View on Bluesky
It would seem uncontroversial to define elaboration as "the shedding of light on a particular matter." Ruhi Book 1 talks about how the soul is like a lamp, and in Seven valleys it is written:
"And if a place be shut away from the light, as by walls or a roof, it will be entirely bereft of the splendor of the light, nor will the sun shine thereon."
- Bahá'u'lláh, p.19
It is also indicated that the illumination of such truths is to some degree contingent upon or restricted by the nature of the illumined object: [1]
"Consider the visible sun; although it shineth [sic] with one radiance upon all things... yet in each place it becometh [sic] manifest and sheddeth [sic] its bounty according to the potentialities of the place. [It] traineth [sic] each thing according to the quality of that thing, as thou observest."
- Ibid, pp.18-19
The symbolism of mirrors and burnishing, representing a clear and unobstructed reflection of said light, echoes what Langdon Winner writes:
"...the sphere of technics one wishes to talk about has grown rapidly, [while] the linguistic resources of public discourse have changed little at all."
- L. Winner, Autonomous Technology (p.10)
In this way, honing our means of communication allows for a crisper public semiosis, and thus the painstaking labor of defining terms undertaken by mathematicians and philosophers from time immemorial, allows for a more unadulterated refelcting of this divine light, and thus a truer discourse. [2]
Endnotes
[1] I wrote "[sic]" so many times above, because I wanted to poke fun at/draw attention to the habit of using these old-timey sounding words that definitely weren't in existence by the time these things were written in the mid-to-late 19th century. Verily, verily, the Book of Mormon does this a lot as well.
[2] C.f. Popper on "verisimilitude" (source not on hand), or Museum Theory on selective revelation.