a difficult point to understand. For while there is a correspondence, as already described, between the production of natural objects by the influence of the natural sun, and that of spiritual objects by the influence of the spiritual sun, it is still true that these operations are, in their essential nature, entirely unlike. The one is dead, as compared with the other, which is the operation of life itself. I cannot so well express the idea, which I here wish to convey, as by a brief quotation from "The Divine Love and Wisdom:"
"Now since nature begins from that sun, and all that exists or subsists therefrom is called natural, it follows that nature, with all and singular the things appertaining to it, is dead. The appearance of nature as alive in men and animals, is owing to the life which accompanies and actuates nature.
"Since the lowest substances of nature, which constitute earths, are dead, and are not mutable and variable according to the state of the affections and thoughts, as in the spiritual world, but immutable and fixed, therefore in nature there are spaces, and distances of spaces. Such things are the consequences of creation closing there, and subsisting in a state of rest."—Nos. 158—160.Let us endeavor to illustrate this principle a little more fully. In the natural world we are surrounded by external forms, existing in accordance with certain laws, which