399. (1) Love or the will is man’s very life.  This follows from the correspondence of the heart with the will (considered above, n. 378-381).  For as the heart acts in the body, so does the will act in the mind; and as all things of the body depend for existence and motion upon the heart, so do all things of the mind depend for existence and life upon the will.  It is said, upon the will, but this means upon the love, because the will is the receptacle of love, and love is life itself (see above, n. 1-3), and love, which is life itself, is from the Lord alone.  By the heart and its extension into the body through the arteries and veins it can be seen that love or the will is the life of man, for the reason that things that correspond to each other act in a like manner, except that one is natural and the other spiritual.  How the heart acts in the body is evident from anatomy, which shows that wherever the heart acts by means of the vessels put forth from it, everything is alive or subservient to life; but where the heart by means of its vessels does not act, everything is lifeless.  Moreover, the heart is the first and last thing to act in the body.  That it is the first is evident from the fetus, and that it is the last is evident from the dying, and that it may act without the cooperation of the lungs is evident from cases of suffocation and swooning; from which it can be seen that the life of the mind depends solely upon the will, in the same way as the substitute life of the body depends on the heart alone; and that the will lives when thought ceases, in the same way as the heart lives when breathing ceases.  This also is evident from the fetus, from the dying, and from cases of suffocation and swooning.  From which it follows that love or the will is man’s very life.

400. (2) Love or the will strives unceasingly towards the human form and all things of that form.  This is evident from the correspondence of heart and will.  For it is known that all things of the body are formed in the womb, and that they are formed by means of fibers from the brains and blood vessels from the heart, and that out of these two the tissues of all organs and viscera are made; from which it is evident that all things of man have their existence from the life of the will, which is love, from their first principles, out of the brains, through the fibers; and all things of his body out of the heart through the arteries and veins.  From this it is clearly evident that life (which is love and the will therefrom), strives unceasingly towards the human form.  And as the human form is made up of all the things there are in man, it follows that love or the will is in a continual conatus and effort to form all these.  There is such a conatus and effort towards the human form, because God is a Man, and Divine Love and Divine Wisdom is His life, and from His life is everything of life.  Any one can see that unless Life which is very Man acted into that which in itself is not life, the formation of anything such as exists in man would be impossible, in whom are thousands of thousands of things that make a one, and that unanimously aspire to an image of the Life from which they spring, that man may become a receptacle and abode of that Life.  From all this it can be seen that love, and out of the love the will, and out of the will the heart, strive unceasingly towards the human form.