42. It is the same with love and wisdom, the only difference being that the substances and forms that are love and wisdom are not visible to our eyes as are the organs of our external senses. Still, no one can deny that those matters of love and wisdom that we call thoughts, perceptions, and feelings are substances and forms. They are not things that go floating out from nothing, remote from any functional and real substance and form that are their subjects. There are in fact countless substances and forms in the brain that serve as the homes of all the inner sensation that involves our discernment and volition.

What has just been said about our external senses points to the conclusion that all our feelings, perceptions, and thoughts in those substances and forms are not something they breathe out; they themselves are functional and substantial subjects. They do not emit anything, but simply undergo changes in response to the things that touch and affect them. There will be more later [210, 273] on these things that touch and affect them.

46. It can be seen from this how sensually - that is to say, how much from the bodily senses and their opaqueness in spiritual matters - those people think who maintain that nature exists of itself. They think from the eye, and are unable to do so from the intellect. Thought from the eye closes the intellect, whereas thought from the intellect opens the eye.

People of that sort cannot conceive of being and expression in itself, and of its being eternal, uncreated and infinite. Nor can they conceive of life except as some aerial entity fading away into nothingness. They also cannot think in any other way of love and wisdom, and are utterly incapable of seeing that they are the origin of all things of nature.

That love and wisdom are the origin of all things of nature cannot be seen unless nature is regarded in terms of the uses it serves in their series and succession, and not in terms of some of its forms, which are objects only of the eye. For useful endeavors spring only from life, and their series and succession from wisdom and love, while forms are the vessels serving those uses. Consequently if one regards only the forms, it is impossible to see anything of life in nature, still less anything of love and wisdom, and so neither anything of God.