Divine Love and Wisdom (Ager) n. 386

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386. (6) Man's mind is his spirit, and the spirit is the man, while the body is an external by means of which the mind or spirit feels and acts in its world. That man's mind is his spirit, and that the spirit is the man, can hardly enter the faith of those who have supposed the spirit to be wind, and the soul to be an airy something like breath breathed out from the lungs. For they say, How can the spirit, when it is spirit, be the man, and how can the soul, when it is soul, be the man? They think in the same way of God because He is called a Spirit. This idea of the spirit and the soul has come from the fact that spirit and wind in some languages are the same word; also, that when a man dies, he is said to give up the ghost or spirit; also, that life returns, after suffocation or swooning, when the spirit or breath of the lungs comes back. Because in these cases nothing but the breath or air is perceived, it is concluded from the eye and bodily sense that the spirit and soul of man after death is not the man. From this corporeal conclusion about the spirit and soul, various hypotheses have arisen, and these have given birth to a belief that man after death does not become a man until the day of the last judgment, and that meanwhile his spirit remains somewhere or other awaiting reunion with the body, according to what has been shown in the Continuation concerning the Last Judgment (n. 32-38). Because man's mind is his spirit, the angels, who also are spirits, are called minds.


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