action to predominate,
instead of confirming his intellectual being, all his powers will be
absorbed in the use of his external senses, and the angel will slowly
perish by the materialization of both natures. In the contrary case, if
he nourishes his inner being with the aliment needful to it, the soul
triumphs over matter and strives to get free.

When they separate by the act of what we call death, the angel, strong
enough then to cast off its wrappings, survives and begins its real
life. The infinite variety which differentiates individual men can only
be explained by this twofold existence, which, again, is proved and made
intelligible by that variety.

In point of fact, the wide distance between a man whose torpid
intelligence condemns him to evident stupidity, and one who, by the
exercise of his inner life, has acquired the gift of some power, allows
us to suppose that there is as great a difference between men of genius
and other beings as there is between the blind and those who see. This
hypothesis, since it extends creation beyond all limits, gives us, as it
were, the clue to heaven. The beings who, here on earth, are apparently
mingled without distinction, are there distributed, according to their
inner perfection, in distinct spheres whose speech and manners have
nothing in common. In the invisible world, as in the real world, if some
native of the lower spheres comes, all unworthy, into a higher sphere,
not only can he never understand the customs and language there, but his
mere presence paralyzes the voice and hearts of those who dwell therein.

Dante, in his _Divine Comedy_, had perhaps some slight intuition of
those spheres which begin in the world of torment, and rise, circle on
circle, to the highest heaven. Thus Swedenborg's doctrine is the product
of a lucid spirit noting down the innumerable signs by which the angels
manifest their presence among men.

This doctrine, which I have endeavored to sum up in a more or less
consistent form, was set before me by Lambert with all the fascination
of mysticism, swathed in the wrappings of the phraseology affected by
mystical writers: an obscure language full of abstractions, and
taking such effect on the brain, that there are books by Jacob Boehm,
Swedenborg, and Madame Guyon, so strangely powerful that they give rise
to phantasies as various as the dreams of the opium-eater. Lambert told
me of mystical facts so extraordinary, he so acted on my imaginatio