Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/100

84 Of the Infinite he called Of the Mechanism of the Intercourse between the Soul and the Body, because Swedenborg saw the belief in God as linked to belief in a soul, and it was clear to him that unless he could show how the soul influenced the body he could not prove that man had a soul.

He decided to investigate. He wrote: "Only from a knowledge of the soul and of the mechanism of the body can we deduce that there is a God and a creator, but the contrary is the case if we postulate the soul as something most unknowable and secret and something far removed from sense; this is the nearest road to atheism . . ." It must not be "regarded as an object of supreme ignorance and as operating by absolutely unknown laws." 10

If he stressed the "mechanism" of the soul, this was because the blessed word connoted being subject to law. Descartes had made soul a kind of Cinderella outside the palace of matter; Swedenborg wanted to see if he couldn't invite her in and make her the queen, but a constitutional monarch, subject to the same "mechanical" laws as matter.

But, through his study of physics, Swedenborg had come to see that "matter" need not be material. A magnetic field, for instance, could not be either kicked or handled, and yet it had extension, it could be measured. Why not the soul?

"My end, therefore," he said, speaking to unbelievers and probably also to a side of himself, "is to demonstrate to the best of my ability the nature and properties of the soul, and then to show from these endowments that it can never die without all nature being annihilated; and, such being my end, I do not see how anyone, unless indeed some singularly obtuse priestling, can disapprove of the undertaking." 11

But in the Of the Infinite, he said, he was not going to make any "positive declaration," for "experience and geometry alone have the right to be affirmative and positive, and when they become so, then and not till then, by the consent of the soul, the rationale is declared. The main end of these our labors will be to demonstrate the immortality of the soul to the very senses." 12

The soul being, according to him, "the last and subtlest part of the body," which he already had located provisionally in "the cortical substance of the cerebrum and partly also in the medullary"