312 THE HUMAN FORM. 



weird or Urdar fountain where the Norns or fates abode ; its branches 

 were heavens and earths, the giant-world, the man-world, and the 

 dwarf-world : and every morning the Norns repaired its many wast- 

 ings by lading over its head from the Mimer spring the dews of im- 

 mortality. A third notion of the mundane order is, that the 

 world is dead or mineral : this belongs to the old age of hypothesis, 

 and to the youth of cold experience : accordingly, on this view, the 

 planet is hoary with immeasurable years, the stiff-kneed laws of to- 

 day presided over its cradle ; if indeed it ever had an infancy, and 

 were not senile from the beginning. The completion of this stony 

 truth takes place in geology, which is a kind of mineralogy of larger 

 growth. Yet as geology, or the science of the great crust, de- 

 tects order and mutuality in the earth, so it begins to revert by ana- 

 logy to organization j just as crystallography points its dry spicular 

 nails towards vegetation. Again, a fourth view is, that the world 

 is quasi-human, or indeed superhuman, in its parts and in the whole. 

 On this score, the planet unites with man ; the head races inhabit 

 its head countries ; in short, the human organs reappear on the sur- 

 face of the globe, and account as well as they may for its relations 

 and distributions, and for its housing of special nations. These 

 hypotheses run in a strict and mutually suggesting series, and either 

 all of them are true, or none. But we do not moot their truth, but 

 adduce them to show that hypothesis has been consistent from the 

 first ; that has always handled the world as some analogue of man; 

 and we will add, though it is beside our present object, that the 

 hypotheses deeply imbedded within modern science, are the fag- 

 ends of those which shone candidly out from the ancient mytholo- 

 gies. For ourselves, the truths of revelation are our hypothesis, 

 and we hold that the worlds, dead and living, include every attribute 

 that others have assigned to them, not as their own, but because 

 they are full of the spirit of Providence, and under Him intend 

 man in their courses. Thus we accept all analogies as tools to work 

 with, but none as a rest. 



To conclude this scale, the unattached natures, waters, atmo- 

 spheres and the like, are our circumstantial relations, the support of 

 our liberties and fluids as the ground is the substance to our feet. 

 Blood and water, breath and air, light and sight, are playmates in- 



