329. After the headmaster and the rest left me, some boys who were also present at the school exercise followed me home, and they stood by me there for a while as I was writing. Suddenly then they saw a cockroach scurrying across my paper, and they asked in astonishment what that little creature was to be so swift.
So I said, "It is called a cockroach, and I will tell you some wonderful things about it. In that living thing, small as it is, there are as many parts and organs as in a camel. It has, for example, a brain, a heart, air passages, sensory organs, motor organs and organs of generation, a stomach, intestines, and many other things; and each one is composed of fibers, ligaments, blood vessels, muscles, tendons, membranes, and each of these of still finer elements, which are too tiny for any eye to see."
[2] The boys then began to say that the little creature still looked to them as though it consisted only of a single substance.
But I said, "Nevertheless it has countless parts within. I tell you this to teach you that it is the same in every phenomenon that appears to your eyes as unitary, single, and irreducible, including your actions, and likewise your affections and thoughts. I can assure you that every particle of your thought and every drop of your affection is divisible to infinity, and according as your ideas are divisible, so are you wise.
"Be advised that everything divided becomes more and more multiple, and not more and more simple, because as something is divided again and again it approaches nearer and nearer to the Infinite in which are all things infinitely. This is something new I am telling you, which you have not heard before."
[3] After I said this, the boys went from me to the headmaster and asked him sometime to pose as a question in the school a new subject, not heard before. He asked what it was. They said that everything divided becomes more and more multiple, and not more and more simple, because it approaches nearer and nearer to the Infinite in which are all things infinitely.
The headmaster then promised to pose it; and he said, "I see it, because I have perceived that a single natural idea has within it a countless number of spiritual ideas - indeed, that one spiritual idea has within it a countless number of celestial ideas. That is the reason for the difference between the celestial wisdom possessed by angels of the third heaven, the spiritual wisdom possessed by angels of the second heaven, and the natural wisdom possessed by angels of the last heaven and likewise by men."
