The method of the reason is symbolized in so trifling a thing as the dealing out one by one of a pack of cards and their reassembling.  The pack has been made to show forth its content by a process of disruption—­of slicing.  Similarly, if a scientist wants to gain a thorough comprehension of a complicated organism, he dissects it, or submits it to a process of slicing, studying each slice separately under the microscope while keeping constantly in mind the relation of one slice to another.  This amounts to nothing less than reducing a thing from three dimensions to two, in order to know it thoroughly.  Now the flux of things corresponds to the four-dimensional aspect of the world, and with this the reason finds it impossible to deal.  As Bergson has so well shown, the reason cuts life into countless cross-sections:  a thing must be dead before it can be dissected.  This is why the higher-dimensional aspect of life, divined by the intuition, escapes rational analysis.

THE COIL OF LIFE

Swedenborg’s description of “the ascent and descent of forms” and the “forces and powers” which flow therefrom, suggests, by reason of the increasing amplitude and variety of form and motion, a progression from space to space.  This description is too long and involved to find place here, but its conclusion is as follows: 

“Such now is the ascent and descent of forms or substances in the greatest, and in our least universe:  similar also is the descent of all forces and powers which flow from them.  But all their perfection consists in the possibility and virtue of varying themselves, or of changing states, which possibility increases with their elevations, so that in number it exceeds all the series of calculations unfolded by human minds, and still inwardly involved by them:  which infinities finally become what is finite in the Supreme.  Our ideas are merely progressions by variations of form, and thus by actual changes of state.”

His sense of the beauty and orderliness of the whole process, and his despair of communicating it, find characteristic utterance in the following passage: 

“If thou could’st discern, my beloved, how distinctly and ordinately these forms are arranged and connected with each other, from the mere aspect and infinity of so many wonderful things connected with each other, from the mere aspect and infinity of so many wonderful things conspiring into one, thou would’st fall down, from an inmost impulse, with sacred astonishment, and at the same time pious joy, to perform an act of worship and of love before such an architect.”

In his description of the manner in which these forms cohere and successively unfold, he introduces one of the basic concepts of higher space thought; namely, that in the “descent of forms” from space to space, that which in the higher exists all together—­that is, simultaneously—­can only manifest itself in the lower piecemeal—­that is, successively.  He says: