NEUOFFENBARUNGThe impressions of matter on the soul and spirit (4 March 1847)
1. You may go through the animal world as well as the plant world, even the mineral world, and everywhere you will find an independent intelligence, but beside this intelligence, also a need. This independent intelligence can be recognized not only from the different characteristics, but also, what is especially important for psychologists, from the impression that the different things and objects make on the human mind.
2. On whom can the impression be made? On a human being, and only on his soul and spirit.
3. But how must the human being be constituted so that he is receptive for impressions?
4. He must be alive and completely intelligent; and so that everything can make an impression on him, he must already unite all intelligences in himself, i.e. in his soul. So he must be alive and completely intelligent.
5. Question: how then can a dead cause or a dead thing make any impression on man; for the impression is an effect. But how can a dead thing or a dead cause have an effect?
6. How can a dead being call forth it's visual likeness in the living being? Wouldn't this mean to cheat life and consider it a fool, if one could seriously be so foolish as to claim that death as an object can awaken a death again from the life of another object?
7. But if there is talk about revival, how can a dead thing be revived if it is dead? The term death presupposes either a complete lack of essence or at least a complete lack of effect of a being, which is basically one and the same; because no being at all can certainly make an impression on nobody, because it is not there at all, just so also a completely ineffective being, because if such a being would be able to make an impression on somebody, it would certainly not be completely ineffective, because the impression is certainly an effect.
8. But from this it follows that all that which makes any impression on the human soul must not be dead, but must be intelligently alive in so far as to excite in the living soul it's equally living intelligence- propertyum, The first thing is that the soul is able to see it as something similar to itself and to bring it before the eyes of the soul to a contemplative conception, which conception is then exactly the above- mentioned impression that any thing or cause has made on man. From this it also follows that there is nowhere a death in the physical world itself, which some better naturalists have already dimly discovered; but what the short-sighted man calls death, is only a transition from a less intelligent form into a higher one, where the intelligences are already united many times.
9. Certainly, various feelings take possession of man at the sight of masses of stones. Yes, the stones are dead, they say; how then can they evoke a feeling in the living soul? Should the dead images evoke the same images alive in the soul? Such an assertion or assumption would be even more incomparably stupid than if someone wanted to claim that if one holds seeds above a calm water surface in which they are reflected, these reflected seed images will begin to germinate in the water, and indeed drive roots out into the air and let fruits ripen below the water surface. But this would not even be so stupid; for then the object that is reflected in the water mirror would not be dead, and it would be more likely to assume that it would be able to produce something living of it's kind through it's image in the water, than that a completely dead object would be able to produce a living idea in the living soul.
10. Groups of stones and rock masses, however, cause living feelings in the human soul, which are sometimes full of charm, sometimes full of enthusiasm and full of admiration; these living feelings should surely be caused by the dead stone? Then I also say:
11. He who has ears, let him hear; and he who has eyes, let him see what the living Spirit speaks to the living spirit!
12. These stone masses have come forth just like the most living cherub from the almighty eternal power of God; how could the eternal primeval life of all life create dead – say – dead stones?
13. I as the original Creator can sure fixate the endless fullness of My ideas – thus says the Lord – and can hold the living intelligences as if it were single thoughts in the apparent matter of stone, and make them gradually free and in the fullness and glory contemplative to Me, the Creator, and to those who are out of Me, so that not all endless fullness of My ideas float as if a whole unchangeable picture before My eyes; For it is precisely in this material creation that the Creator locks up for Himself the endless abundance of ideas, and through the freeing and dissolving of matter, presents them to Himself again like individual thoughts to His divine contemplation.
14. If, however, the Creator has bound His ideas and thoughts, which are certainly not dead, in the appearance of matter, in a certain way like the bookbinder binds a book, then there must also be life in the stone, thus a large quantity of intelligences, which are found again in the living human soul, which has already taken it's living part of it, in order to regenerate itself in a certain way as alive again in the soul.
15. Behold, this is the characteristic which radiates from every thing or cause into the living soul of man, and this characteristic stems from the living intelligent forces which are held in matter.
16. This characteristic attests to the free intelligence by which each thing in it's kind is in a certain way self-conscious of one or more abilities and skills; in addition to this characteristic, however, it also attests to a necessity, such as, for example, that the stone must be solid, the plant must grow and bear fruit in this or that form, and the animal in it's kind must be and do what it is intended to do. This need does not lie in the matter; but this is a work of the perfect spirits to whom such business is given.
17. But how the spirits carry out such business here in this region, we will illuminate in the following by certain kind of dramatic representations and narrations as clearly as always possible.