Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/104

88 He did not intend to be one of the unknowing disputing about the unknown. From the notes to Wolff it is clear he had already studied a great deal of anatomy from standard works on the subject. Impatiently he complains that it is so difficult during a voyage "because of business and pleasure" to make the necessary researches for this study. But he looks forward to the great work he is planning:

"Why should we not reach forward and establish that which surely our posterity will establish—that this body of ours is mechanical, that its organs are mechanical, that its senses are mechanical, the intellect, the reason, and the soul itself. In course of time the learned world will agree. [Nature is] alike in great and small. There is not another kind of reasoning, not another kind of nature; two kinds of nature are by no means possible."

Concerned as he now was about metaphysical and religious questions, such as the Infinite and its connection with the finite world, the nature of the soul and immortality, he was perfectly certain that the answers could not be reached with any satisfaction to his scientific conscience except by "experience, geometry and reason." For some time he had been meaning to turn this battery on the human body. The bulk of the notes on Wolff, as well as the second part of the Of the Infinite show that even before his return to Stockholm in July, 1734, he had made up his mind: he intended to delve for the traces of the soul in the finest recesses of the physical brain.

In his notes to Wolff's Psychology, he had regretted our unconsciousness of most of our make-up. "If the cerebellum were rightly joined to the cerebrum, and if there were a communication between their subtle membranes, then we would know all that took place in our body . . . If God had willed so to join the cerebellum and cerebrum, we would have been instructed in all things of our anatomy almost without a master."

Bar such a convenient arrangement between the seat of consciousness and what was then considered the center for involuntary physiological processes, Swedenborg went in search of the best masters of anatomy he could find when he left Stockholm for his long leave of absence in 1736, but he did not put a word of this into the diary he kept during his stay abroad.