267. (ii) A bad man abuses these capacities to confirm evils and falsities, while a good man uses them to confirm goods and truths. From the intellectual capacity called rationality, and from the voluntary capacity called liberty, man derives the power to confirm whatever he wishes. For the natural man is able to raise his understanding into higher light to any extent he desires. But he who is in evils and consequent falsities, raises it no higher than into the upper region of his natural mind, and rarely to the region of the spiritual mind. The reason is that he is in the delights of the love of his natural mind, and if he rises above that mind the delight of his love perishes. If his understanding is raised higher and he sees truths opposed to the delights of his life or to the principles of his self-intelligence, he either falsifies these truths or passes them over and relinquishes them out of contempt, or he retains them in the memory as a means to serve his life's love, or the pride of his self-intelligence. It is clearly manifest from the numerous heresies in the Christian world, each of which is confirmed by its adherents, that the natural man is able to confirm whatever he wishes. Who does not know that evils and falsities of every kind can be confirmed? It is possible to confirm, and indeed it is confirmed by the evil within themselves that there is no God, and that Nature is everything, and created herself; that religion is only a medium by which simple minds may be held in bondage; that human prudence effects all things, and the Divine Providence nothing except to sustain the universe in the order in which it was created; also that murders, adulteries, thefts, frauds, and revenge are allowable, according to Machiavelli and his followers. These and a host of similar things the natural man is able to confirm, and to fill volumes with the confirmations, and when they are confirmed then these falsities appear in their foolish light, and truths in such obscurity as to be seen only as phantoms of the night. In a word, take what is most false and present it as a proposition, and say to a clever person "confirm", and he will confirm to the total extinction of the light of truth. But set aside the confirmations, return and view the proposition itself from your own rationality, and you will see its falsity in its baseness. From these things it can be established that man can abuse these two capacities which he has from the Lord to confirm evils and falsities of every kind. This no beast can do, because a beast does not enjoy these capacities. Therefore, a beast is born into all the order of its life, and into all the knowledge of its natural love, but not so a man.