Black and white tablets

Meaning

The white and black tablets are an example about recognition, not colour stages of the chymical process. A questioner places them before an observer and asks which is which. The objects can stir the senses, but, being silent and dead, cannot supply the inward knowledge needed to distinguish their colours. The comparison explains why the outward letter and heard Word bear witness to, stimulate and assist the God-given inward light without originating it. The English plural “tablets” helps make the imagined pair clear. Readers should not transfer this contrast mechanically to blackening and whitening elsewhere: identical colour words serve a different argument here.