Page:Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondence.djvu/143

love of the world, and because these loves (out of subordination to the higher) are hell, the origin of hell is evident. When man has become a hell, the interior or higher principles of his mind are closed, but the exterior and lower are open; and because self-love directs everything of thought and will to itself, immersing them in the body, it therefore inverts and forces back the exteriors of his mind, which, as was observed, are open, and the consequence is that they have an inclination and tendency downwards, and are borne away to hell. But because he retains, notwithstanding, the faculty of thinking, of willing, of speaking and of acting—a faculty which is in no case taken from him, because he is born a man—and is, at the same time, in this inverted state, receiving no longer any good or truth whatever from heaven, but rather what is evil and false from hell, he therefore procures for himself a kind of light, by confirmations of evil based in falsity, and of falsity based in evil, in order that he may still be eminent above others. He imagines that this is a rational light, though it is from hell, and in reality full of foolish delusion, producing a vision like that of a dream in the