Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/120

104 is unprecedented, it is unknown anywhere else except in living matter." 27

Professor Schrödinger returns by way of quantum mechanics to the validity of physics, modern nuclear physics, even for living matter, but, as he says himself, with one big new factor. Asserting that his body "functions as a pure mechanism, according to the laws of nature," he insists that he, his "I," is able to direct and foresee the motions of this mechanism, even if the effects are to be fateful, "in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them." 28

In his more youthful works, Swedenborg was fond of writing a triumphant Q.E.D. when he thought he had proved his point, and he would no doubt have attached that to the above. Eager as he always was to accord praise when he agreed with another scholar, he would also have declared that the "learned and illustrious" Schrödinger was entirely right in his "golden" treatise What is Life? Of course everything in created nature—so Swedenborg would have put it—is "mechanical" and subject to mechanical laws, and the difference between dead and living matter is that the living is purposefully governed by a soul.

Swedenborg's answer about "this earthy loan," the body, was: It is something which is fabricated by the soul for its own purposes. Once the body is made it has a certain reciprocal relationship with the soul, but the latter, besides being the manufacturer, is the maintainer and repairer of the body as long as the thing is repairable.

Many of those at whom he so often had jeered as "occult" had made the same answer, but with Swedenborg it was not quite such a short story. He took years and thousands of anatomical pages to tell it. Essentially, however, the plot began with his trying to track down and analyze something which in his time was called the "animal spirits" or "the spirituous fluid," or similar names.

It was only supposed to be a "fluid" in the way that electricity then was called a fluid, something indicating its spatial though invisible nature. It was an attempt to give a name to the nerve impulse, as well as to the "X" that made the difference between dead and living matter.

This "spirituous fluid," Swedenborg said, must have something to flow in, its channels being the "fibres," or nerves. By his study