Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/304

288 flows into the natural world out of the spiritual world. If that bird, he said, were to be infilled in its minutest parts, with corresponding matters from the earth, and thus fixed, it would be a lasting bird, like the birds on earth, and that it is the same with such things as are from hell." 4

Putting it a little differently one might say that Sir Hans acknowledged that the induced hallucination of a bird was perfect, lacking only "the matters from the earth" to be eaten with bread-sauce in London. As it vanished, that test could not be made, and perhaps the learned gentlemen were in a sphere where enjoyments were on a higher level.

Swedenborg explained that of course once these forms had been started on earth they continued in the natural way of propagation by egg or seed. But the origin of species apparently was in the spiritual world where "affections or lusts" could take on visible form.

Once he was fully started on this train of thought it quite naturally followed that he returned to the belief of many "occult" writers who thought that nature was one big picture-book symbolical of the spiritual world. Indeed, as early as in the Animal Kingdom he had written that "you would swear that the physical world is merely symbolic of the spiritual world, and so much so that if you express in physical terms . . . any natural truth whatever, and merely convert those terms into the corresponding spiritual terms then . . . will come forth a spiritual truth or a theological dogma . . ." 5

Still at that time he also warned that comparison illustrates but does not explain, a piece of common sense which he forgot later when much of what he called "correspondence" was not causal in character at all, but either analogy or simple association of ideas. In this way he could manage to interpret "the internal sense" of everything, especially of the Bible, to suit himself, and what came to suit him was to interpret the Bible so that everything in certain books of it had some relation to truth and good, those twin poles of the world for him, as well as to Jewish history and prophecy of the Messiah.

He made up a kind of dictionary. For instance, since "bread" can be taken to mean all food in general, it "corresponds to" or means "in the internal sense" all celestial food, which is spiritual good.