1. Influx ¹

"When such as believe in nature see how these animals or insects are generated in the ground or on the leaves of plants, and when they examine the wonderful things in their organisms, and things made by their means, they think that nature produces them, not knowing that their formation and vivification is from the spiritual world, and their reception and clothing from the natural world; further, that the heat of the sun at the time of spring and summer dissolves and adapts the particles of purer nature for the reception of influx, and for the process of clothing. Wherefore the same argument and the same confirmation, which the believers of nature derive hence, are to me an argument for, and a confirmation of, a continual influx from the spiritual into the natural world. Written in the year 1750.

"The changes of caterpillars into butterflies, the government of bees, and many other things which are described in this book, are manifest signs of such influx." [See Heaven and Hell 567, also Heaven and Hell 39, 108, 109.]

Notes de bas de page:

109. How the things in the vegetable kingdom correspond can be seen from many instances, as that little seeds grow into trees, put forth leaves, produce flowers, and then fruit, in which again they deposit seed, these things taking place in succession and existing together in an order so wonderful as to be indescribable in a few words. Volumes might be filled, and yet there would be still deeper arcana, relating more closely to their uses, which science would be unable to exhaust. Since these things, too, are from the spiritual world, that is, from heaven, which is in the human form (as has been shown above in its own chapter), so all the particulars in this kingdom have a certain relation to such things as are in man, as some in the learned world know. That all things in this kingdom also are correspondences has been made clear to me by much experience. Often when I have been in gardens and have been looking at the trees, fruits, flowers, and plants there, I have recognized their correspondences in heaven, and have spoken with those with whom these were, and have been taught whence and what they were.