496. The reason why what is freely accepted lasts is that a person's will takes it to itself and makes it its own; and because it enters into his love, and this love acknowledges it as its own and uses it to develop its form. This can be illustrated by comparisons, but because these are drawn from events in nature, heat takes the place of love. It is well known that the effect of heat, depending on its degree, is to open passages in all plants; and that as they are opened up, so the plant returns inwardly to the form dictated by its nature, spontaneously taking in its food, retaining what suits it, and so growing. It is much the same with an animal; everything its desire for food, its appetite, leads it to choose and eat is added to its body and so lasts. The reason why what is suitable is constantly added to the body is that all the body's constituent parts are continually being renewed. This is a known fact, though few are aware of it.
[2] With animals too heat opens up every part of their bodies and gives free play to their natural love. As a result in spring and summertime they develop or return to their instinctive desire to produce and bring up offspring. They do so in the greatest freedom, because it is the effect of the dominant love implanted in them from creation, in order to maintain the universe in the state in which it was created.
[3] The reason why the freedom of loving can be illustrated by the freedom induced by heat is that love produces heat; this is obvious from its effects, as when a person is fired, grows heated and bursts into flame as his love develops into enthusiasm or into a blaze of anger. This and no other is the source of people's blood heat or vital heat and that of animals in general. This correspondence is the reason why parts of the body are made suitable through heat to receive freely what love seeks.
[4] All the inward parts of the human body are in this sort of equilibrium and so freedom. In such freedom the heart pumps its blood equally up and down, the mesentery its chyle, the liver produces blood, the kidneys secrete, the glands filter, and so on. If anything should happen to the equilibrium, the organ would become sick and suffer from paralysis or ataxia. In this case equilibrium and freedom are one. There is no substance throughout the created universe that does not tend towards equilibrium to maintain its freedom.
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