rial
sphere, which is the lowest.' And to certain men it is granted not only
to converse as a spirit with angels and spirits, but to traverse in a
spiritual way the vast distances which separate world from world and
system from system, all the while remaining in the body. Swedenborg was
one of these. 'The interiors of my spirit,' he says, 'are opened by the
Lord, so that while I am in the body I can at the same time be with
angels in heaven, and not only converse with them, but behold the
wonderful things which are there and describe them, that henceforth it
may no more be said, "Who ever came from heaven to assure us it exists
and tell us what is there?" He who is unacquainted with the arcana of
heaven cannot believe that man can see earths so remote, and give any
account of them from sensible experience. But let him know that spaces
and distances, and consequently progressions, existing in the natural
world, in their origin and first causes are changes of the state of the
interiors; that with angels and spirits progressions appear according to
changes of state; and that by changes of state they may be apparently
translated from one place to another, and from one earth to another,
even to earths at the boundaries of the universe; so likewise may man as
to his spirit, his body still remaining in its place. This has been the
case with me.'

Before describing his visits to earths in the starry heavens, Swedenborg
is careful to indicate the probability that such earths exist. 'It is
well known to the learned world,' he says, 'that every star is a sun in
its place, remaining fixed like the sun of our earth.' The proper
motions of the stars had, alas! not been discovered in Swedenborg's day,
nor does he seem to have been aware what a wild chase he was really
entering upon in his spiritual progressions. Conceive the pursuit of
Sirius or Vega as either sun rushed through space with a velocity of
thirty or forty miles in every second of time! To resume, however, the
account which Swedenborg gives of the ideas of the learned world of his
day. 'It is the distance which makes a star appear in a small form;
consequently' (the logical necessity is not manifest, however) 'each
star, like the sun of our system, has around it planets which are
earths; and the reason these are not visible to us is because of their
immense distance and their having no light but from their own star,
which light cannot be reflected so far as to reach us.'