270 HEAVEN and HELL §464
those languages. Some of them seemed as simple as people who did not
know anything about those languages; some of them seemed dense,
though there still remained a pride, as though they were wiser than other
people.
[ 4 ] I have talked with some people who had believed in the world
that wisdom depends on how much we have in our memory and who
had therefore fi lled their memories to bursting. They talked almost
exclusively from these items, which meant that they were not talking for
themselves but for others; and they had not developed any rational func-
tion by means of these matters of memory. Some of them were dense,
some silly, with no grasp of truth whatever, no sense of whether anything
was true or not. They seized on every false notion sold as true by people
who called themselves scholars. They were actually incapable of seeing
anything as it actually was, whether it was true or not, so they could not
see anything rationally when they listened to others.
[ 5 ] I have talked with some people who had written a great deal in the
world, some of them in all kinds of academic fi elds, people who had there-
fore gained an international reputation for learning. Some of them could
quibble about whether truths were true or not. Some of them understood
what was true when they turned toward people who were in the light of
truth; but since they still did not want to understand what was true, they
denied it when they focused on their own false opinions and were there-
fore really being themselves. Some of them did not know any more than
the illiterate masses. So they varied depending on the way they had devel-
oped their rational ability through the treatises they had written or cop-
ied. Still, if people had opposed the truths of the church, had based their
thinking on the arts and sciences, and had used them to convince them-
selves of false principles, they had not developed their rational ability but
only their skill in argumentation—an ability that is confused with ratio-
nality in the world, but is in fact a different ability from rationality. It is
an ability to prove anything one pleases, to see false things rather than true
ones on the basis of preconceptions and illusions. There is no way people
like this can be brought to recognize truths because it is impossible to see
truths from false principles, though it is possible from true principles to
see what is false.
[ 6 ] Our rational faculty is like a garden or fl ower bed, like newly tilled
land. Our memory is the soil, information and experiential learning are
the seeds, while heaven’s light and warmth make them productive. There
is no germination without these latter. So there is no germination in us