Page:Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondence.djvu/51

Rh no creation. Spiritual things could not be permanent. Man could have no personal life; no permanent states. The real reasons of this necessity are finely given by Dr. Wilkinson in answer to the question, "Why is a dead sun wanted?" "For the same reason that the human body is wanted for the inhabitants of nature. Man has to be created; that is to say, separated and distanced from the creator in order that he may be a personal existence. He cannot begin his career in the spiritual world, because then he would be a projection from the Divine into nothing; the concept would be as of a force without a recipient vessel to hold it." This is the root of error, it may be remarked, in all past metaphysics, with its "intellectual entities" and "metaphysical points," and "uncompound substance without body and without parts;" and the modern idealism that discourses of man as "an idea or thought of God," without any personal organism, is equally unreal and unthinkable. Life must have an organism to operate a function; and the organism must be twofold, spiritual to receive life, and at first material to give permanence to spiritual forms, and react against the inflowing life. "Dead matter," continues