Page:Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondence.djvu/67

Rh Man being as to his spirit in the spiritual world, in unconscious association with spirits there, who were once men and women on earth, the activities of their affection and thought flow in to excite, accelerate, and modify in a thousand ways man's thoughts, ideas and feelings. Affections are excited, thoughts called forth and others injected; and they are entertained, and rejected or accepted, according to man's will and bent, as his own. Thence come not only the poet's inspiration, the author's flight of imagination, the inventor's insight, and the merchant's foresight, but all forms of mental activity in wakefulness and sleep, in sound and unsound minds, as man's dominant purpose determines his spiritual associates. His associates will be such as correspond to the affections of his love which determine his thoughts. The spirits with him are of the same general state as he is; good spirits associated with heaven, and operating into and by corresponding affections and thoughts good and true; and evil spirits associated with hell, and operating into and by corresponding evil affections and appetites, and falsities and fallacies.

The phenomena of dreams have in this