4653. The spirits who correspond to hearing, that is, those who constitute the province of the ear, are ones who lead lives of simple obedience; that is to say, they do not use reason to establish whether a thing is true but believe it to be so because others say it is. They may therefore be called 'obediences'. The reason why they are as they are is that the relationship of hearing to speech is like what is passive to what is active, and so like a person who hears and acquiesces in what another says. This also explains why in everyday speech hearing someone may mean being obedient to him, and to hearken to his voice to obey him. For the deeper meanings which human utterances possess have their origin for the most part in correspondence, the reason being that man's spirit exists among spirits in the next life, and exercises its power of thought there, though man himself has no knowledge at all of this and one interested solely in the body has no wish to know it.

[4653a] There are many different kinds of spirits who correspond to the ear, that is, to its functions and duties. There are those who correlate with the specific parts of that organ - those who correlate with the outer ear; those who do so with the membrane there which is called the ear-drum, the interior membranes termed fenestrae; and those who correlate with the malleus, the stapes, the incus, the cylinders, and the cochlea. There are also those who correlate with parts more interior still, including those immaterial or insubstantial parts that are closer to the spirit. Lastly there are those spirits, within the spirit itself, who are linked ultimately - at the most internal point - to spirits belonging to internal sight, from whom they differ in that they themselves are not so discerning, yet, like those who are passively obedient, support them.