Page:Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondence.djvu/53

Rh of our being in this world. We know that it fixes us to our place and time. For us that is its function; we know by abundant exact Revelation that when this body dies we are taken out of it and live forever in another state. What then is the office of the matter? To give us permanence here and hereafter. Our higher minds are founded upon our natural minds, whose fixity is taken up into them by an inner and most organic memory of which we are unconscious, but which is the outer vessel of our immortal state. The sun then ministers to this; under divine design it is dead in order to its ministry."

The spiritual world is the world of causes, and the natural world is one of effects flowing from such causes. The living organisms and forms of the spiritual world dispose corresponding forms in the natural world, and rest in them. Life flows in through the spiritual forms, into the inert natural forms, which it actuates and causes to react. Such reaction serves to develope, form, reform and perfect the spiritual.

"Nature is not able to dispose life to anything, for nature in itself is totally inert. For the dead thing to act upon the living, or the dead force upon the living force, or what is the same, the natural upon the spiritual, is quite