Page:Immanuel Kant - Dreams of a Spirit-Seer - tr. Emanuel Fedor Goerwitz (1900).djvu/157

 Rh in the spiritual. According to this law of correspondence the Word was written in which all the words and senses of the words are correspondences, and thus contain a spiritual or internal sense, in which the angels are. For this reason, when man reads the Word and perceives it according to the sense of the letter, or the external sense, the angels perceive it according to the internal or spiritual sense; for all the thought of the angels is spiritual, whereas the thought of man is natural. These thoughts indeed appear diverse, but still they are one, because they correspond. The natural ideas of man thus pass into spiritual ideas with angels, without their knowing anything of the sense of the letter of the Word; as of a new heaven and a new earth, a new city of Jerusalem, its wall, the foundations of the wall, and the measures. Nevertheless the thoughts of angels make one with the thoughts of man, because they correspond. They make one almost like the words of a speaker, and the understanding of them by a hearer who docs not attend to the words, but only to the meaning. When, therefore, the angels think thus spiritually, and man thus naturally, they are conjoined almost like soul and body: the internal sense of the Word also is its soul, and the sense of the letter is its body. Such is the Word throughout: hence it is evident that it is a medium of the conjunction of heaven with man, and that its literal sense serves for a basis and foundation."—H. H., 303, 307.

33 (p. 69)—"In the natural world there are three degrees of ascent, and in the spiritual world there are three degrees of ascent. Man alone is a recipient of the life both of the three degrees of the natural world and of the three degrees of the spiritual world. From this it is that man can be elevated above nature, while the animal cannot. Man can think analytically and rationally of the civil and moral things that are within nature, also of the spiritual and celestial things that are above nature, yea, he can be so elevated into wisdom as even to see God."—D. L. W., 66.

34 (p. 69).—"An opinion has prevailed with some, that God turns away His face from man, rejects him from Himself, and casts him into hell, and that he is angry with him on account of evil; and with some it is supposed still further, that God punishes man and does evil to him. In this opinion they confirm themselves from the literal sense of the Word, where such things are said, not being aware that the spiritual sense of the Word, which explains the sense