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(151) The Lord created the universe and all things belonging to it by means of the (spiritual) sun, which is the first proceeding of the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom.

(154) In the spiritual world are the causes of all things, and in the natural world are the effects of all things.

(After a long gap the direct marginal commentary is resumed.)

S. (163) Without two suns, the one living and the other dead, there can be no creation.

B. False philosophy according to the letter, but true according to the spirit.

S. (164) Natural things in their origins are dead. . . suns are the dead sun is created through the living sun by the

origins Lord.

...

B. How could life create death?

S. (165) A dead sun was created . . . that things may be fixed. that existences may come forth which shall be . . . ever enduring. The terraqueous globe is a basis and firmament upon which they exist. B. They exist literally about the sun, and not about the earth.

S. (166) All things were created by the Lord through the living sun and nothing through the dead sun.

B. The dead sun is only a phantasy of evil men.

S. (181, condensed) Men in their natural heat and light do not know spiritual heat except by a certain delight of love, nor spiritual light except by perception of truth.

B. He speaks of men as mere earthly men, not as receptacles of spirit, or else he contradicts 257.

(257 is quoted and annotated below, in its place.)

S. (182) Degrees of spiritual heat cannot be described from experience, because love, to which spiritual heat corresponds, does not come under ideas of thought, but spiritual light can be described because light, being of light, falls into those ideas.

B. This is certainly not to be understood according to the letter, for it is false by all experience. Who does not and may not know of love and wisdom in himself?

S. (220) By works (so often mentioned in the Word, where we are told that a man's salvation depends on them) are meant uses which are actually done, for charity and faith is in uses and according to uses. B. The whole of the New Church is in Active Life and not in Ceremonies at all.

S. (237) Man comes first into the natural degree. This increases until he reaches the rational. The second degree, the spiritual,. is opened by the love of uses. . . love towards the neighbour the third degree. by love toward the Lord.

...

B. Study science till you are blind. Study intellectuals till you are cold. Yet science cannot teach intellect. Much less can intellect teach affection. How foolish it is then to assert that Man is born in only one degree, when that one degree is receptive of the three degrees; two of which he must destroy or close up or they will descend. If he closes up the two superior then he is not truly in the third, but descends out of it into mere Nature or Hell (see No. 239). Is it not also evident that one degree will not open the other, and that science will not open intellect, but that they are discrete, and not continuous so as

to explain each other except by correspondence which has nothing to do with demonstration, for you cannot demonstrate one degree by the other, for how can science be brought to demonstrate intellect without making them continuous and not discrete ?

S. (239) There is in every man a natural, spiritual, and celestial impotency by birth, and in act when they are opened.

B. Mark this. It explains 238.

S. (later in 239) Man... after death, if he becomes an angel .. speaks ineffable things incomprehensible to the natural man.

B. Not to a Man, but to the natural Man.

S. (241) Every one who consults his reason whilst it is in the light is able to see that a man's love is the end of all things belonging to him.

B. Whilst it is in the light (underlined).

S. (244) The understanding does not lead the will. Wisdom does not produce love.

B. Mark this.

S. (256) A man, so long as he lives in the world, and is therefore in the natural degree, cannot be elevated into very wisdom as it is with the angels.

B. See Sect. 4 of the next number.

S. (257, Sect. 4) Still, the man with whom the spiritual degree has been opened comes into that wisdom when he dies, and he can also come into it by a laying asleep of the sensations of the body, and by an influx into the spiritual things of his mind from above.

(Sect. 5) Thought comes out of the mind's spiritual substances, not out of its natural substances.

B. This is to be understood as unusual in our time but common in ancient. This is while in the body. Many persons understand him (Swedenborg) as if a man in the natural body was only conversant with natural substances, because themselves are mercenary and worldly, and have no idea of any but worldly gain.

S. (257) It may be confirmed, and indeed is confirmed, by the wicked to themselves that there is no God . . . nature created herself . . religion is to keep simple minds in bonds . . . human prudence does all things.

B. Who shall dare to say after this that elevation is of self, and is Enthusiasm and Madness, and is it not plain that self-derived intelligence is worldly demonstration?

S. (294) Those things which constitute the spiritual sun are from the Lord, and are not the Lord, therefore they are not life in itself. B. This assertion that the spiritual sun is not life explains how the natural sun is dead.

(294, later) As things which flow forth from an angel or a man are not the angel or the man, but are from them, devoid of life. making one with them no further than that

they have been taken out of the forms of their bodies which were the forms of their life. Men with natural ideas cannot express this.

B. How absurd then would it be to say that no man on earth has a spiritual idea after reading No. 257.

...

S. (295) Angels were told to think spiritually and tell what they thought.... They could not. ... No word of spiritual speech is like natural speech nor of spiritual writing like natural except the letters, each of which has an entire meaning.

...

B. They could not tell him in natural ideas how absurd must men be to understand him, as if he said the angels could not express themselves at all to him.

S. (304, condensed) There is progression of fibres and vessels in man, and their states from their first principles where they are in the light (underlined) and heat to ultimates in shade and not in heat.

B. We see here that the cause of an ultimate is the absence from heat and light.

S. (315) Heat, light, and atmospheres of the natural world conduce absolutely nothing to the image of creation.

B. Therefore the Natural Earth and Atmosphere is a Phantasy.

S. (315, continued) They only open seeds, maintain their shoots in expansion, and put upon them matters which fix them, but this not by Powers derived from their own Sun.

