Page:Swedenborg, Harbinger of the New Age of the Christian Church.djvu/121

 mixed topics into appropriate divisions, of skilfully subordinating the series thus divided, and of being never overwhelmed by the multiplicity of things, but continually enlightened more and more, he says of such as enjoy the faculty—

"The fictitious depresses them, the obscure pains them; but they are exhilarated by the truth, and in the presence of everything that is clear they too are clear and serene. When after a long course of reasoning they make a discovery of the truth, straightway there is a cheering light and joyful confirmatory brightness that plays around the sphere of their mind, and a kind of mysterious radiation—I know not whence it proceeds—that darts through some sacred temple in the brain. Thus a sort of rational instinct displays itself, and in a manner gives notice that the soul is called into a state of inward communion, and has returned at that moment into the golden age of its intellectual perfections. The mind that has known this pleasure is wholly carried away in pursuit of it; and in the kindling flame of its love despises in comparison, as external pastimes, all merely corporeal pleasures; and though it recognizes them as means for exciting the animal mind