Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/117

IX ] But thus far I have felt bound to venture, for I have resolved, cost what it may, to trace out the nature of the human soul." 15

At the outset he explained his method. It was to cite in full the greatest authorities in anatomy and medicine, and then to draw his own deductions. Here and there, he said, he had taken the liberty to throw in the results of his own experience, but this only sparingly. We know his reasons for this: first, that he felt his was a synthesizing gift, and second, that he feared the temptation of basing everything on a discovery of his own. He determined therefore to rely mainly on the researches of others.

That this was a real sacrifice is evident from the ardor with which he speaks of what he saw in his own explorations of the body. As engineer and chemist he was fitted to appreciate the "pipes, ovens and little bladders" of the body, and all its ingenious constructions that so "cooperated" with each other. Always an image-thinker, fond of concrete metaphors, he speaks of the "gratework of the ribs," or says of the "old blood" that "it is clad in black garments and hurried away to the tombs of the liver." 16

He so loves physiology that he writes of the organs as if they had conscious life of their own. "The hungry veins" will "eagerly snatch" at the gastric juices; certain nerves are like "a married pair, the intercostal doing the husband's office and the par vagum the wife's." He was especially fond of matrimonial similes; at times a wedding feast seems to be going on in the body's every nook and cranny.

This was one aspect of his being a man who had the great gift of wonder at the apparently commonplace. He himself warns us that "When a name which is given to any unknown quality becomes familiar to us, we are apt to think, after a frequent use of it, that we clearly understand . . . it." In such cases, he continues, one has only to ask, What is this? Whence is this? to be carried off "to things more unknown." 17

Hence when Swedenborg asked, "What is the body?" he followed that up by wondering how it comes to be a body. He studied the formation of the embryo of a chick, looking at it with his eyes, through the poor microscopes of the day, as well as through his rational mind, second to none in any day. He concluded (the