Page:Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondence.djvu/83

life, and angels are only recipient forms of that life; they are recipients of it because their angelic forms correspond. When the divine life with its goods and truths, flows into the corresponding angelic forms, it take on new forms and functions which are angelic life; when this life again flows down into the corresponding forms of man's natural mind, it is neither divine nor angelic life, but it corresponds to them, i.e., it takes on new forms and functions which are man's natural life; and finally, when life flows down into the corresponding organs of the body, it takes on new forms and functions corresponding with the others but distinct from them. The idea of the Lord and of heaven, and of the organs and functions of the body, is therefore to be an idea of distinct things which correspond; the external is an image of the internal, and the life and function it receives is on its own plane like that of the internal on its plane. Correspondence is of the Lord with heaven; thus of the highest heaven with the middle heaven, of the middle heaven with the lowest; then a correspondence of heaven with the corporeal forms in man, which are called his organs, members and viscera. This correspondence