sities from the pride of
self-intelligence, hearing others speak on some exalted matter, or
reading something of the kind, if he is in any affection of knowing,
understands these things and also retains them, and may afterwards
confirm them. A bad man as well as a good man may do this. Even a bad
man, though in heart he denies the Divine things pertaining to the
church, can still understand them, and also speak of and preach them,
and in writing learnedly prove them; but when left to his own thought,
from his own infernal love he thinks against them and denies them. From
which it is obvious that the understanding can be in spiritual light even
when the will is not in spiritual heat; and from this it also follows
that the understanding does not lead the will, or that wisdom does not
beget love, but only teaches and shows the way, - teaching how a man
ought to live, and showing the way in which he ought to go. It further
follows that the will leads the understanding, and causes it to act as
one with itself; also that whatever in the understanding agrees with the
love which is in the will, the love calls wisdom. In what follows it will
be seen that the will does nothing by itself apart from the understanding,
but does all that it does in conjunction with the understanding; moreover,
that it is the will that by influx takes the understanding into
partnership with itself, and not the reverse.

245. The nature of the influx of light into the three degrees of life in
man which belong to his mind, shall now be shown. The forms which are
receptacles of heat and light, that is, of love and wisdom in man, and
which (as was said) are in threefold order or of three degrees, are
transparent from birth, transmitting spiritual light as crystal glass
transmits natural light; consequently in respect to wisdom man can be
raised even into the third degree. Nevertheless these forms are not
opened except when spiritual heat conjoins itself to spiritual light,
that is, love to wisdom; by such conjunction these transparent forms are
opened according to degrees. It is the same with light and heat from the
sun of the world in their action on plants on the earth. The light of
winter, which is as bright as that of summer, opens nothing in seed or
in tree, but when vernal heat conjoins itself to that light then the heat
opens them. There is this similarity because spiritual light corresponds
to natural light, and spiritual heat to natural heat.

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