The Soul Wanderers

I recently finished a book about the philosophy of the Druids, the best one I've read so far, and this quote is about one of the ideas the Druids had that is in common with many other ancient religions and philosophies.

From Sir John Daniel's The Philosophy of Ancient Britain (1926):
"The Science of Correspondences is therefore the science by which we perceive principles operating in the spiritual world, and by which we trace those same principles in the order of their progression into their types in nature, and thus prove by strict analysis the truth of our perception. It unfolds the correspondence between things spiritual and natural, between every object in the spiritual world, between God and His Church, and between the spirit and the letter of His Word."










The Science of Correspondences (SOC, I'll call it for short), was first written about by Emanuel Swedenborg, though it was known to the ancients, such as the Druids, centuries before. The basic idea is that everything in the world, from plants to humans to stars and galaxies, corresponds to higher spiritual principles. This gives them their order, the laws by which they unfold. It's sort of the same idea as Plato's forms, the eternal, unchanging concepts that things in the physical world partake in, like a plant participating in the perfect form of "plantness", though it is never as perfect as the spiritual form.
Just about all of the Bible was written by means of correspondences, such as, as Swedenborg pointed out, the sacrifices, offerings, clothing, and all those little details about buildings and things that don't seem important, though convey a secret formula that can be read by people who understand the encoded SOC.
The SOC can aide us in understanding the foundations of our scientific knowledge as well, as John Daniel points out, saying that the scientist, "having done his utmost...to reach a solution to the riddle of the universe...is faced with a hiatus he cannot bridge, an infinity he cannot fathom." This sounds similar to what is facing physics right now (even though this was written in the 1920s), with the attempts of particle physicists to probe deeper and deeper into the nature of matter and the structure of the universe. The SOC can aide us in understanding the uses of things and their cause and effect. This is not to put a divine purpose into every little thing in the world, but to see greater patterns in the evolution of the world and the universe at large. It is "the Science of Sciences", what I think is a more metaphysical kind of philosophy of science. It connects the workings of the world with more basic principles, and as John Daniel says, "as the natural world is one of the effects whose causes are in the spiritual world, and whose ends are in the Divine, it is impossible to understand the meaning of one link without having regard to the complete chain."
I think it is important to have more philosophy in sciences, especially physics dealing with the very small and very large, and the SOC is certainly a way to do this. Whether it will be able to 'bridge our hiatus', I don't know, but by uniting the spiritual aspect of the world with the physical (a very Aizian idea, if you've read my novel Aizai the Forgotten), we can certainly gain a better understanding of the universe. Especially with physics theories about the multiverse, extra dimensions, the universe as being a mathematical structure, and other such things, what if what they were describing is a fuller spiritual world? This could correspond to philosophies such as Kabbalism or Neoplatonism. For example, in Neoplatonism, each level of existence, "hypostases", is a reflection (or dispersion would be more fitting) of the one above it, and so the lower worlds are a reflection of the higher, creating a link between them. And so we see the well-known phrase again: "As above, so below".
If our physical world is derived from a higher spiritual world, we will indeed reach a limit in our understanding of the physical universe as John Daniel pointed out, even if there are higher physical dimensions and other worlds, because the laws that govern our world derive from laws that encompass a higher level of reality. So we have to go a step above, and science, since it deals with understanding the physical world, can't get there without something else. Mathematics might well connect our world to others, and we can already see this with string theory, higher dimensions, and other such theories.
It seems like the ancients, with their SOC, knew something which we would do well to uncover if we actually want to understand the universe we live in, and to understand ourselves.