Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/102

86 theories were taught at Upsala, believed the human organism to be a chemicomechanical affair, which the soul uses as long as it is usable. Hoffmann subdivided "soul." At the top there was an immortal or God-like part. In the middle there was consciousness which received sense impressions and passed them on to the upper house which translated them into ideas. At the bottom, half part of the soul and half of the body, were the "animal spirits," a kind of ethereal "fluid" which was thought to circulate in the nerves. They were what we should call the electrochemical nerve impulse, bringing the sensations to be perceived by consciousness.

These ideas were far from new. From Plotinus and further back they had been trickling through the Dark Ages and the Renaissance in various forms. Always the immaterial part of man was thought to consist of a part capable of contact with the Infinite or Deity, a lower part which took care of concrete reasoning, and a still lower which gave life to the tissues of the body. These theories were known to Swedenborg; yet he held them as mere "opinion" until he could figure out for himself how such soul elements could function in terms of matter and motion.

During the Leipzig stay, in 1734, he came across a book on psychology by Christian Wolff, which he annotated,17 his remarks showing how thoroughly gripped he was by his new program of study. Here it is as if one were inside the very furnace of Swedenborg's mind, his ideas sparkling in every direction. Wolff's prim little propositions are taken into it; they often, he says, agree with his own ideas, but he carries them much further, sees many more implications, and finally drops them altogether to fling himself into outlining a work which is to describe what he already thinks about the causes of perception, imagination, memory, dreams, and so on. With diagrams. And his "tremulation" theory.

In his notes on dreams one seems to detect a strong personal interest. For instance, he contests Wolff's assertion that if we are not able to recognize an idea reproduced by aid of the senses we can't do it by force of the imagination. That is not always true, Swedenborg says. "Thus in sleep I can frequently remember a thing, which when awake I have completely forgotten; as for