12. X.
Spiritual things, thus clothed in a man, enable him to live as a rational and moral man, thus a spiritually natural man.
From the principle established above, that the soul clothes itself with a body as a man clothes himself with a garment, this follows as a conclusion. For the soul flows into the human mind, and through this into the body, and carries life with it, which it continually receives from the Lord, and thus transfers it mediately into the body, where by the closest union it makes the body as it were to live. Thence from a thousand testimonies of experience, it is evident that the spiritual united to the material, as a living force with a dead force, causes man to speak rationally and to act morally. [2] It appears as if the tongue and lips speak from a certain life in themselves, and that the arms and hands act in a like manner; but it is the thought, which in itself is spiritual, that speaks, and the will, which likewise is spiritual, that acts, and each through its own organs, which in themselves are material, because taken from the natural world. That it is so appears in the day, provided this is attended to: remove thought from speech, is not the mouth dumb in a moment? also remove will from action, do not the hands rest in a moment? [3] The union of spiritual things with natural, and the appearance of life therefrom in material things, may be compared to generous wine in a clean sponge, and to the sweet must in a grape, and to the savory liquor in an apple, and also to the aromatic odor in cinnamon. The fibers containing all these things are matters which neither taste nor are fragrant from themselves, but from the fluids in and between them; wherefore if you squeeze out those juices, they are dead filaments. So are the organs proper to the body, if life is taken away. [4] That man is rational from the union of spiritual things with natural, is evident from the analytical processes of his thought; and that he is moral from the honorableness of his conduct and the graces of his bearing. These he has from the faculty of receiving influx from the Lord through the angelic heaven, where is the very abode of wisdom and love, thus of rationality and morality. From these things it is perceived, that what is spiritual and what is natural, being united in man, cause him to live a spiritually natural man. The reason that he lives in a similar and yet dissimilar manner after death, is because his soul is then clothed with a substantial body, as in the natural world it was clothed with a material body. [5] It is believed by many that the perceptions and thoughts of the mind, because they are spiritual, flow in naked, and not through organized forms. But those dream thus who have not seen the interiors of the head, where perceptions and thoughts are in their beginnings; and that the brains are there, interwoven and composed of the cineritious and medullary substances, and that there are glands, cavities, septa, and the meninges and matres, which surround them all; and that a man thinks and wills sanely or insanely according to the sound or perverted state of all those things; thence that he is rational and moral according to the organic formation of his mind. For nothing could be predicated of the rational sight of man, which is the understanding, without forms organized for the reception of spiritual light, just as nothing could be predicated of the natural sight without the eyes; and so in other instances.
