Indirect comparisons

Usage examples of analogies.

There is nothing strange in this revelation for {123} anyone who is well acquainted with the analogies of Nature.

For the sage who understands the analogies of the transcendental Qabalah, and the exact relation of ideas with signs, this fabulous country of the fairies is a country still fertile in discoveries.

The other fables of the sham natural history of the ancients are explained in the same manner, and in this allegorical use of analogies, one can {189} already understand the possible abuses and predict the errors to which the Qabalah was obliged to give birth.

For that purpose it is sufficient to understand the system of universal analogies, such as Swedenborg has set it forth in the hieroglyphic key of the arcana.

The observation of universal analogies, moreover, has been neglected, and for that reason divination is no longer believed in.

The hand has seven protuberances which the qabalists, following natural analogies, have attributed to the seven planets: that of the thumb, to Venus.

Various other suggestive analogies present themselves here, but we will defer their discussion until we have the other dimensions before us, and then consider them all together.

It must therefore be distinctly understood that we firmly believe God is a spirit, and the other world a spiritual one, and that we have no wish or intention of materializing it in enforcing the truth of some of its laws by means of analogies drawn from a supposed fourth dimension.

The careful comparison of the analogies of the third and fourth dimensions with the revealed relation of our world to the spirit world, shows such a likeness between the two, that it is not too much to say that if we call our world a world of three dimensions, we may fairly consider the spirit world in many respects a world of four.

If then these few remarks, and these mathematical analogies, serve to show that the scriptural way of entering the Kingdom of God is the only way possible.

Our analogies therefore represent the unity of nature in the coherence of all phenomena, under certain exponents, which express the relation of time (as comprehending all existence) to the unity of apperception, which apperception can only take place in the synthesis according to rules.

The three analogies, therefore, simply say, that all phenomena exist in one nature, and must so exist because, without such unity a priori no unity of experience, and therefore no determination of objects in experience, would be possible.

If we had attempted to prove these analogies dogmatically, that is from concepts, showing that all which exists is found only in that which is permanent, that every event presupposes something in a previous state on which it follows by rule, and lastly, that in the manifold which is coexistent, states coexist in relation to each other by rule, all our labour would have been in vain.

It is possible, however, even before the perception of a thing, and therefore, in a certain sense, a priori, to know its existence, provided it hang together with some other perceptions, according to the principles of their empirical connection (analogies).

For in that case the existence of a thing hangs together at least with our perceptions in a possible experience, and guided by our analogies we can, starting from our real experience, arrive at some other thing in the series of possible perceptions.