585. Moreover, their understanding far excels the understanding of the learned or the wise of our earth, and especially of those who are from Europe, who suppose that they are learned because they treat of philosophical things. Yet they yearn after nothing else but terms and dust, which take away all the sense of a thing, as when the mind is intent upon the words of a speaker, not upon the sense; wherefore if terms were absent the mind would perceive clearly. This the spirits of the planet Jupiter understood quite well, and they said that such things were only black little clouds which are cast up, and which they are unwilling to admit while they represent to themselves by vision their own starry heaven. From this it can be made evident what is the nature of the difference. When they wanted to represent that the one only Lord turns depraved affections so that they become good, which is the same as turning evil into good, they represented the intellectual mind as a beautiful form, and its activity as an affection in conformity with that form. They then wanted to show me how the one only Lord bends the depraved affections into good ones, which they did for some time by their own nature, and so dexterously that they were highly praised by the angels. But on the contrary, the learned of our earth could not apprehend it in the least, although they were learned, and supposed themselves wiser than those spirits. Nevertheless they think that they are learned provided that they can dispute as to what form is, what modification, what substance, what the material and the non-material, which the spirits of the other earth laugh at and call insanities. They love the thing, but our spirits love only the most feculent froth. They now say to me these words.