Page:Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondence.djvu/146

Now it will be seen from the foregoing exposition of the doctrine of recipient forms; that this is an inadequate account of both the process and the effect of man's desire to "lead an independent life." It is the more misleading because it is partially true so far as it goes, but is neither wholly true nor the whole truth. What that desire did in the origin of evil was to close the will and understanding above and open them below; and since affections and thoughts are changes in the state and form of the spiritual substances of the mind, this was an inversion and perversion of the receptacles "substantiated and formed" with man. The result, which the Doctor calls "a vast tissue of self-deceptions," was indeed wrought into the spiritual tissue of the mind itself; wherefore it became organic, and transmissible as a perverted organism by the laws of heredity. It did not indeed "produce a new life different from God's life," for man can produce no life, good or evil; but it did produce something more than "a dream," an inversion in the substantial organism of the mind, a perversion of functions, turning of the good of life into its opposites, and thus an inflowing good into a real and continuing evil. Any jugglery with