are what give the initiative to such things.  That when they have come forth, they are afterwards propagated either by eggs or offshoots, does not disprove their immediate generation; since every living creature, along with its minute viscera, receives organs of generation and means of propagation (see below, n. 347).  In agreement with these phenomena is the fact heretofore unknown that there are like things also in the hells.

343.  That the hells mentioned above have not only communication but conjunction with such things in the earths may be concluded from this, that the hells are not distant from men, but are about them, yea, are within those who are evil; thus they are contiguous to the earth; for man, in regard to his affections and lusts, and consequent thoughts, and in regard to his actions springing from these, which are good or evil uses, is in the midst either of angels of heaven or of spirits of hell; and as such things as are on the earth are also in the heavens and hells, it follows that influx therefrom directly produces such things when the conditions are favorable.  All things, in fact, that appear in the spiritual world, whether in heaven or in hell, are correspondences of affections or lusts, for they take form there in accordance with these; consequently when affections or lusts, which in themselves are spiritual, meet with homogeneous or corresponding things in the earths, there are present both the spiritual that furnishes a soul, and the material that furnishes a body.  Moreover, within everything spiritual there is a conatus to clothe itself with a body.  The hells are about men, and therefore contiguous to the earth, because the spiritual world is not in space, but is where there is a corresponding affection.

344.  I heard two presidents of the English Royal Society, Sir Hans Sloane and Martin Folkes, conversing together in the spiritual world about the existence of seeds and eggs, and about productions from them in the earths.  The former ascribed them to nature, and contended that nature was endowed from creation with a power and force to produce such effects by means of the sun’s heat.  The other maintained that this force is in nature unceasingly from God the Creator.  To settle the discussion, a beautiful bird appeared to Sir Hans Sloane, and he was asked to examine it to see whether it differed in the smallest particle from a similar bird on earth.  He held it in his hand, examined it, and declared that there was no difference.  He knew indeed that it was nothing but an affection of some angel represented outside of the angel as a bird, and that it would vanish or cease with its affection.  And this came to pass.  By this experience Sir Hans Sloane was convinced that nature contributes nothing whatever to the production of plants and animals, that they are produced solely by what flows into the natural world out of the spiritual world.  If that bird, he said, were to be infilled, in its minutest parts, with corresponding matters from the earth, and thus fixed, it would be a lasting bird, like the birds on the earth; and that it is the same with such things as are from hell.  To this he added that had he known what he now knew of the spiritual world, he would have ascribed to nature no more than this, that it serves the spiritual, which is from God, in fixing the things which flow in unceasingly into nature.