Page:Immanuel Kant - Dreams of a Spirit-Seer - tr. Emanuel Fedor Goerwitz (1900).djvu/126

 108 have their form, activity, and stability. This inner meaning is unknown to man, and it is that which Swedenborg, whose interiors are opened, wants to make known to the world. With all other things of the visible world the case is the same; they have, as I say, a signification as things, which amounts to little, and another as signs, which amounts to much.. This also is the origin of all the new interpretations which he would make of the Scripture.. For this inner meaning, the internal sense, i.e., the symbolic relation of all things told there to the spirit-world, is, as he fancies, the kernel of its value, the rest only the shell. Again, the important point in this symbolic conjunction of corporeal things, as images, with the interior spiritual state, is the following. All spirits present themselves to each other under the appearance of figures possessing extent; and the influences of all these spiritual beings among each other at the same time call forth the appearance of still other spiritual creatures possessing extent, thus, as it were, the appearance of a material world. The scenes of this world, however, are only symbols of its inner state; nevertheless they cause such a clear and enduring deception of the senses as to equal the real sensation of such objects. (A future interpreter will conclude from this that Swedenborg was an idealist, because he denies to this world its independent subsistence, and therefore held it to be only a systematic appearance, arising from the constitution of the spirit world.) Thus he talks about the gardens, vast countries, the dwelling-places, galleries, and arcades of the