es conversed with all his friends
after their death, he had almost always found in those who had but
lately died--that they could scarcely convince themselves that they
had died, because they saw round about them a world similar to the one
they had quitted. He found also that spiritual societies, which had
the same inner condition, had the same apparition of space and of all
things in space; and that the change of their internal state was
always accompanied by the appearance of a change of place.

I have already noticed that, according to our author, the various
powers and properties of the soul stand in sympathy with the organs of
the body entrusted to its government. The outer man therefore
corresponds to the whole inner man; and hence, whenever any remarkable
spiritual influence from the invisible world reaches one of these
faculties of the soul, he is sensible also harmonically of the
apparent presence of it in the corresponding members of his outer man.
To this head now he refers a vast variety of sensations in his body
which are uniformly connected with spiritual intuition; but the
absurdity of them is so enormous that I shall not attempt to adduce
even a single instance.----By all this a preparation is made for the
strangest and most fantastic of his notions in which all his ravings
are blended. As different powers and faculties constitute that unity
which is the soul or inner man, so also different spirits (whose
leading characteristics bear the same relation to each other as the
various faculties of a spirit) constitute one society which exhibits
the appearance of one great man; and in this shadowy image every
spirit is seen in that place and in those visible members which are
agreeable to its proper function in such a spiritual body. And all
spiritual societies taken together, and the entire universe of all
these invisible beings, appears again in the form of a hugest and
ultra-enormous man mountain: a monstrous and gigantic fancy, which
perhaps has grown out of the school mode of representing a whole
quarter of the world under the image of a virgin sitting. In this
immeasurable man is an entire and inner commerce of each spirit with
all, and of all with each; and, let the position of men in reference
to each other be what it may, they take quite another position in this
enormous man--a position which they never change, and which is only in
appearance a local position in an immeasurable space, but in fact a
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