Question Four of Chapter Eight of the Second Decade
How a spirit can address a human being
It is asked in how many ways some spirit can address a human being.
To this it is answered as follows. A spirit can speak intelligibly to a human being, or to an angel, in four ways.
First, by an exterior, idiomatic voice formed either by itself in a medium, or by the tongue of an assumed body, or by the tongue of some animal body into which it has so glided that, through the use of that body’s organs, it can speak through the body itself. And in this way the devil spoke to the Lady Eve, as will be said below.
Second, by way of an actualization of the imagination in this or that order, and this only according to a phantasmal utterance of spoken words or writings in a given language.
Third, by way of an actualization of the imagination according to phantasms of sensible things.
In these two ways the imagination can be actualized through the stirring and alteration of phantasms and through their varied presentation and application to the interior sense, because corporeal things obey created spirits, both good and evil, with respect to local motion.
From these two ways just mentioned, a spirit can speak to a human being even by interior speech apart from exterior speech.
Fourth, a spirit can speak to a human being through an immediate influx of species or acts into the intellective or sensitive power. And this fourth way is possible only for the uncreated Spirit in the common and natural course.
These things are from Henry upon Genesis.