Table of Contents

i. [Introduction] §§1-2

I. There are two worlds: the spiritual world, inhabited by spirits and angels, and the natural world, inhabited by men. §3

II. The spiritual world first existed and continually subsists from its own sun; and the natural world from its own sun. §4

III. The sun of the spiritual world is pure love from Jehovah God, who is in the midst of it. §5

IV. From that sun proceed heat and light; the heat proceeding from it is in its essence love, and the light from it is in its essence wisdom. §6

V. Both that heat and that light flow into man: the heat into his will, where it produces the good of love; and the light into his understanding, where it produces the truth of wisdom. §7

VI. Those two, heat and light, or love and wisdom, flow conjointly from God into the soul of man; and through this into his mind, its affections and thoughts; and from these into the senses, speech, and actions of the body. §8

VII. VII. The sun of the natural world is pure fire; and the world of nature first existed and continually subsists by means of this sun. §9

VIII. Therefore everything which proceeds from this sun, regarded in itself, is dead. §10

IX. That which is spiritual clothes itself with that which is natural, as a man clothes himself with a garment. §11

X. Spiritual things, thus clothed in a man, enable him to live as a rational and moral man, thus as a spiritually natural man. §12

XI. The reception of that influx is according to the state of love and wisdom with man. §13

XII. The understanding in a man can be raised into the light, that is, into the wisdom in which are the angels of heaven, according to the cultivation of his reason; and his will can be raised in like manner into the heat of heaven, that is, into love, according to the deeds of his life; but the love of the will is not raised, except so far as the man wills and does those things which the wisdom of the understanding teaches. §14

XIII. It is altogether otherwise with beasts. §15

XIV. There are three degrees in the spiritual world, and three degrees in the natural world, hitherto unknown, according to which all influx takes place. §16

XV. Ends are in the first degree, causes in the second, and effects in the third. §17

XVI. Hence it is evident what is the nature of spiritual influx from its origin to its effects. §§18-20

16. XIV. There are three degrees in the spiritual world, and three degrees in the natural world, hitherto unknown, according to which all influx takes place.

It is discovered by the investigation of causes from effects that there are two kinds of degrees: one in which things are prior and posterior, and another in which they are greater and less. The degrees which distinguish things prior and posterior are to be called DEGREES OF ALTITUDE, or DISCRETE DEGREES; but the degrees by which things greater and less are distinguished from each other are to be called DEGREES OF LATITUDE, and also CONTINUOUS DEGREES.

[2] Degrees of altitude, or discrete degrees, are like the generations and compositions of one thing from another; as for example, of some nerve from its fibres, and of any fibre from its fibrils; or of some piece of wood, stone, or metal from its parts, and of any part from its particles. But degrees of latitude, or continuous degrees, are like the increases and decreases of the same degree of altitude with respect to breadth, length, height and depth; as of greater and less volumes of water, air, or ether; and as of large and small masses of wood, stone, or metal.

[3] All things in general and in particular in both worlds, the spiritual and the natural, are by creation in degrees of this double kind. The whole animal kingdom in this world is in those degrees, both in general and in particular; so likewise are the whole vegetable kingdom and the whole mineral kingdom; and also the atmospheric expanse from the sun even to the earth.

[4] There are, therefore, three atmospheres, discretely distinct according to the degrees of altitude, both in the spiritual and in the natural world, because each world has a sun; but the atmospheres of the spiritual world, by virtue of their origin, are substantial, and the atmospheres of the natural world, by virtue of their origin, are material. Moreover, since the atmospheres descend from their origins according to those degrees, and are the containants of light and heat, and as it were the vehicles by which they are conveyed, it follows that there are three degrees of light and heat; and since the light in the spiritual world is in its essence wisdom, and the heat there in its essence is love, as was shown above in its proper article, it follows also that there are three degrees of wisdom and three degrees of love, consequently three degrees of life; for they are graduated by those things through which they pass.

[5] Hence it is that there are three angelic heavens: a supreme, which is also called the third heaven, inhabited by angels of the supreme degree; a middle, which is also called the second heaven, inhabited by angels of the middle degree; and a lowest, which is also called the first heaven, inhabited by angels of the lowest degree. Those heavens are also distinguished according to the degrees of wisdom and love: those who are in the lowest heaven are in the love of knowing truths and goods; those in the middle heaven are in the love of understanding them; and those in the supreme heaven are in the love of being wise, that is, of living according to those truths and goods which they know and understand.

[6] As the angelic heavens are distinguished into three degrees, so also is the human mind, because the human mind is an image of heaven, that is, it is heaven in its least form. Hence it is that a man can become an angel of one of those three heavens; and he becomes such according to his reception of wisdom and love from the Lord: an angel of the lowest heaven if he only receives the love of knowing truths and goods; an angel of the middle heaven if he receives the love of understanding them; and an angel of the supreme heaven if he receives the love of being wise, that is, of living according to them. That the human mind is distinguished into three regions, according to the three heavens, may be seen in the memorable relation inserted in the work on Conjugial Love 270. Hence it is evident that all spiritual influx to a man and into a man from the Lord descends through these three degrees, and that it is received by the man according to the degree of wisdom and love in which he is.

