which are good or evil uses,
is in the midst either of angels of heaven or of spirits of hell; and as
such things as are on the earth are also in the heavens and hells, it
follows that influx therefrom directly produces such things when the
conditions are favorable. All things, in fact, that appear in the
spiritual world, whether in heaven or in hell, are correspondences of
affections or lusts, for they take form there in accordance with these;
consequently when affections or lusts, which in themselves are spiritual,
meet with homogeneous or corresponding things in the earths, there are
present both the spiritual that furnishes a soul, and the material that
furnishes a body. Moreover, within everything spiritual there is a conatus
to clothe itself with a body. The hells are about men, and therefore
contiguous to the earth, because the spiritual world is not in space, but
is where there is a corresponding affection.

344. I heard two presidents of the English Royal Society, Sir Hans Sloane
and Martin Folkes, conversing together in the spiritual world about the
existence of seeds and eggs, and about productions from them in the
earths. The former ascribed them to nature, and contended that nature
was endowed from creation with a power and force to produce such effects
by means of the sun's heat. The other maintained that this force is in
nature unceasingly from God the Creator. To settle the discussion, a
beautiful bird appeared to Sir Hans Sloane, and he was asked to examine
it to see whether it differed in the smallest particle from a similar
bird on earth. He held it in his hand, examined it, and declared that
there was no difference. He knew indeed that it was nothing but an
affection of some angel represented outside of the angel as a bird, and
that it would vanish or cease with its affection. And this came to pass.
By this experience Sir Hans Sloane was convinced that nature contributes
nothing whatever to the production of plants and animals, that they are
produced solely by what flows into the natural world out of the spiritual
world. If that bird, he said, were to be infilled, in its minutest parts,
with corresponding matters from the earth, and thus fixed, it would be a
lasting bird, like the birds on the earth; and that it is the same with
such things as are from hell. To this he added that had he known what he
now knew of the spiritual world, he would have ascribed to nature no more
than this, that it serves t