to posterity, and goes on increasing from the love they have for it
as existing with their parents. Of the sciences, such as exist on our
Earth, they know nothing whatever, nor have they any desire to know.
They call them shades, and compare them to clouds which come between
[the earth and] the sun. They were led into this idea concerning
the sciences by the conduct of some who had come from our Earth,
who boasted in their presence that they were wise by reason of the
sciences. The spirits from our Earth, who thus boasted, were such as
placed wisdom in such things as are matters of the memory only, as in
languages, especially the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, in the noteworthy
publications of the learned world, in criticism, in bare experimental
facts, and in terms, especially philosophical ones, and other similar
things, not using them as means for becoming wise, but making wisdom
to consist in those very things. Such persons, in consequence of not
having cultivated their rational faculty by the sciences as means, in
the other life have little perception, for they see only in terms and
from terms, and, for those who see in this way, those things are as
little formless masses, and as clouds before the intellectual sight
(see above, no. 38); and those who have been conceited of their
learning from this source perceive still less. But those who have used
the sciences as means of invalidating and annihilating the things
that belong to the church and to faith, have entirely destroyed their
Intellectual, and see in the dark like owls, seeing falsity for truth
and evil for good. The spirits of Jupiter, from intercourse with such
persons, concluded that the sciences occasion shade and blindness; it
was told them, however, that on this Earth the sciences are means of
opening the intellectual sight, which is in the light of heaven; but
because of the dominion of such things as belong to merely natural
and sensual life, the sciences, to those [who are such], are means of
becoming insane, that is to say, of confirming themselves in favour of