Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/119

IX ] distended with those equivocal terms that produce such hot dissension in the schools." Again and again he longed (at considerable length) for the precision and concision of mathematical language, for symbols that would be applicable both to First Causes and to these physiological and psychological facts. Indeed, he promised to invent this "mathematical language of universals."

And he wondered at this "mass of miracles" of the body, quoting Grotius: "As well might we believe that stones and timbers come together by chance into the form of a house or that an accidental concourse of letters produce a poem."

Via the embryo, Swedenborg decided that "life is one distinct thing, and nature [inorganic matter] is another." 23 He went further: "Life is what regards ends," or purpose.24

For centuries this was to be scornfully dismissed as "the old teleological argument." Matter, dead or living, was considered to be all the same. At the close of the nineteenth century, however, Professor Hans Driesch, the "Vitalist" biologist, was to prove that living tissues did behave in a manner unpredictable by the physics then current, but Swedenborg would doubtless have been even more pleased at the opinions expressed in our own day by Professor Erwin Schrödinger, one of the world's leading nuclear physicists.25

Professor Schrödinger, with all the humility of the trespassing specialist, nevertheless approached his study of the unfolding embryo with the idea that anything which developed in so orderly a manner, so according to a seeming plan, must be a "many-atomic" structure, because, as all modern physicists know, the behavior of a few atoms cannot be predicted. "Only in the cooperation of an enormously large number of atoms do statistical laws begin to operate and control the behavior of these assemblées, with an accuracy increasing as the number of atoms involved increases. It is in that way that events acquire truly orderly features." 26

But the startling fact about the egg (and unicellular organisms) was this, that: "In biology we are faced with an entirely different situation. A single group of atoms [the chromosome fibers] existing only in one copy produces orderly events, marvellously tuned with each other and with the environment, according to most subtle laws." Professor Schrödinger adds: "The situation