ught from mere knowledges and
confirmed themselves thereby in falsities, did not cultivate their
rational faculty, but cultivated only an ability to reason, which in
the world is believed to be rationality. But this ability is wholly
different from rationality; it is an ability to prove any thing it
pleases, and from preconceived principles and from fallacies to see
falsities and not truths. Such persons can never be brought to
acknowledge truths, since truths cannot be seen from falsities; but
falsities may be seen from truths. [6] The rational faculty of man is
like a garden or shrubbery, or like fresh ground; the memory is the
soil, truths known and knowledges are the seeds, the light and heat
of heaven cause them to grow; without light and heat there is no
germination; so is it with the mind when the light of heaven, which
is Divine truth, and the heat of heaven, which is Divine love, are
not admitted; rationality is solely from these. It is a great grief
to the angels that learned men for the most part ascribe all things
to nature, and have thereby so closed up the interiors of their minds
as to be unable to see any thing of truth from the light of truth,
which is the light of heaven. In consequence of this such in the
other life are deprived of their ability to reason that they may not
disseminate falsities among the simple good and lead them astray; and
are sent away into desert places.

465. A certain spirit was indignant because he was unable to remember
many things that he knew in the life of the body, grieving over the
lost pleasure which he had so much enjoyed, but he was told that he
had lost nothing at all, that he still knew each and everything that
he had known, although in the world where he now was no one was
permitted to call forth such things from the memory, and that he
ought to be satisfied that he could now think and speak much better
and more perfectly than before, and that his rational was not now
immersed as before in gross, obscure, material and corporeal things,
which are of no use in the kingdom into which he had now come; also
that he now possessed everything conducive to the uses of eternal
life, and that this is the only way of becoming blessed and happy;
and therefore it is the part of ignorance to believe that in this
kingdom intelligence perishes with the removal or quiescence of the
material things in the memory; for the real fact is that so far as
the mind can be withdrawn from th