Page:Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondence.djvu/147

the words "real" and "unreal" is folly here. Since man is nothing but a recipient form, a perversion of the form is organized and substantiated; and it is a real perversion in every customary sense of the word, that is a substantial and organic fact however disorderly; and because he is still a recipient form, though perverted and disordered, the life received and qualified by that form, is a real life though insane and evil. And moreover this evil condition existing is not to be escaped by any denial of it, but by "re-formation;" that is by actually living the receptacles of the will and understanding back into their true form and order by obedience to the truth of God, or the Word brought down to man's apprehension. Evil is so real that there is no escape from it, except by real regeneration, by "shunning evil as sin against God," and "combatting it as from hell" which is the inversion and opposite of heaven. There is an unreality and phantasy pertaining to every perverted will and understanding; but the perversion of the receptacles, which is the origin and determining cause of these insanities, is most real. "A real thing," says the Doctor, "has a definite projection or objectivity, dependent upon some underlying