Page:Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondence.djvu/138

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THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

spiritual abstract principle, but a subject substantiated and formed for the reception of love or wisdom." "Man's soul, which lives after death, is his spirit, and is in complete form a man; the soul of this form is the will and understanding; and the soul of these is love and wisdom from the Lord; these two constitute man's life from the Lord alone, yet in order to man's acceptance of Him He causes life to appear as if it were man's own."[1] This appearance can be given, and thence rationality and freedom, because man as a created form has an inmost entrance and dwelling place of the Divine life, an internal will and understanding corresponding to the love and wisdom of the Lord, an external will and understanding corresponding to the internal, and a spiritual and natural body corresponding to the will and understanding.

How real these organic receptacles are, may be conceived in that they are "substantiated and formed," and that the mental processes of which we are conscious are defined, not in the least as abstractions, but as mutations of actual spiritual substances and forms. "The changes of their state are affections, the variations of their form are thoughts, the existence

  1. Divine Love and Wisdom, n. 394.