32、为叫我确切知道这就是他们的秉性，我被允许将牧场、耕地、花园、树林和河流的图片指给他们看。展示这类事物的图片通过运用想象力呈现给别人来实现；在来世，这些东西看上去就像真实事物。可他们却立刻使之变形，模糊了牧场和耕地，通过代表用蛇来填满它们。他们把河流染成黑色，以致河水不再清澈透明。我问他们为何这样做，他们说，他们不愿思想这类事物，只愿思想真实事物，也就是抽象物的知识，尤其诸如存在于天上的那类事物的知识。
32. To make me absolutely sure about their particular character, I was allowed to represent to them meadows, newly ploughed and planted fields, as well as gardens, forests, and rivers (“representing” things like this means displaying images to others; in the other life images seem alive), but they immediately changed the images. They darkened the meadows and farmlands and by representations of their own filled them with snakes; they darkened the rivers so that the water was no longer clear. When I asked why they were doing this, they said that they did not want to think about that sort of thing but about what is conceptual, which is separate from what is earthly, and especially concepts about the kinds of things that happen in the heavens.
32. To prove to me that this was their character, I was allowed to show them pictures of meadows, ploughed fields, gardens, woods and rivers. (Showing pictures of such things is done by presenting them to others by use of the imagination; in the next life these look exactly like the real things.) But they immediately changed these, making the meadows and fields dark and filling them with snakes by picturing them. They turned the rivers black, so that the water was not transparent. When I asked them why they did this, they replied that they were unwilling to think about such things, but only real things, that is, the knowledge of abstract subjects, particularly those which arise in the heavens.
32. That I might know for certain, that such is their genius, it was allowed to represent to them meadows, fallow lands, gardens, woods, and rivers; to represent such things is imaginatively to exhibit them before another, in which case, in another world, they appear to the life; but they instantly transmuted them, obscuring the meadows and fallow fields, and by representations filling them with snakes. The rivers they made black, so that the water no longer appeared limpid. When I asked them why they did so, they said that they did not wish to think of such things, but of things real, which are the knowledges of things abstracted from what is terrestrial, especially of such things as exist in the heavens.
32. Ut pro certo scirem, quod talis eorum genuis esset, licuit repraesentare illis prata, novalia, hortos, sylvas, flumina, (repraesentare talia, est imaginative sistere illa coram alio, quae in altera vita apparent ad vivum) sed illico transmutabant illa, prata et novalia obscurabant, et per repraesentationes implebant anguibus; flumina denigrabant ut aqua non limpida appareret: cum quaererem, cur ita facerent, dicebant, quod non velint cogitare de talibus, sed de realibus, quae sunt cognitiones rerum a terrestribus abstractarum, imprimis talium quae existunt in coelis.