blood, now vivified, to the vena cava just above where the
thoracic duct brings in the chyle, and so back again to the heart.

[15] These and countless other activities are secret operations of the
soul in the body. Man has no sense of them, and unless he is acquainted
with the science of anatomy, knows nothing of them. Yet similar
activities take place in the interiors of the human mind. Nothing can
take place in the body except from the mind, for man's mind is his
spirit, and his spirit is equally man; the sole difference being that
what is done in the body is done naturally, while what is done in the
mind is done spiritually; there is all similarity. Plainly, then, divine
providence operates with every man in a thousand hidden ways, and its
incessant care is to cleanse him, since its purpose is to save him.
Plainly, too, nothing more is incumbent on man than to remove evils in
the outward man; the Lord sees to the rest, when He is implored.

297. (iii) _The evil cannot be fully withdrawn from evil and led in good
by the Lord so long as they believe their own intelligence to be
everything and divine providence nothing._ It would seem that man could
withdraw himself from evil provided he thought that this or that was
contrary to the common good, or to what is useful, or to national or
international law, and this an evil as well as a good man can do if by
birth or through practice he is such that he can think clearly within
himself, analysing and reasoning. But even then he is not capable of
withdrawing himself from evil. The faculty of understanding and of
perceiving, even abstractly, has indeed been given everyone by the Lord,
to the evil as well as to the good, as has been shown above in many
places, and yet man cannot deliver himself from evil by means of this
faculty. For evil comes of the will, and the understanding influences the
will only with light, enlightening and instructing. If the heat of the
will, that is, man's love, is hot with the lust of evil, it is cold
towards the affection of good, therefore does not receive the light but
either repels or extinguishes it, or by some fabricated falsity turns it
into evil. The light is then like winter light, which is as clear as the
light in summer and remains as clear even when it flows into frozen
trees. But this can be seen better in the following order:

1. When the will is in evil, one's own intelligence sees only falsity,
and neither desires to see, nor can