"Hence our human sciences are but the analysis of form. The learned of this world are purely superficial, as their knowledge is; their inner man is of no avail except to preserve an aptitude for apprehension and truth. The angelic spirit goes far beyond this. His knowledge is the thought of which human science is the mere utterance; he derives a knowledge of things from the Word by studying the correspondences through which the worlds are harmonized with the heavens. The Word of God was written entirely by such correspondences; it contains a hidden or spiritual meaning which cannot be understood without the study of correspondences. 'There are,' says Swedenborg (Celestial Doctrine), 'innumerable arcana in the inward meaning of the correspondences.'
"Those men who have laughed to scorn the books in which the prophets have treasured the Word, were in such a state of ignorance as men are in, who, in this world, knowing nothing of a science, mock the truths of that science. To know the correspondences of the Word with heavenly things, to know the correspondences that exist between the visible and ponderable things of the earthly globe and invisible and imponderable things of the spiritual world, is to 'have the heavens in your understanding.'
"Every object of every creation proceeded from the hand of God, and has, therefore, necessarily a hidden meaning, as we see in those grand words of Isaiah, 'The earth is as a garment' (Isaiah li. 6). This mysterious tie between the smallest atoms of matter and the heavens constitutes what Swedenborg calls a Celestial Arcanum. Indeed, his Treatise on the Celestial Arcana, in which he explains the correspondences or symbolism of the natural and spiritual, containing, as Jacob Boehm has it, the 'sign and sealing of all things,' contains no less than thirteen thousand propositions, filling sixteen volumes. 'This wonderful apprehension of correspondences which the grace of God vouchsafed to Swedenborg,' says one of his disciples, 'is the secret of the interest taken in his works.' According to this commentator, 'everything is derived from heaven, everything returns to heaven. The prophet's words are sublime and lucid; he speaks in the heavens, and is understood on earth. A volume might be written on any one of his phrases.' And, among a thousand others, he quotes this text: 'The realm of heaven,' says Swedenborg (Arcana Celestia), 'is the realm of impulsion. Action takes form in heaven, and thence in the world, and by degrees in the minutest details of earthly life; earthly effects being thus continuous with heavenly causes, the result in every case is correspondent and symbolical. Man is the link of union between the Natural and the Spiritual.'
"Angelic spirits, then, inevitably know the correspondences that link each earthly thing to heaven, and they know the inmost sense of the prophetic words which foretell their evolution. Thus, to these spirits everything here below has its hidden meaning. The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition. To them the adulteries and debauchery of which the Scripture and the Prophets speak, and which are often misapprehended by self-styled scribes, signify the state of the souls who in this world persist in debasing themselves with earthly affections, and so confirm their divorce from heaven. Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God. The candlesticks, the shewbread, the horses and riders, the whores, the jewels,—everything in the Scriptures has for them a super-sensual meaning, and reveals the future of earthly history in its relation to heaven. They can all enter into the truth of the declarations of Saint John, which human science demonstrates, and substantially proves at a later time, such as this, 'pregnant,' says Swedenborg, 'with many human sciences': 'I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away' (Rev. xxi. 1). They know the suppers where 'they eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captives, and the flesh of mighty men,' to which [the fowls] are bidden by an angel standing in the sun (Rev. xix. 17, 18). They see the woman with wings, clothed with the sun, and the man always armed. 'The horse of the Apocalypse,' says Swedenborg, 'is the visible image of the human intellect ridden by death, because it bears in itself the element of its own destruction.' Finally, they recognize the nations hidden under forms which, to the ignorant, seem grotesque.
"When a man is prepared to receive the prophetical insufflation of correspondences, the Spirit of the Word moves within him; he then sees that creations are but transformations; it gives vitality to his intellect, and a burning thirst for truth which can only be quenched in heaven. In proportion to the greater or less perfection of his inner man he can conceive of the power of the angelic spirit; and guided by desire, the least perfect state of unregenerate man, he proceeds to hope, which opens before him the world of spirits, and thence to prayer, which is the key of heaven.
"What human creature could fail to desire to become worthy of passing into the sphere of those intellects that live in secret by love or wisdom? During their life on earth those spirits remain pure; they neither see, nor think, nor speak as other men do.
"There are two modes of perception—the external and the internal. Man is wholly external; the angelic spirit is wholly internal. The spirit penetrates the sense of numbers; it masters them all and knows their meanings. It is lord of motion, and is one with everything by ubiquity: 'One angel is present to another whenever he will,' says the Swedish Seer (Angelic Wisdom concerning Divine Love), for he has the power of escaping from the body, and sees the heavens as the prophets saw them, and as Swedenborg himself saw them.
"'In this state,' he says, in the True Religion, 'the spirit of a man is borne from one place to another, his body remaining where it is, a state in which I lived for twenty-six years.' This is the meaning to be given to the Bible phrase, 'The Spirit carried me.'
"Angelic wisdom is to human wisdom what the numberless forces of Nature are to its action, which is single. Everything lives again, moves, and exists in the spirit, for it is in God, as it is expressed in these words of Saint Paul, In Deo sumus, movemur et vivimus (In God we live and move and have our being, Acts xvii. 28). Earth offers no obstacle to it, as the Word offers no difficulties. Its nearness to the divine state enables it to see the thought of God veiled by the Word, just as the spirit dwelling inwardly can communicate with the hidden meaning of all the things of this world. Science is the language of the temporal world; love is that of the spiritual world. Man, indeed, describes more than he explains; while the angelic spirit sees and understands. Science saddens man; love enraptures the angel; science is still seeking, love has found. Man judges of Nature in relation to itself; the angelic spirit judges of it in relation to heaven. In short, to the spirits everything speaks.
"The spirits are in the secret of the reciprocal harmony of creations; they are in accord with the spirit of sounds, with the spirit of colors, with the spirit of vegetable life; they can question minerals, and minerals reply to their thoughts. What, to them, are the learning and the treasures of earth when they can constantly command them by their sight, and when the worlds of which men think so much are for the spirits no more than the topmost step whence they will fly up to God? Heavenly love, or heavenly wisdom, are visibly with them, seen by the elect in a halo of light that envelops them. Their innocence, of which a child's innocence is the external image, has knowledge which children have not; they are innocent, and they know.