Page:Immanuel Kant - Dreams of a Spirit-Seer - tr. Emanuel Fedor Goerwitz (1900).djvu/34

 16 has already spoken in the 'Dreams,' where he mentions the 'spiritual body' and the 'society of spirits' (Ros. VII., A. 96). On the change from the natural to the spiritual world Swedenborg says:—

"That man when he passes out of the natural world into the spiritual, as is the case when he dies, carries with him all things that are his, or which belong to him as a man, except his earthly body, has been testified to me by manifold experience; for man when he enters the spiritual world, or the life after death, is in a body as in the world; to appearance there is no difference, since he does not perceive nor see any difference. But his body is then spiritual, and thus separated or purified from earthly things, and when what is spiritual touches and sees what is spiritual, it is just as when what is natural touches and sees what is natural : hence a man, when he has become a spirit, does not know otherwise than that he is in his body in which he was in the world, and thus does not know that he has deceased. A man-spirit also enjoys every external and internal sense which he enjoyed in the world; he sees as before, he hears and speaks as before, he also smells and tastes, and when he is touched, he feels the touch as before; he also longs, desires, craves, thinks, reflects, is affected, loves, wills, as before; and he who is delighted with studies, reads and writes as before. In a word, when a man passes from one life into the other, or from one world into the other, it is as if he passed from one place into another; and he carries with him all things which he possessed in himself as a man, so that it cannot be said that the man after death, which is only the death of the earthly body, has lost anything of himself He also carries with him the natural memory, for he retains all things whatsoever which he has in the world heard, seen, read, learned, and thought, from earliest infancy even to the end of life; the natural objects, however, which are in the memory, because they cannot be reproduced in the spiritual world, are These expressions of Kant offered at