8628. The spirits from our planet who boasted in this way were ones who supposed that wisdom consisted in those things that belong merely to the memory, such as languages, matters of history known to the literary world, mere facts known from experiments, technical terms, especially philosophical ones, and other things like these. They did not use them as the means to attaining wisdom, since they supposed that those things themselves constituted wisdom. Because these spirits have not used organized knowledge as the means to develop true rationality in themselves, they have little perception in the next life. Their whole outlook is confined to and conditioned by the use of terms, which in that life are like dust particles and like dense clouds in front of the eye of understanding; and those who have been made conceited by their learning in such knowledge have even less perception, while those who have used it to discredit matters of faith have completely destroyed their power of understanding. Like owls they see in thick darkness, viewing falsity as truth and evil as good.
[2] As a result of mixing with such as these, the spirits belonging to Jupiter came to the conclusion that organized knowledge led to dimness and blindness. But I told them that on our planet such knowledge serves as the means by which the eye of the understanding can be opened, the eye which sees in the light of heaven and informs the mind about the things that belong to spiritual life. But because self-love and love of the world reign, and consequently such things as belong to life on a merely natural level and on the level of the senses, organized knowledge serves to make people insane, that is to say, they use it to endorse their preference for nature as against the Divine, and the world as against heaven.
[3] I went on to tell them that organized knowledge is in itself spiritual wealth, and that those who possess it are like people in possession of worldly wealth, which in a similar way can serve them as the means by which to perform useful services to themselves, their neighbour, and their country, or else as the means by which to do ill to them. Such knowledge is also like clothes, which can have their use and serve to adorn, or else can serve human pride such as exists with those who wish to be admired solely for what they wear. The spirits belonging to Jupiter understood all this clearly. But they were astonished that people when they were still on earth should have had a greater liking for such things as lead to wisdom than for wisdom itself, and that those people do not see that to immerse their minds in those things and not rise above them is to incur dimness and blindness.
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