Page:Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondence.djvu/54

48 against order, and therefore to think it is against the light of sane reason. The dead or the natural thing may indeed in many ways be perverted or changed by external accidents, but yet it cannot act upon life; but life acts into it according to the change of form induced."

We are to think distinctly, therefore, of these three things: God, the spiritual world and the natural world. God created through the spiritual sun, the spiritual world, an image and likeness of the infinite things in himself which He would put into the making of man's spiritual nature. Then through the spiritual world He created the natural world, an image and likeness of the spiritual, and of corresponding things He would put into man's earthly nature. The end is man, who is a microcosm, embodying in himself a little spiritual world and a little natural world.

Man during this life is an inhabitant of both worlds. The spirit, which is the real man, has its own body organized of spiritual substances in the human form, corresponding in every organ and sense with the physical body. The material body is organized of dead substances to be the covering and instrument of the spirit, which is the real