Page:Swedenborg, Harbinger of the New Age of the Christian Church.djvu/127

 the whole. The science which does this I call the Doctrine of Series and Degrees, or the Doctrine of Order. . . [which] teaches the distinction and relation between things superior and inferior, or prior and posterior. ..

"I am strongly persuaded that the essence and nature of the soul, its influx into the body, and the reciprocal action of the body can never come to demonstration without these doctrines, combined with a knowledge of anatomy, pathology, and psychology; nay, even of physics, and especially of the auras of the world. . . . This and no other is the reason that with diligent study and intense application I have investigated the anatomy of the body, and principally the human, so far as it is known from experience; and that I have followed the anatomy of all its parts, in the same manner as I have here investigated the cortical substance."

The soul itself and a society of souls he finds to be the final purpose of all creation, and then he concludes—

"If there be a society of souls, must not the City of God on the universal earth be the seminary of it? The most universal law of its citizens