At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)
“Though thou shouldest bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him.”
“Though you grind a fool in a mortar with a pestle along with crushed grain, yet his foolishness will not depart from him.”
Proverbs 27:22
To illustrate the principle here, we may take a page from an American proverb which says, “Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.” There are certain kinds of stupidity, folly, ugliness, and so on that go all the way down.
First, what the proverb says, strictly speaking, is this. If you took a particular kind of stupid person and put him in a mortar, along with some grain, and ground him up with a pestle, what you would have at the end of the process would be stupid flour, for use in the making of stupid bread. In other words, there is a certain kind of folly that is manifest all the way down to the cellular level.
Certain qualities are altered as you go down, and other qualities do not change at all. For example, if a large object is heavy, when you break it up into little pieces, each piece can be light. But if a large object is made of metal, and you break it up into little pieces, each little piece is still metal. What this proverb is saying is that a certain kind of moral stupidity is like that object made of metal. It doesn’t matter how far you break it down.
I used the phrase moral stupidity to make it clear that we are not talking about intelligence of the kind that is measured by IQ tests. There are people who are very bright in that way who fit the description of the fool outlined here. And there are also very simple people who are wise within their sphere.
