Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/116

100 as in his other works, he anticipates much that was unknown until relatively lately. . . there are still to be found ideas in this book which a neuroanatomist might find not unsuggestive." 11

The modern reviewers of course dissociate themselves from Swedenborg's speculations on the nature of the soul's interaction with the body. But as it was to lay a foundation for such speculations that Swedenborg wrote these books, it is not irrelevant to take a look at the kind of house he built on the foundation. The speculations are not out of date. In Swedenborg's own time Stahl believed that the soul formed the body, and Hobbes believed the opposite. In the nineteenth century Vogt was to claim that the brain merely secretes ideas as the kidneys secrete urine, and in the twentieth century Hans Driesch was to assert that "in the modern solution of the mind-body problem everything that is new and important in psychology as well as biology is centered," while, nearly half a century later, Dr. Gardner Murphy asks: "Is it not indeed, somewhat of a paradox that in an era of huge progress in neurology, psychiatry, and psychology, almost nothing new and clarifying has taken shape regarding the mind-body problem?" 12

The Economy of the Animal Kingdom is primarily Swedenborg's attempt to answer a question put by himself: "We have hitherto been stating what the soul is, but, pray, what is the body?" 13

He dissociates himself from two unfortunately rather large sections of humanity—those "who stubbornly refuse to stir a step beyond visible phenomena," and those who "prefer to drown their ideas in the occult at the very outset."

"To these two classes our demonstration may not be acceptable," he declared. "For, in regard to the former, it asserts that the truth is to be sought far beyond the range of the eye; and, in regard to the latter, that in all the nature of things there is no such thing as an occult quality; in fact, that there is nothing but is either already the subject of demonstration or capable of becoming so." 14

Truth could be found by objective methods, he thought, but he did not claim to have found the truth in this book. He even feared that he might "have gone beyond the ordinary limits of inquiry, so that but few of my readers may be able distinctly to understand me.