XXXIII. Swedenhorg. " God alone acts, and man

suffers himself to be acted upon, and co-operates in all appearance as from himself, although inwardly from God." True 0. R. page 397.
Spinoza. " God alone acts by the sole necessity of his own nature, and therefore God alone is a free cause." Ethics, part 1, prop. 17, corol. 2.
Yet it should be remarked, that Spinoza con- tends for a freedom in man in so far as he acts from adequate ideas referred to God as theii* cause ; but he considers that in so far as man is acted u]?on by external causes, blindly, uncon- scious of the existence of these causes in God, he is not free, but a slave. But even here there is an opening for freedom in the man who can
308 8WEDENB0RG, [Cu. XII.
recognize God in all these external causes, and wlien hf/ love to God he yields joyfully to them, converting them as it were into his own acts, by regarding them as God's acts, with which his love of God places him in harmony, in relation or in conjunction. See No. YI.
As a further illustration of the above, I take the following passage from
Swedenhorg. " Concerning the elevation of the in- terior of a man's mind, this also is to be observed ; there is from God in every created thing a re-action : Life alone has action, and re-action is excited by the action of life : this re-action appears as if it belonged to the created thing, because it exists when the being is acted upon ; thus in man it appears as if it were his own, because he does not perceive any otherwise than that life is his own, when nevertheless man is only a recipient of life. From this cause it is that man, from his own hereditary evil, re-acts against God ; but [and here is the doctrine assimilated to that of Spinoza] so far as he believes that all his life is from God, and every good of life from the action of God, and every evil of life from the re-action of man, re-action becomes correspondent with action, and man acts with God, as from himself. The equilibrium of all things is from action and joint re-action, and every thing must be in equilibrium." Angelic Wisdom cone. Div. Love, p. 23.