8942. 'For if you move your chisel over it' means if a product of the proprium or self. This is clear from the meaning of 'chisel' as counterfeit truth, thus a product of the self. For a chisel is a piece of iron used to carve and shape figures out of stones, and therefore the human self is meant here since this shapes things which are to compose religion, to make them look like the truth. Instead of the word 'chisel' some places elsewhere have '[a piece of] iron', while others elsewhere have 'axe', as in Deuteronomy 27:5; Joshua 8:30-31; 1 Kings 6:7; Isaiah 44:10-12; Hosea 13:2; Jeremiah 10:3-4; and these tools mean such things as are implements of self-intelligence used for fabrication.

1385. There are spirits who belong to the province of the skin, especially its scaly area, who wish to reason about everything, but who have no perception of what good or truth is. Indeed, the more they go on reasoning the less they perceive. They identify reasoning with wisdom; and they do this so that they may appear wise. They have been told that angelic wisdom involves perceiving whether a thing is good or true without reasoning about it, but they have no conception of the possibility of a perception such as this. They are people who during their lifetime had thrown truth and good into confusion by means of scientific and philosophical arguments, and in so doing had seemed to themselves to be more learned than everybody else; but they had not in the first place grasped from the Word any basic ideas of truth, as a result of which they possess less common sense than anybody else