Regarding the spiritual world, he tells us ‘that the whole natural world corresponds to the spiritual world collectively and in every part; for the natural world exists and subsists from the spiritual world, just as an effect does from its cause.’ He also tells us ‘that if in the spiritual world two desire intensely to see each other, that desire at once brings about a meeting. When any angel goes from one place to another, whether it is in his own city, or in the courts, or the gardens, or to others out of his own city, he arrives sooner or later, just as he is ardent or indifferent, the way itself being shortened or lengthened in proportion.... Change of place being only change of state, it is evident that approximations in the spiritual world arise from similitudes of mind and removals from dissimilitudes; and thus spaces are merely signs of inner differences.... From that cause alone the hells are altogether separated from the heavens.’ Of God he says: ‘The Divine is incomprehensible even by the angels, for there is no ratio between the finite and the infinite. ‘No man or angel can ever approach the Father and immediately worship Him; for He is invisible, and being invisible can neither be thought of nor loved.’ Of God’s Providence he says: ‘As in the Lord we are and act, His Providence is over us from birth to death, and even to eternity.... To talk of the Lord’s Providence as universal, and to separate it from particulars, is like talking of a whole in which there are no parts, or of something in which there is nothing. Consequently it is most false, a mere picture of the imagination, and downright stupidity, to say that the Lord’s Providence is universal, and not at the same time in the minutest particulars; for to provide and rule in the universal, and not at the same time in the minutest particulars, is not to rule at all.’ Swedenborg likewise believed in an intermediate state analogous to purgatory, although he objected to the name. This was called by him the world of spirits, after staying in which, for a longer or shorter time, the souls of the departed were drafted off to heaven on the one side, and to hell on the other. 47. We have now said enough to give our readers some idea of Swedenborg’s spiritual system. Unquestionably it is the system of a profound thinker, and many great men have not hesitated to express their admiration of Swedenborg and his works. It is one thing however to admit the beauty, the philosophical completeness, and even the possible truth of many of his statements, and another thing to believe that he actually conversed with the inhabitants of another world in the way in which one man converses with another.