1. Influx 1
"When such as believe in nature see how these animals or insects are generated in the ground or on the leaves of plants, and when they examine the wonderful things in their organisms, and things made by their means, they think that nature produces them, not knowing that their formation and vivification is from the spiritual world, and their reception and clothing from the natural world; further, that the heat of the sun at the time of spring and summer dissolves and adapts the particles of purer nature for the reception of influx, and for the process of clothing. Wherefore the same argument and the same confirmation, which the believers of nature derive hence, are to me an argument for, and a confirmation of, a continual influx from the spiritual into the natural world. Written in the year 1750.
"The changes of caterpillars into butterflies, the government of bees, and many other things which are described in this book, are manifest signs of such influx." [See Heaven and Hell 567, also Heaven and Hell 39, 108, 109.]
Fusnotat:
1. On the fly-leaf of Swedenborg's copy of Swammerdam's Biblia Naturae, which he presented to Count Hopkin, and which is now in the possession of Dr. Loven of the "Carolinska Institut" in Stockholm, is written by his own hand the above remarks. See Documents Concerning Swedenborg. Vol. II., p. 750.
