3616. CONCERNING THE INTERNAL MAN. When writing, concerning spirits who were ignorant that an internal man is given, I was intellectually informed, and it was afterwards said in conversing with spirits that it was wonderful that man did not know that there is an internal man, when every day he might, upon reflection, experimentally know that he bears himself differently in gesture, look, and word, from what he inwardly thinks, thus that he separates his exteriors from his interiors, and thus appears double, especially when his interiors are deceitful, consequently that he is one interiorly and another exteriorly, on account of this separation. Hence it may appear that an interior man is given, separate from the external or corporeal, which, if one thinks it to be thought only, could not be separated from the external or corporeal, which, if one thinks it to be thought only, could not be separated from the external, unless it were something real. But because they do not reflect, but abide in externals, they do not know [the truth], and are less deceitful compared with others. Moreover, they could observe that good separates itself from evil; that one, for instance, thinks that a certain thing is not to be done, thus that good in this way extinguishes the evil of thought, consequently that there is something still more interior which fights with the thought. - 1748, October 19.