Page:The Swedenborg Library Vol 1.djvu/23



HOEVER duly considers the subject may know that the body does not think, because it is material; but that the soul does think, because it is spiritual. The soul of man, about the immortality of which so many have written, is his spirit; for this is immortal as to all that pertains to it. It is this also which thinks in the body, for it is spiritual; and what is spiritual receives what is spiritual, and lives spiritually, which is to think and to will.

All the rational life, therefore, which appears in the body, belongs to the spirit, and nothing of it to the body; for the body, as was just said, is material; and materiality which is proper to the body, is added, and almost as it were adjoined, to the spirit, in order that the spirit of man may live and perform uses in the natural world whereof all things are material and in themselves void of life.

And since what is material does not live, but only what is spiritual, it may be evident that whatever lives in man is his spirit, and that the body only