3890. CONCERNING DIPPEL. Dippel spoke with me and I asked him what had been his belief respecting spirits. He said he had believed that the spirit lived indeed after death, but that it lived an obscure kind of life. He observed that he could not believe otherwise, because if life is abstracted from the body, that which should remain would be obscure. He could not well but think thus, inasmuch as he had placed life in the life of the body, though he acknowledged a spirit, of which, however, he had no other idea than of that of a larva. Inasmuch as he then lived in such an obscure life, it was said to him that [the spirit] was in fact in the highest light, in the highest intelligence, in wisdom and in felicity, or in the highest delights arising from the affections of good. - 1748, November 6. He confirmed his opinion while in the life of the body from his seeing that brutes also have life almost like men, and because he acknowledged a spirit as a something superadded to man above the brutes, but still a something which was obscure; his idea did not penetrate more interiorly.