4000. CONCERNING PROVIDENCE. Certain spirits, holding me in a kind of obscurity, objected that ideas arise from the objects of sight and not the objects of sight from ideas, -thus that the life of the Lord does not flow in directly, but is excited by visible objects occurring in a vast variety of ways. Of this I have spoken before, but it was [now] answered them by thought, and perceived, that this was very much like saying that the innumerable applications of the lungs to the several muscles and their fibers, according to all the intention and will of the thought, together with the muscles and motive fibers, flowed into the ideas of the thought and will, instead of the reverse, when, in fact, not a single compound action can take place but by means of innumerable applications of the lungs prompted by ideas, and bringing into play an equally countless number of muscular fibers, all of which are disposed according to the influx of the will alone, and that too in such boundless diversity of manner that one fiber seems to act altogether differently from another. Since these things are so, and such incomprehensible facts occur even in the lowest plane of nature, how can skeptical reasonings avail concerning the influx of the life of the Lord into ideas, and thence into objects, as though a different law prevails here; besides various other inferences that are liable to be drawn? - 1748, November 19.