Throughout much of the night, then quite long in the morning, for hours, I was absorbed in a spiritual mental image showing how mankind is led by the Lord, and I was seeing then by that uninterrupted spiritual mental image, which is unutterable, that it is pure necessities by which mankind is led by the Lord. Both because of the kind of societies people join with and because of the thoughts they find agreeable, there are therefore nothing but pure necessities, and to be sure, necessities by which people are bent toward the best that can possibly come of the life [they lead]. For if they were led any differently than they are, it would tend to their destruction, since every aspect of their life, both of thought and of action, brings with it a series of consequences for their life. Each element [of thought and action] is as a seed from which a tree is born, whence come new seeds, and so on.