3476. CONCERNING THOSE WHO ARE INSANITIES FROM INQUIRING WHAT GOD WAS EMPLOYED ABOUT FROM ETERNITY, BEFORE THE CREATION OF THE WORLD, AND WHO THENCE INFER ON ORIGIN EVEN OF THE LORD HIMSELF. Those who remain [in great measure] corporeal, very much as they were on earth, cannot reason, so long as they are of this character, otherwise than from corporeal and material things, consequently from the most finite and exterior, judging, for instance, of celestial happiness from the pleasures of the body, and of everything spiritual from the sensual joys of the flesh. Some of these also, when they reason, fall into speculations grounded upon the most finite things, as time and space, concluding from time respecting the eternal, and from space respecting the infinite, not knowing that in the other life there is no notion of time or space, for those who have lived thousands of years know not that they have lived a minute; and those who were locally the most remote from me, as in the Indies, or in other earths, compared with the distance of which, all the distances on our earth vanish to nothing, were yet made to be present in a moment of time. Wherefore the notion of time and space is not given to spirits, except to those who are corporeal, and while in corporeals. But a [true and correct] notion does not obtain even with them, because [interior] reflection is not given them, and without reflection a [true] notion does not exist, as is evident from the case of a man in the body who does not reflect upon corporeal things of this kind; he is not then in the notion of them. This is written in the presence of the angels, and thus with the angels.