himself to you?  Is it not for you to rise to Him?  If human reason finds the ladder of its own strength too weak to bring God down to