understand no susceptibility or pain, they being one in themselves.[1] In short, heaven is as rich as the earth. Everything that is on this earth, is in heaven,[2] all that is in Nature is in God. But in the latter it is divine, heavenly; in the former, earthly, visible, external, material, but yet the same.” “When I write of trees, shrubs and fruits, thou must not understand me of earthly things, such as are in this world; for it is not my meaning, that in heaven there grows a dead, hard, wooden tree, or a stone of earthly qualities. No: my meaning is heavenly and spiritual, but yet truthful and literal; thus, I mean no other things than what I write in the letters of the alphabet;” i.e., in heaven there are the same trees and flowers, but the trees in heaven are the trees which bloom and exhale in my imagination, without making coarse material impressions upon me; the trees on earth are the trees which I perceive through my senses. The distinction is the distinction between imagination and perception. “It is not my undertaking,” says Jacob Böhme himself, “to describe the course of all stars, their place and name, or how they have yearly their conjunction or opposition, or quadrate, or the like,—what they do yearly and hourly,—which through long years has been discovered by wise, skilful, ingenious men, by diligent contemplation and observation, and deep thought and calculation. I have not learned and studied these things, and leave scholars to treat of them, but my undertaking is to write according to the spirit and thought, not according to sight.”[3]
The doctrine of Nature in God aims, by naturalism, to establish theism, especially the theism which regards the Supreme Being as a personal being. But personal theism conceives God as a personal being, separate from all material things; it excludes from him all development, because that is nothing else than the self-separation of a being from circumstances and conditions which do not correspond to its true
- ↑ L. c. p. 468, 617, 618.
- ↑ According to Swedenborg, the angels in heaven have clothes and dwellings. “Their dwellings are altogether such as the dwellings or houses on earth, but far more beautiful; there are apartments, rooms, and sleeping chambers therein in great number, and entrance-courts, and round about gardens, flowers, meadows, and fields.” (E, v. S. auserlesene Schriften, 1 Th. Frankf. a. M. 1776, p. 190, and 96.) Thus to the mystic this world is the other world; but for that reason the other world is this world.
- ↑ L. c. p. 339, p. 69.
