Page:Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondence.djvu/55

man. What Swedenborg saw, and knew by living experience, he could urge upon rational grounds. Thus he says: "All the rational life which appears in the body belongs to the spirit; for the body is material, and materiality, which is proper to the body, is added, and as it were almost adjoined to the spirit, in order that the spirit of man may live and perform uses in the natural world, whereof all things are material and in themselves void of life. And since what is material does not live, but only what is spiritual, it may be evident that whatever lives in man is his spirit, and that the body only serves it as an instrument is subservient to a living force. It is said, indeed, of an instrument that it acts, moves, or strikes; but to believe that these acts are those of the instrument, and not of him who acts by means of it, is a fallacy. Since everything that lives in the body, and from life acts and feels, belongs exclusively to the spirit, and nothing of it to the body, it follows that the spirit is the real man, and that the spirit is in a form similar to the body; for everything in him, from his head to the sole of his foot, lives and feels." "From these considerations it may be seen that the spirit