Page:The Swedenborg Library Vol 2.djvu/57

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what is good; these are the spiritual and celestial things which make man.

It is also generally known that every man is such as is the character of his understanding and will; and it might also be known that his earthly body is formed to serve these faculties in the world, and to perform uses in accordance with their dictates in the ultimate sphere of nature. Therefore also the body has no activity of itself, but acts altogether obsequious to the nod of the understanding and the will, insomuch that whatever a man thinks, he utters with the tongue and lips; and whatever he wills, he performs with the body and its members; so that understanding and will are the active agent, and the body does nothing itself.

Hence it is evident, that the things of the understanding and will are what make man; and that these are in the human form, because they act upon the most minute parts of the body, as what is internal acts upon what is external. By virtue of these faculties, therefore, man is called an internal and spiritual man. Heaven is such a man in the greatest and most perfect form.

Such is the idea of the angels concerning man. Therefore they never attend to the things which man does with the body, but to the will from which the body does them. This they call the man himself, and the understanding so far as it acts in unison with the will.

The angels, indeed, do not see heaven in the whole complex in the form of a man; for the whole heaven