Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/113

IX ] The answer is Yes. But the answer tarried for a couple of hundred years, illustrating what Swedenborg sadly asks in the book itself: "What is truth? Will it be the work of ages to discover it, or of ages to recognize it when discovered?" 2

And he mentions that even the discovery by the illustrious Harvey of the circulation of the blood was for a long time disputed by many. "Still," he adds optimistically, "that fashion of judging of a work cannot be eternal which regulates the approbation of the reader not so much by the truth of the writer's sentiments as by the felicity of the language. The latter is an attainment easy and common among persons belonging to polite society; it is the former that presents the difficulty, which is to be surmounted only by intense mental labor." 3

Intense mental labor, however, is not enough in physiology. Swedenborg himself stresses that "with diligent study and intense application, I have investigated the anatomy of the body, principally the human . . ." 4

Was he nevertheless "an armchair philosopher, making easy lucky guesses"? A modern American physiologist, Dr. H. W. Haggard, asks this question and acquits him of such a charge.5

"His [Swedenborg's] conclusions were based upon the best medical knowledge of his time; knowledge that he gained in the medical school, in the anatomy laboratory, and from the writings of every scientist of his time."

"It was he," so Dr. Haggard summarized Swedenborg's most important physiological discovery, "who first said that what we call the gray matter on the surface of the brain, the cerebral cortex, is the seat of the psychic functions—of consciousness, perception, sensations, thought. He showed the relation of the parts of the brain controlling the muscles of various parts of the body. He went further and said that gray matter in the center of the brain controlled many of the complicated but unthinking acts performed by the body. He was the first to show . . . that the surface of the brain is in connection through nerve fibers with every part of the body, even as he said with as remote an organ as the foot. And what makes it all the more astounding is the fact that he attributed the primary function of nervous control to little oval particles in the