Page:Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondence.djvu/35

Rh only disclosures; but what magnificent disclosures for the founding of a science of the spiritual! There are no philosophical propositions in the Bible regarding the nature of the soul and the world of souls: but a cloud of witnesses testify that their "eyes being opened" they have seen, and offered their experiences for reason to generalize from. Grouping all these visions we may say:

1. The Scriptures represent that men have been permitted to see, and in many ways to be sensible of spirits and angels out of the physicial body, though once men on earth, and now moving among phenomenal realities not of earth. That is,

2. These persons and things were perceived in a plane within nature and discrete from it, by spiritual senses touched and opened for the purpose, and in no case by physical sense alone.

These things are testified by patriarchs prophets and seers, from Abraham to John the revelator; and their testimony is to be accounted for. Things which outgo daily experience have been attested over all the world by the personal character of the narrators; especially when one after another deposits his stone of experience and the