mage
of God; and since God is love itself and wisdom itself, a man is a
recipient of those principles; and a recipient becomes an image of God
in proportion to reception; and a man is a likeness of God from this
circumstance, that he feels in himself that the things which are of God
are in him as his own; but still from that likeness he is only so far an
image of God, as he acknowledges that love and wisdom, or good and
truth, are not his own in him, and consequently are not from him, but
are only in God, and consequently from God."

133. After this, they entered upon the next subject of discussion, WHY
IS NOT A MAN BORN INTO THE KNOWLEDGE OF ANY LOVE, WHEN YET BEASTS AND
BIRDS, FROM THE HIGHEST TO THE LOWEST, ARE BORN INTO THE KNOWLEDGE OF
ALL THEIR LOVES? They first confirmed the truth of the proposition by
various considerations; as in regard to a man, that he is born into no
knowledge, not even into the knowledge of conjugial love; and they
inquired, and were informed by attentive examiners, that an infant from
connate knowledge cannot even move itself to the mother's breast, but
must be moved thereto by the mother or nurse; and that it knows only how
to suck, and this in consequence of habit acquired by continual suction
in the womb; and that afterwards it does not know how to walk, or to
articulate any human expression; no, nor even to express by its tone of
voice the affection of its love, as the beasts do: and further, that it
does not know what is salutary for it in the way of food, as all the
beasts do, but catches at whatever falls in its way, whether it be clean
or unclean, and puts it into its mouth. The examiners further declared,
that a man without instruction is an utter stranger to every thing
relating to the sexes and their connection; and that neither virgins nor
young men have any knowledge thereof without instruction from others,
notwithstanding their being educated in various sciences: in a word, a
man is born corporeal as a worm; and he remains such, unless he learns
to know, to understand, and to be wise, from others. After this, they
gave abundant proofs that beasts, from the highest to the lowest, as the
animals of the earth, the fowls of the air, reptiles, fishes, the small
creatures called insects, are born into all the knowledges of the loves
of their life, as into the knowledge of all things relating to
nourishment, to habitation, to the love of the sex and prolification,
and to the rearing