329. After the headmaster and the others had left me, some boys who had also been in the high-school, accompanied me home, and for a while stood by as I was writing. Then they suddenly caught sight of a cockroach running across my paper. They were surprised and asked, 'What is this little creature that runs so fast?' I told them it was called a cockroach. 'I will tell you extraordinary facts about it,' I said. 'Small creature as it is, it contains as many limbs and organs as a camel. It has a brain, heart, bronchi, organs for sense, movement and reproduction, a stomach, intestines and many more. Each of these is a structure composed of fibres, sinews, blood-vessels, muscles, tendons and membranes; and each of these is made from still simpler structures, which are far beyond the power of any eye to resolve.'
[2] They then said that this tiny creature still looked to them like a simple substance. 'Yet,' I said, 'it contains countless parts. I tell you this so that you can know that it is the same with every object which looks to you like a unity, simple and reduced to its smallest components, and with your actions as much as your affections and thoughts. I can assure you that every single spark of thought, and every single drop of affection is capable of infinite subdivision; and the more your ideas are divided, the wiser you are. You must grasp that everything which is divided becomes more and more complex, not more and more simple, because by being more and more divided it approaches closer to the infinite, in which all things are infinitely. I can report this to you as a new and hitherto unheard-of fact.'
[3] When I said this, the boys left me and returning to the headmaster asked him to set some time as a problem in the school a new and unheard-of subject. 'What one?' he said. 'Everything,' they said, 'by being more and more divided becomes more and more complex, and not more and more simple, because it approaches closer to the infinite in which all things are infinitely.'
He promised he would set this problem, saying, 'I can see this, because I have grasped that one natural idea contains countless spiritual ideas; indeed, one spiritual idea contains countless celestial ideas. This is the difference between the celestial wisdom of the angels of the third heaven, and the spiritual wisdom of the angels of the second heaven; as it is between this and the natural wisdom of the angels of the lowest heaven, and also of human beings.'
This page is part of 
© 2000-2001 The Academy of the New Church