4628. CONCERNING THE SOUL. ((It may be evident how much the perceptions of the learned differ from the perceptions of the unlearned, concerning the life after death. The learned, that is, they who are instructed in the sciences, have, from hypotheses concerning the soul, and from their own thought, thence, concerning it, made the soul either a something ethereal, or a something flamy, or a something fiery, or a something cogitative, and thus [they have made it] to be able to reside in some part of the body, or in a little gland, or in the corpus striatum, or in the ventricles, or in the heart. Hence they have taken up an idea concerning the soul, from which idea they can never acquire for themselves a faith that it is going to live after death, but a notion that it will be dissipated; and this they confirm with themselves, by their science. The unlearned who are in good, however, care for nothing of this sort, but say they are going to live after death; for they exercise no thought touching the soul. Into this thought [that they are going to live after death], not entangled and defiled by such ideas, is secretly insinuated [the truth] that they are going to live there with a body like the angels; for into such perception, there is such an influx. But into the perception of the learned there is the influx, that the soul, because of such a nature, can by no means live after death; and, if it should live, that it would be again in the material body. That the learned are of such a nature, is because they learn the sciences for the sake of a reputation for learning, in order that they may be promoted to honors and so to gain, but not that they may grow wise by means of the sciences: for the sciences are means of becoming wise; but, to those who thus learn them they are the means of becoming insane. And when they [i. e., such learned men] are exalted to honors, they live sensually, wholly like others; hence it is, that very many of the learned, if you except a few, attribute all things to nature, and believe that they are going to die like the beasts, and are going to have no life after the death of the body: for sensual men, imbued with sciences, can confirm themselves in such things; for they apply fallacies [to their confirmation].))