1. Influx ¹

"When such as believe in nature see how these animals or insects are generated in the ground or on the leaves of plants, and when they examine the wonderful things in their organisms, and things made by their means, they think that nature produces them, not knowing that their formation and vivification is from the spiritual world, and their reception and clothing from the natural world; further, that the heat of the sun at the time of spring and summer dissolves and adapts the particles of purer nature for the reception of influx, and for the process of clothing. Wherefore the same argument and the same confirmation, which the believers of nature derive hence, are to me an argument for, and a confirmation of, a continual influx from the spiritual into the natural world. Written in the year 1750.

"The changes of caterpillars into butterflies, the government of bees, and many other things which are described in this book, are manifest signs of such influx." [See Heaven and Hell 567, also Heaven and Hell 39, 108, 109.]

Фусноте:

109. We can deduce how members of the vegetable kingdom correspond from a multitude of instances - for example, from the fact that tiny seeds grow into trees, beget leaves, produce flowers and then fruits in which they place another generation of seeds, and that these things happen in a sequence and emerge all together in such a wondrous design that there is no way to describe it briefly. It would take volumes, and still there would be deeper mysteries suited to their uses that our knowledge could not compass.

Because these things stem from the spiritual world or heaven, which is in a human form (as was explained in the appropriate chapter above [78-86]), it is also true that the details of that kingdom have a kind of relationship to human characteristics - a fact that is recognized by some individuals in the learned world.

It has become clear to me from a great deal of experience that everything in that kingdom is also a correspondence. Very often, when I have looked over trees and fruits and flowers and vegetables in gardens, I have become aware of corresponding things in heaven. Then I have talked with nearby people there and have learned where these plants were from and what their characteristics were.