[81] Next Sarah gives Hagar to Abraham, not at once after his arrival in the land of the Canaanites, but after he has stayed there for ten years. The meaning of this requires careful consideration. In the first stage of our coming into existence the soul is reared with none but passions to be its comrades, griefs, pains, excitements, desires, pleasures, all of which come to it through the senses, since the reason is not yet able to see good and evil and to form an accurate judgement of the difference between them, but is still slumbering, its eyes closed as if in deep sleep.
[82] But as time goes on, when we leave the stage of boyhood and are adolescent, there springs from the single root the twofold stalk, virtue and vice, and we form an apprehension of both, but necessarily choose one or the other, the better-natured choosing virtue, the opposite kind vice.
[83] Following on this preliminary sketch we must know that Egypt symbolizes sense, and the land of the Canaanites vice, and thus it is natural that when Moses brings the people out of Egypt he should lead them into the country of the Canaanites. The man, as I have said,
[84] at his first coming into being receives for his habitation Egyptian passion, and his roots are fixed in pleasures and pains; but after awhile he emigrates to a new home, vice. The reason has by this time advanced to a higher degree of vision, and while it apprehends both alternatives, good and evil, chooses the worst, because mortality is so large an ingredient in the reason, and evil is native to mortality as its opposite, good, is to the divine.