Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine WisdomSwedenborg, Emanuel
Religion
Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom
Swedenborg, Emanuel
God (Christianity) -- Love; God (Christianity) -- Wisdom
373. Because the will and understanding are the receptacles of love and
wisdom, these two are organic forms, or forms organized out of the purest
substances; for such they must be to be receptacles. It is no objection
that their organization is imperceptible to the eye; it lies beyond the
reach of vision, even when this is increased by the microscope. The
smallest insects are also too small to be seen, yet they have organs of
sense and motion, for they feel, walk, and fly. That they have brains,
hearts, pulmonary pipes, and viscera, acute observers have discovered from
their anatomy by means of the microscope. Since minute insects themselves
are not visible, and still less so their component viscera, and since it
is not denied that they are organized even to each single particle in
them, how can it be said that the two receptacles of love and wisdom,
called will and understanding, are not organic forms? How can love and
wisdom, which are life from the Lord, act upon what is not a subject, or
upon what has no substantial existence? Without organic forms, how can
thought inhere; and from thought inherent in nothing can one speak? Is
not the brain, where thought comes forth, complete and organized in every
part? The organic forms themselves are there visible even to the naked
eye; and the receptacles of the will and understanding, in their first
principles, are plainly to be seen in the cortical substance, where they
are perceptible as minute glands (On which see above, n. 366). Do not,
I pray, think of these things from an idea of vacuum. Vacuum is nothing,
and in nothing nothing takes place, and from nothing nothing comes forth.
(On the idea of vacuum, see above, n. 82.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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