3578. But yet the externals are not wholly rejected and consigned to death, so as to become nothing, but they are disposed by the Lord that they may be subservient to interior things, and thus to Himself, which subserviences are of such vast variety, in order that at indefinite variety of genera and species may be given. Such subserviences are represented in the other life by colors, as of the rainbow, by odors, as of flowers, by spheres, from which their qualities are immediately perceived, by resembling images of visual things, as well as by other kinds of perceptions, which truths flow in only through the interiors, from the remains [obsequiis] of external things. - 1748, October 15. I was instructed concerning the things here treated of as much by ideas of interior thought, as by speech communicated to me.