307. All useful functions, which are the goals of creation, are in forms, and they get these forms from the material substances characteristic of earth. All the things I have been talking about so far--the sun, the atmospheres, and the earth--are simply means toward goals, and the goals of creation are what are brought forth from earth by the Lord as the sun, through the atmospheres. These goals are called useful functions, and they include everything involved in the plant kingdom, everything involved in the animal kingdom, and ultimately the human race and the angelic heaven that comes from it.

These are called useful functions because they are receptive of divine love and wisdom and because they focus on God the Creator as their source and thereby unite him with his master work in such a way that they continue to exist through him in the same way they arose. I say "they focus on God the Creator as their source and unite him with his master work," but this is talking in terms of the way things seem. It actually means that God the Creator works it out so that these useful functions seem to focus on and unite themselves to him on their own initiative. I will describe later [310-317] how they focus on and thereby unite themselves to him.

I have already dealt with these subjects to some extent in appropriate places; in 47-51, for example, divine love and wisdom cannot fail to be and to be manifested in others that it has created; in 54-60 [55-60], everything in the created universe is a vessel of divine love and wisdom; and in 65-68, the useful functions of every created thing tend upward to us step by step, and through us to God the creator, their source.

61. All the things that have been created reflect the human in some respect. There is evidence for this in every detail of the animal kingdom, in every detail of the plant kingdom, and in every detail of the mineral kingdom.

We can see ourselves reflected in every detail of the animal kingdom from the fact that all kinds of animal have in common with us members for locomotion, sensory organs, and the inner organs that support these activities. They also have their impulses and desires like our own physical ones. They have the innate knowledge proper to their desires, with an apparently spiritual element visible in some of them, more or less obvious to the eye in the beasts of the earth, the fowl of the heavens, bees, silkworms, ants, and the like. This is why merely earthly-minded people regard the living creatures of this kingdom as much like themselves, lacking only speech.

We can see ourselves reflected in every detail of the plant kingdom in the way plants grow from seeds and go through their successive stages of life. They have something like marriages with births that follow. Their vegetative "soul" is the function to which they give form. There are many other ways in which they reflect us, which some writers have described.

We can see ourselves reflected in every detail of the mineral kingdom simply in its effort to produce the forms that reflect us--all the details of the plant kingdom, as I have just noted--and to perform its proper functions in this way. The moment a seed falls into earth's lap, she nurtures it and from all around offers it resources from herself for its sprouting and emerging in a form representative of humanity. We can see this effort in solid mineral materials if we look at deep-sea corals or at flowers in mines, where they spring from minerals and metals. This effort toward becoming plant life and thereby performing a useful function is the outermost element of Divinity in created things.