Page:Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondence.djvu/134

natural world as its re-active body, and God in the inmost as the intelligent producer and mover of all; then life flows in from God through the sun of the spiritual world into the natural sun, and by its atmospheres to the earths carrying the spiritual impulse and endeavor to form its substances into "rock-ribbed" foundations, and overlay them with mould and earths, and to form these substances into cells or eggs for the reception of vegetative seeds. In the spiritual world at the same time, are produced the active spiritual forms with an impulse to clothe themselves with material forms. Thus the first productions of the material world while it was still recent and in its virgin state, were seeds; the first endeavor could be no other. There is, in the mineral kingdom, a constant tendency to vegetate; that is, it receives from the common influx of the spiritual world through the sun's atmospheres an impulse and motion disposing its substances into recepticals, into which the vegetative soul or seed from the spiritual world may flow. Towards this result, however, the heat and light and atmospheres of the natural world contribute nothing except to clothe the heat and light of the spiritual world, and supply the