THERE ARE AS MANY AFFECTIONS AS THERE ARE USES

There are many things evidencing that Divine Love is Life Itself and that the love derived therefrom with man is his life; but one of these evidences is specially clear, namely, the fact that a man's spirit is nothing else than affection, and that consequently after death he becomes an affection, an angel of heaven if he is an affection for a good use, a spirit of hell if an affection for an evil use. This is why the entire heaven is distinguished into societies according to the genera and species of affections; and hell likewise, in an opposite order. Consequently, whether you speak of affections, or of societies in the spiritual world, it is the same.

[22.] By "affections" are meant continuations and derivations from love. Love may be [compared] to a fountain, and affections to streams flowing from it; it may also be compared to the heart, and affections to the blood-vessels derived from it and continuous with it. It is, moreover, recognized that blood-vessels carrying the blood from their heart re-enact the heart at every point, so that they are as it were extensions of it. Hence the circulations of the blood from the heart along the arteries, and from the arteries into the veins, and back again into the heart. Affections also are similar, for affections are derived from love and are continuous with it, they bring uses forth in forms, and in these they advance from the first things of the uses to their ultimates, from which they return again to the love from which they come; all which shows that affection and use are respectively love in its essence and love in its form. [2] It follows from this that the objects of affections, or their ends, are uses, and that consequently the uses are their "subjects,"* and the forms themselves in which uses have existence, are effects that are effigies of the affections, in which they advance from their first end to their last end, and from this back to the first again, and by means of which they carry out their labours, functions and activities.

Who cannot see from the above that an affection alone is not anything, it becomes something by being in a use: that the affection for a use is nothing but an idea, if it is not in a form: that neither is the affection for a use when it is in a form, more than a potentiality: and that the affection first becomes something when it is in act? This is the use itself that is meant, which in its essence is affection. Now because affections are the essences of uses, and uses are their "subjects," it follows that there are as many affections as there are uses. * The Latin word "Subjectum" is used by Swedenborg in a philosophic sense, as that in and by which another thing has actuality. Thus, the eye is the "Subject" in which and by means of which the mind's seeing of external things has effective existence.