1623. HOW INDURATION APPEARS. We read in a great many places that the heart is hardened; this hardening is also manifestly apparent, yea, it is felt, not indeed in the [literal] heart, for the heart signifies what pertains to the affections. It takes place, therefore, where first principles exist, to wit, in the brain. When the souls of the recently deceased appear after death in the world of spirits, the brains of some of them seem to be hardened, like things that you see elsewhere, so that the exterior or crustal portion is, as it were, hard and conglutinated. This is seen by a spiritual idea, and thus plainly exhibited, as also its softening. Thus it is without faith. Something similar it was given me to experience, namely, a hardness in the left region of the cerebrum, as if occasioned by somewhat large and hard lumps which were the seat of an obscure dull pain, and I was informed that it was thence perceived, namely, from these hardenings, that there yet remained something not belonging to true faith. It appears hence that an actual hardness does exist in the organicals [of the body] when faith is wanting, and that the greater the obduration, the less the conscience, so that those who have no conscience, manifesting itself in anxieties, seem to have their brain, after death, externally hardened, which was formerly soft, and this is attended with pains and torture. - 1748, March 21.