267. (2) A bad man abuses these capacities to confirm evils and falsities,
but a good man uses them to confirm goods and truths. From the intellectual
capacity called rationality, and from the voluntary capacity called
freedom, man derives the ability to confirm whatever he wishes; for
the natural man is able to raise his understanding into higher light
to any extent he desires; but one who is in evils and in falsities
therefrom, raises it no higher than into the upper regions of his natural
mind, and rarely as far as the border of the spiritual mind; for the reason
that he is in the delights of the love of his natural mind, and when he
raises the understanding above that mind, the delight of his love perishes;
and if it is raised still higher, and sees truths which are opposed to the
delights of his life or to the principles of his self-intelligence, he
either falsifies those truths or passes them by and contemptuously leaves
them behind, or retains them in the memory as means to serve his life's
love, or the pride of his self-intelligence. That the natural man is able
to confirm whatever he wishes is plainly evident from the multitude of
heresies in the Christian world, each of which is confirmed by its
adherents. Who does not know that evils and falsities of every kind can
be confirmed? It is possible to confirm, and by the wicked it is
confirmed within themselves, that there is no God, and that nature is
everything and created herself; that religion is only a means for keeping
simple minds in bondage; that human prudence does everything, and Divine
providence nothing except sustaining the universe in the order in which
it was created; also that murders, adulteries, thefts, frauds, and revenge
are allowable, as held by Machiavelli and his followers. These and many
like things the natural man is able to confirm, and even to fill volumes
with the confirmations; and when such falsities are confirmed they appear
in their delusive light, but truths in such obscurity as to be seen only
as phantoms of the night. In a word, take what is most false and present