Page:The Other Life.djvu/117

 or angels who live there; and its spiritual forms and phenomena represent outwardly in ever-shifting panorama the qualities and motions of the soul itself.

Dissect this statement and view the constituent ideas separately, for they are the foundation-stones of the Swedenborgian philosophy.

The spiritual world has no externeity independent of the mind.

It has a transcendently beautiful externeity wholly dependent upon the mind.

That externeity represents the mind; is the mind symbolized or mirrored in objective spiritual forms.

Take away the angels and heaven would vanish.

Take away God and all would vanish; for everything lives, moves and has its being from a continuous influx of the divine life.

The spiritual world is created momentarily and changes momentarily by and through the changes of affections and thoughts in the inhabitants. It changes as the scenery of a dream changes in correspondence with the changes of state occurring in the brain of the dreamer.

Heaven and hell are, therefore, in the last analysis, states of the soul or spirit of man. "The