THE UNIVERSAL SKINS. 281 



Especially must it reign in the intellectual sphere. There it is a 

 noble species of touch, allied to all that is great and solid — no other 

 than our common sense — polished, inviolate, sensitive of trivialities, 

 rejecting at once what is antiquated and useless, open as day to 

 edification, reconsidering many things j the basis of capacity ; the 

 beauty of the emotions ; the complexion of the virtues ; the con- 

 versability of the understanding ; the simple drapery of wise actions. 

 This it is which fosters the man, and is the defence of an immortal 

 vesture. 



Let us, then, attend a little more severely to the correspondences 

 of the skin considered as a function and principle, and elicit its 

 formulas in their main departments. In fulfilling this task, we 

 shall come to the largest generalizations, as the skin is the general- 

 ization of the body ; and to self-evident positions, because the skin 

 is ocular evidence of ourselves. This is the reason why the present 

 chapter is descriptive, for the skin being scenery, we wander perforce 

 around its regions, pencil in hand. 



The outer skin of all is space, whose face robes the suns, its 

 breast envelops the air, and its belly overlays the terrene globes; a 

 skin adapted to its contents ; space expressive to the glancing fire, 

 free space to the atmospheres, and fixed space to the earth. At the 

 top the name of space is light, the countenance or beaming of 

 things; in the middle it is expanse, the chest of the same ; and below 

 it is extense, the flatness of matter, or the skin of the ground. Space 

 limits, for nothing can exceed its space, or add a cubit to its stature. 

 But it is porous, and keeps in none but insides of its own grossness. 

 The light-space transpires through the air-space, which becomes 

 luminous thereby; and spiritual things invade space with no re- 

 sistance, for it is not their bound. Space has no existence without 

 things, as neither the skin without the body. But it holds the 

 creatures that want room, and carries them all ; it is the quarry of 

 the sculptures of shape, the canvas of the pictures of color; white 

 and glowing in its sunny eyes, blue in its immensity, green on its 

 seas, and verdant on its earths. As by room and show it gives free 

 expression, it makes the outward world candid, that is to say, repre- 

 sentative of the inner. So is space the mundane skin — all-expres- 

 sive, all-elastic, and all-continent. 



24* 