[7] A knowledge of these degrees is, at the present day, of the greatest value: for many persons, in consequence of not knowing them, remain in and cling to the lowest degree, in which are the senses of their body; and from their ignorance, which is a thick darkness of the understanding, they cannot be raised into spiritual light, which is above them. Hence naturalism takes possession of them, as it were spontaneously, as soon as they attempt to enter on any enquiry and examination concerning the soul and the human mind and its rationality; and still more if they extend their inquiries to heaven and the life after death. Hence they become like persons standing in the market-places with telescopes in their hands, looking at the sky and uttering vain predictions; and also like persons who chatter and reason about every object they see and everything they hear, without anything rational from the understanding being contained in their remarks; but they are like butchers, who believe themselves to be skilful anatomists, because they have examined the viscera of oxen and sheep outwardly, but not inwardly.

[8] The truth, however, is, that to think from the influx of natural light [lumen] not enlightened by the influx of spiritual light is merely to dream, and to speak from such thought is to make vain assertions like fortune-tellers. But further particulars concerning degrees may be seen in the work on The Divine Love and Wisdom 173-281.

11. -IX-. That which is spiritual clothes itself with that which is natural, as a man clothes himself with a garment.

It is well known that both an active and a passive are necessary to every operation, and that nothing can be produced from an active alone, and nothing from a passive alone. It is similar with what is spiritual and what is natural: what is spiritual, as a living force, being active, and what is natural, as a dead force, being passive. Hence it follows that whatever existed in this solar world from the beginning, and whatever comes into existence from moment to moment since, exists from what is spiritual by means of what is natural; and this not only in regard to the subjects of the animal kingdom, but also to those of the vegetable kingdom.

[2] Another similar fact is also known, namely, that in every effect which is produced there are both a principal and an instrumental cause, and that these two, when anything is done, appear as one, although they are distinctly two; hence it is one of the laws of wisdom, that the principal cause and the instrumental cause make together one cause; so also do what is spiritual and what is natural. The reason that in producing effects these two appear as one is that the spiritual is within the natural, as a fibre is within a muscle and blood within the arteries, or as thought is inwardly in speech and affection in the tones of the voice; and it causes itself to be felt by means of the natural. From these considerations though thus far only indistinctly, as through a lattice it appears that what is spiritual clothes itself with what is natural, as a man clothes himself with a garment.

[3] The organic body with which the soul clothes itself is here compared with a garment, because it invests the soul; and the soul also withdraws itself from it, and casts it off as old clothing, when it departs by death from the natural into its own spiritual world. Moreover, the body grows old like a garment, but not the soul; because this is a spiritual substance, which has nothing in common with the changes of nature, which advance from their beginnings to their ends, and are terminated at stated times.

[4] Those who do not consider the body as a vesture or covering of the soul, which in itself is dead, and only adapted to receive the living forces flowing into it through the soul from God, cannot avoid concluding from fallacies that the soul lives of itself, and the body of itself, and that there is, between their respective lives, a PRE-ESTABLISHED HARMONY. They likewise infer either that the life of the soul flows into the life of the body, or the life of the body into the life of the soul, whence they conceive INFLUX to be either SPIRITUAL or NATURAL: when, nevertheless, it is a truth attested by every object in creation that what is posterior does not act from itself, but from something prior, from which it proceeded; thus that neither does this act from itself, but from something still prior; and thus that nothing acts except from a First, which does act from itself, thus from God. Besides, there is only one life, and this is not capable of being created, but is eminently capable of flowing into forms organically adapted to its reception: all things in the created universe, in general and in particular, are such forms.

[5] It is believed by many that the soul is life, and thus that a man, since he lives from his soul, lives from his own life, thus of himself, consequently not by an influx of life from God. But such persons cannot avoid tying a sort of Gordian knot of fallacies, in which they entangle all the judgments of their mind till nothing but insanity in regard to spiritual things is the result; or they construct a maze, from which the mind can never, by any clue of reason, retrace its way and extricate itself. They also actually let themselves down, as it were, into caverns underground, where they dwell in eternal darkness.

[6] For from such a belief proceed innumerable fallacies, each of which is horrible: as that God has transfused and transcribed Himself into men, whence every man is a sort of deity that lives of himself, and thus that he does good and is wise from himself; likewise, that he possesses faith and charity in himself, and thus derives them from himself, and not from God; besides other monstrous sentiments, such as prevail with those in hell, who, when they were in the world, believed nature to live or to produce life by its own activity. When these look towards heaven, its light appears to them as mere thick darkness.

[7] I once heard from heaven the voice of some one saying that if a spark of life in man were his own, and not of God in him, there would be no heaven nor anything that exists there; whence also there would be no church on earth, and consequently no life eternal.

For further particulars relating to this subject, the memorable relation in the work on Conjugial Love 132-136, ¹ may be consulted.

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