particular object; but this is all; we see no
reciprocity. The effect does not re-act upon the cause; the intention
does not change relations with the object. In Divine constructions the
object is either design or object as we choose to regard it--and we may
take at any time a cause for an effect, or the converse--so that we can
never absolutely decide which is which.

To give an instance:--In polar climates the human frame, to maintain its
animal heat, requires, for combustion in the capillary system, an
abundant supply of highly azotized food, such as train-oil. But
again:--in polar climates nearly the sole food afforded man is the oil of
abundant seals and whales. Now, whether is oil at hand because
imperatively demanded, or the only thing demanded because the only thing
to be obtained? It is impossible to decide. There is an absolute
_reciprocity of adaptation_.

The pleasure which we derive from any display of human ingenuity is in
the ratio of _the approach_ to this species of reciprocity. In the
construction of _plot_, for example, in fictitious literature, we
should aim at so arranging the incidents that we shall not be able to
determine, of any one of them, whether it depends from any one other or
upholds it. In this sense, of course, _perfection_ of _plot_ is really,
or practically, unattainable--but only because it is a finite
intelligence that constructs. The plots of God are perfect. The Universe
is a plot of God.

And now we have reached a point at which the intellect is forced, again,
to struggle against its propensity for analogical inference--against its
monomaniac grasping at the infinite. Moons have been seen _revolving_
about planets; planets about stars; and the poetical instinct of
humanity--its instinct of the symmetrical, if the symmetry be but a
symmetry of surface:--this _instinct_, which the Soul, not only of Man
but of all created beings, took up, in the beginning, from the
_geometrical_ basis of the Universal irradiation--impels us to the fancy
of an endless extension of this system of _cycles_. Closing our eyes
equally to _de_duction and _in_duction, we insist upon imagining a
_revolution_ of all the orbs of the Galaxy about some gigantic globe
which we take to be the central pivot of the whole. Each cluster in the
great cluster of clusters is imagined, of course, to be similarly
supplied and constructed; while, that the "analogy" may be wanting at no
point, we go on to conceive these c