Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/101

VIII ] was therefore subject to "mechanical" laws, but he did foresee difficulties in explaining "imagination, perception, reason, memory and so on . . .," yet "why may not mechanical laws exist in a superlative fashion equal to these offices?" 13

It was not a new interest entirely, this interest of Swedenborg's in the mind-body relationship. Even before he left for Germany in 1733 he had written a little piece, The Motion of the Elements, in which he brooded on the means used by the soul to affect the body. And as early as in his twenty-ninth year he had written a study On Tremulations in which he showed a good acquaintance with anatomy. In Upsala, since Olaf Rudbeck's day, a little stealthy dissection had been done, which he probably had had a chance to see something of. At any rate, On Tremulations dealt with the means of sensation. He tried to prove that they were tremulations or vibrations carried through the liquids and solids of the body. Hearing, he said, might be possible even without the mechanism of the ear, if the tremulation were caught "by means of the sympathetic vibration of the teeth or the bones of the head." 14 (A modern hearing aid is based on this principle.)

Similarly he applied "mechanics" to telepathy (as we should now call it), saying: "It also frequently happens that a person falls into the thought of another person, that he perceives what another is doing or thinking, that is, his membrane [the word stood for nerves also] trembles from the tremulations of the other person's cerebral membranes, just as one string is affected by another if they are tuned in the same key." 15

It will be seen that, though he did not deny the reality of thought transference, he had a purely mechanical explanation ready. It came close to a "materialistic" explanation, which is perhaps why the Upsala College of Medicine lost the finished manuscript.

Yet it was not his intention to deny "soul" any more than he ever denied "God." But at no time did he imagine "soul" as a simple night-shirted replica of the earthly self, to be raised on Judgment Day. Few scholars did, even in his time.

It is significant that when Swedenborg came to Halle in March, 1734, he noted in his diary that Professor Hoffmann was still alive. Hoffmann, a great doctor, as well as his colleague Stahl,16 whose