I was once in the company of angels, listening to their conversation. The subjects they were talking about were intelligence and wisdom. They said that a person cannot but perceive both of these as present in himself, so that anything he thinks with his intellect or intends with his will comes from himself. Yet not a scrap of this is from the person himself, apart from the ability to receive from God intellectual and voluntary matters. Since everyone is by birth inclined to love himself, it has been provided ever since creation, to prevent him perishing from self-love and from pride in his own intelligence, that the man's love should be copied into his wife. She by birth has it implanted in her to love her husband's intelligence and wisdom, and so to love him. A wife therefore continually draws her husband's pride in his own intelligence to herself, and douses it in him, bringing it to life in herself and so turning it into conjugial love, and filling it brim-full with delights. This has been provided by the Lord, to prevent pride in his own intelligence making him so foolish that he believes his intelligence and wisdom come from himself, and not from the Lord, so that he wants to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and so believe himself like God, and even to be God; as the serpent, which was the love of one's own intelligence, persuasively said. Man was therefore after eating of it cast out of the garden, and a cherub was set to guard the way to the tree of life. The garden is spiritually intelligence; eating of the tree of life is spiritually to have intelligence and wisdom from the Lord; and eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is spiritually to have intelligence and wisdom from oneself.