58 HEAVEN and HELL §108
choose. Bees know how to collect honey from fl owers, build cells from
wax in which they store their honey, and so provide food for themselves
and their families for the coming winter. Their queen lays eggs, while the
others cover them over and lead her around so that a new generation
may be born. They live under a kind of government that all their mem-
bers know instinctively, protecting their useful members and expelling
the useless ones and clipping off their wings. There are even more mar-
vels that are given them from heaven for their use. In fact, their wax
serves the human race throughout the world for candles, and their honey
for fl avoring foods.
[ 2 ] Then what about caterpillars, the lowest creatures in the animal
kingdom! They know how to nourish themselves with the sap of their
[preferred] leaves and in due time how to make a covering around them-
selves and virtually put themselves in a womb and so to hatch offspring
of their own species. Some fi rst turn into nymphs and chrysalides and
make threads, and after exhausting labor grace themselves with new bod-
ies and adorn themselves with wings. Then they fl y in the air as though it
were their heaven, celebrate their “weddings,” lay their eggs, and so pro-
vide themselves with a posterity.
[ 3 ] Over and above these particular examples, all the birds of the air
know the foods that are good for them—not only what they are, but
where they are. They know how to construct nests for themselves, each
species differently from all others, how to lay their eggs there, incubate
them, hatch and feed their chicks, and expel them from the nest when
they can be on their own. They also know the particular enemies they
must avoid and the allies they can associate with, all from earliest infancy.
I will say nothing about the wonders in the eggs themselves, where every-
thing necessary for the formation and nourishment of the embryonic
chicks lies properly available, or countless other wonders.
[ 4 ] Will anyone who thinks with any rational wisdom say that such
things arise from any source but a spiritual world, a world that the natu-
ral world serves by clothing what comes from it with a body, or present-
ing in effect that which is spiritual in origin?
The reason why earthbound animals and the birds of the air are born
into all this knowledge while we, who are actually superior, are not, is
that animals are in the proper pattern of their life and cannot destroy
what is within them from the spiritual world because they are not ratio-
nal. It is different for us, who think from the spiritual world. Because we
have corrupted ourselves by living contrary to the design that reason
itself has recommended to us, we cannot escape being born into total