Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/111

VIII ] body or of the animus [reasoning mind], and, furthermore, by the details of experimental chemistry and physics. . ." 21

No scholastic web would suffice Emanuel Swedenborg as proof of the soul's interaction with the body. He required demonstration, the kind you could point at with your finger. To find material for such proof was the object of his year and a half in Paris, at Dr. Petit's school of anatomy, where he studied under Winsløv, the Dane, who was probably the first to examine the organs of the body in the body, dissecting them under water.22 (Anatomists had hitherto taken the organs out.) For this he studied in Venice, where he wrote about the brain, near to Padua, where the brilliant Morgagni taught, much quoted by him. Italy had long been the foremost country for anatomy.23

Of these facts, however, Swedenborg's travel diary tells nothing. All that he conveys is that he went from Italy in March, 1739, by way of Paris to Amsterdam, where, "on the stroke of midnight," December, 1739, he finished the book known as The Economy of the Animal Kingdom.