EMANUEL SWEDENBORG
as the soul itself, and what follows therefrom; its life, immortality, heaven, etc. . . . Consequently they honor and worship nature, the world, and themselves; in other respects they compare themselves to brutes, and think that they shall die in the same manner as brutes, and their souls exhale and evaporate: thus they rush fearlessly into wickedness. For these persons only I am anxious; and, as I said before, for them I indite and to them I dedicate my work. For when I shall have demonstrated truths themselves by the analytic method, I hope that those debasing shadows or material clouds which darken the sacred temple of the mind will be dispersed; and that thus at last under the favor of God, who is the Sun of Wisdom, an access will be opened and a way laid down to faith. My ardent desire and zeal for this end is what urges and animates me."
In the Second Part he says—
"If we wish to invite real truths, whether natural or moral or spiritual—for they all make common cause by means of correspondence and representation—into the sphere of our rational minds, it is necessary that we extinguish the impure fires of the body and thereby our own delu-
120
