Page:Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondence.djvu/37

Rh the soul to the body, its correlative and correspondent.

If this be true, seership is intelligible and spiritual science is possible. But if it is not true, if the soul has no organization and no form, and the spiritual world no things, then the seers were not seers, and he who saw heaven opened saw nothing; then our beloved dead are not, and we ourselves are elected to be nothing; then the aspiration of science is a cheat and a snare, because the knower is nobody and there is nothing to know.

As we have seen, there are three possible theories, than which no others have been conceived in the mind and embodied in language:

1. We may try to think with the metaphysicians of the soul as disembodied spirit, that is, a pure simplicity; that is a metaphysical point, that is, a logical definition of nothing.

2. We may think of the emotional and intellectual life, which we call the soul, as inseparable from the physical organism; and then whether you call it with the materialists, a property of this organism in defiance of all logic and in the absence of all proof, or