By the same token, when your sight focuses on something beautiful,
your appreciation of it is heightened if there is something misshapen
beside it; this is why painters often place an unpleasant face next to a
beautiful one. The same thing happens with goodness and truth. When
evil and falsity struggle against good and truth, we perceive the evil and
the falsity distinctly by contrast.
Everyone who focuses on goodness can sense evil, and everyone who
focuses on truth can see falsity. The reason is that goodness is actually in
the warmth of heaven and truth is in its light, while evil is in the coldness
of hell and falsity is in its darkness. An illustration of this is that the
angels of heaven are capable of seeing what goes on in hell and what type
of monsters are there; but the spirits of hell are completely unable to see
what goes on in heaven. They cannot see the angels any more than a
blind person could, or more than an eye would see something by looking
into empty air or ether.
Those who have the light of wisdom in their intellects are like people
standing on a mountain in the middle of the day clearly seeing everything
below. Those who have an even higher light are like people with telescopes
who can see things off in the distance or far below as if they were close at
hand. Those, however, who have defended falsities and are therefore in
the faint, deceptive light of hell are like people on the same mountain at
night with oil lamps in their hands who can see only what is nearby and
even then can barely make out vague shapes or tell colors apart.
Some people have some light of truth but still have evil in their
lives. As they go on loving and enjoying their particular evil, at first they
view things that are true more or less the way a bat views towels on a
clothesline in a garden—it flies to them as a safe haven. Later on these
people become like night birds, and then at length like horned owls.
Then they become like a chimneysweep stuck in a dark chimney; when
he raises his eyes, he sees the sky through the smoke; when he looks
down he sees the hearth from which the smoke ascends.62 Keep in mind, however, that it is one thing to sense things that are
opposite and another to sense things that are related. Opposites are things
that stand outside and against the things that are inside. Something
opposite first arises where one thing completely stops being anything and
something else then arises that tries to act against the first thing, like one
gear that opposes another gear, or a current that goes against another cur-
rent. Related things, however, have to do with the arrangement of many