B. Mark this.

S. (316) There is a progression in the forms of animals and vegetables from first principles to ultimates, and from ultimates to first principles. Will and understanding are primes: thought and action ultimates.

B. A going forth and returning.

S. (324) There is nothing in the created universe which has not correspondence with something in man, affections, thoughts, or even organs and viscera of the body. . . not with these as substances but

as uses.

B. Things and substances are so different as not to correspond.

(A long portion here of the book has no note made, but Blake read and partly used afterwards many remarks in it, such as: (371) "There is a correspondence of the will with the heart, and of the understanding with the lungs." This recalls all that is said in Jerusalem and Milton about the furnaces and bellows of Los.)

S. (404, condensed) There is thought out of affection for truth, it is wisdom, but there is a thought out of memory through the sight of the natural mind.

B. Note this.

S. (410) Love or the will joins itself to wisdom or understanding, and wisdom or understanding does not conjoin itself to love or the will. B. Mark this.

S. (410, later, condensed) Knowledge which love acquires is not of understanding, but of love. It flows in from the spiritual world not to the understanding but to love in the understanding. It appears as if the understanding received it, but this is a fallacy, and as if love conjoined itself to affection, but this is a fallacy.

B. Mark this. Note this.

S. (410, still later) Love acts through truths, deriving nothing from understanding, but acting as though wisdom came from it, from some determination of Love called affection.

B. Mark this.

S. (411) Therefore love conjoins itself to understanding, not the

converse.

B. Mark this.

S. (417) Any one who is familiar with the anatomic structure of the lungs, and collates it with the understanding, can see clearly that the understanding does nothing of itself.

B. Mark.

S. (412, later) My knowledge of the fabric of the lungs fully convinced me that love through its affections conjoins itself to the understanding, and that the understanding does not conjoin itself to the affection of love.

B. Mark.

S. (413) The wisdom or understanding, out of the potency given to it by love or the will, is able to receive those things which are light from heaven, and to receive them.

B. Mark this.

S. (414) Love cannot be elevated through honour or gain as an end. Love towards the neighbour from the Lord is the love of wisdom. The light in man corresponding to winter is . . wisdom without love.

B. Is it not false, then, that Love receives its influx through the understanding, as was asserted in the Society?

S. (419) Material love has become impure through the separation from heavenly love in parents.

B. Therefore it was not created impure and is not naturally so.

S. (419, later) In so far as the love puts heaven in the first place and the world in the second . . . it is raised into the heart of heaven and conjoined to the light of heaven.

B. Therefore it may not receive influx through the understanding. S. (421) The love or will is defiled in the understanding and by it, if they are not elevated together.

B. Mark this. They are elevated together.

S. (422) The understanding is not become spiritual or celestial, but the love does. When the love is so it makes its spouse, the understanding, spiritual and celestial.

B. underlines this.

S. (432, condensed) The initiament or primitive of man as it is in the womb after conception no man can know because it cannot be seen. It is of spiritual substance that does not fall into natural light. . .. The right half of the brain at smallest is of love, the left of understanding. Its form within is in the form of heaven, but its exterior form was seen in it in opposition to that Order and Form.

B. Heaven and Hell are born together.

In Swedenborg's Angelic Wisdom concerning the Divine Love it is also taught that (288) "Inasmuch as God is a Man, therefore the universal Heaven in the complex is as one man, and it is distinguished into regions and provinces according to the members, viscera, and organs of a man. All these provinces are distinct from one another. The angels who constitute heaven are the recipients of love and wisdom from the Lord, and RECIPIENTS ARE IMAGES."

The last three words relate what may be called the first law of mysticism. It contains a conceivable relation between the IMAGINATION in Blake's sense of the word, and the Logos.

CHAPTER XIII

ROBERT'S INVENTION

IN the year 1788-89 Blake was not only busy with his studies of Swedenborg, he received from a dream or vision of his dead brother Robert the invention of the kind of printing in which he published all his autograph books. Robert directed him to write and draw in a liquid varnish that would protect a copper plate from being eaten away by acid, and then to leave the plate in an acid bath till only the lines were left standing up. He could then roll an ordinary printing roller soaked with printing ink over the surface and print as from an ordinary block.

As this is usually told from Blake's own account of it, we cannot help understanding it as though Blake were a medium, and the spirit of Robert came to him and spoke to him. Whether such a thing be possible or not seems to be still a matter in dispute with most people, but we have an incorrect idea of Blake if we look upon him as here claiming to be a "medium"; though he would seem to speak as though that were his idea of himself. Whatever the "mediumistic faculty may be, it is one which imagination does not help, but rather hinders and distorts. Blake's imagination being habitually in a state of boiling activity, ready at the smallest suggestion to boil over, we should expect him to be less of a medium than most people, while his Swedenborgian habit of talk, dating back to before he possessed more than a childish smattering of Swedenborg, would naturally cause him to refer to the dead in such a way that mediums, especially those who were not Swedenborgians, would claim him as one of themselves.

In fact, he seems to have possessed a very slight and easily disturbed and deceived faculty of an occult or psychic sort, showing itself in presentiment and intuition, and leading him as often to errors as to revelations. His views of the subsist

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