Page:The Swedenborg Library Vol 9.djvu/27

, one cannot be changed into the other, it follows that after death the male is male and the female is female.

EACH ONE'S RULING LOVE REMAINS.

. Man knows that love exists, but he does not know what love is. He knows from common discourse that it exists, as when it is said that such an one loves me; that a king loves his subjects, and that subjects love their king; that a husband loves his wife and a mother her children, and vice versa; also that this or that one loves his country, his fellow-citizens and his neighbor. In like manner of things abstracted from persons, as that a man loves this or that thing.

But although the term love is universal in conversation, scarcely any one knows what love is; as, while he is meditating upon it, he is not able to form any idea of thought about it, and thus to fix it in the light of his understanding, because it is not of light but of heat. He either says it is nothing, or calls it only something flowing in from the sight, hearing and conversation, and thus moving one. He does not know that it is his very life, not only the common life of his whole body and of all his thoughts, but also the life of all the particulars thereof. This a wise person may perceive from the fact that, if you remove the affection of love, you cannot think any thing nor do any thing. In proportion as the affection which is of love grows cold, do not thought and speech and action grow cold