Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/103

VIII ] Greek and Hebrew words, which I would never have known although I had read them."

Without a doubt several things about his own mind were puzzling him. He agrees with Wolff that "every dream is caused by a sensation," and yet "one may frequently notice that they tend to some definite end." He thinks that perhaps the soul "supplies many additional things and marvelously joins them together."

He has come to the hypothesis that the "soul," the highest rational faculty in man, is of the same "substance" as the second or "magnetic element" of the universe. An idea, he says, is a vibration in this most subtle "membrane" of the soul, and in the case of dreams, "something is wont to come from the soul which directs ideas to a definite end, as though they were directed by one of whose origin we are ignorant—a circumstance which often seems to us a matter of wonder."

He adds that unless the vibration-motion in the soul is strong enough, it cannot reach the senses, but if it is "considerable," then "a phantasy arises which spreads to the senses, with the result that "in wakeful moments we seem to see and hear this identical thing, exactly as in dreams." Not a bad description of a hallucination. He was aware of such things. "A man," he says, "has heard in his brain the singing of melodies, which otherwise he would have been entirely unaware of knowing."

In these notes he begins to sketch many of his later ideas. He is interested in Wolff's description of the symbolism of hieroglyphics.

He reiterates his belief in thought transference and in the communion of souls, "because there is an undulation between them." He begins to try to apply his theories of immaterial energy "substance" to the make-up of "angels and spirits," but for the common notion of "spirits" he has scorn. "When they can go no further into nature's work . . . our modern authors take refuge in spirits, where the ancients betook themselves to atoms . . . they have merely clothed the unknown with a new name." Men wrangle about anything we can't perceive with our eyes, "the unknowing disputing about the unknown."

Then with a truly magnificent outburst of confidence, he takes refuge in science: "If we had the microscopes, we might be able to see the entire structure both of the soul and the spirit."