Page:Immanuel Kant - Dreams of a Spirit-Seer - tr. Emanuel Fedor Goerwitz (1900).djvu/161

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EXTRACTS FROM SWEDENBORG.
143

visible angel; 6, by Speech heard without by an angel not visible.—Arcana, 6000.

41 (p. 77).—On the subjective origin of sight, as of all the senses, Swedenborg treats in the following numbers of the Arcana:—

"It is not the body that sees and otherwise sensates, but the spirit in the body; hence, when the body is put off by death, the spirit is in full enjoyment of its senses."—4622.

"The corporeal man as the receptacle of the sensitive consists of sensual faculties subject to the understanding and will. Sight is the principal of these, subject to the intellectual part; and hearing to the voluntary part; smell and taste conjoin both."—5077.

"The sensual faculty of sight has its life from the intellectual because the latter sees from the light of heaven."—5114.

"Divine Truth from the Lord is light, which light illumines the mind of man and gives him internal sight or understanding."—9399.

"What the will, or voluntary part of man, determines into form, appears to the sight in the intellectual part, which sight is thought."—9915.

42 (p. 79).—"The sight of the eye, strictly speaking, is nothing but the sight of the spirit produced outwards."—Arcana, 1806.

43 (p. 82).—"The five sensories of the body, by virtue of an influx from within, are sensible of the impressions which enter by influx from without; the influx from within is from the spiritual world, but the influx from without is from the natural. With these facts the laws inscribed on the nature of all things are in concert, and these laws are: 1. That nothing exists, subsists, is acted upon or moved by itself, but by some other being or agent; whence it follows that everything exists, subsists, is acted upon and moved by the First Being, who has no origin from another, but is in Himself the living force which is life. 2. That nothing can be acted upon or moved, unless it is intermediate between two forces, of which the one acts and the other re-acts; thus, unless one acts on one part, and one on the other; and, further, unless one acts from within, and the other from without. 3. And since these two forces, whilst they are at rest, produce an equilibrium, it follows that nothing can be acted upon or moved, unless it is in equilibrium, and that when it is acted upon, it is out of the equilibrium; and, further, that everything acted upon or moved seeks to return to an equilibrium. 4. That all activities