Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/123

IX ] Gustaf Strömberg, of the Mt. Wilson Observatory, grapples with exactly the same phenomena of life and matter (The Soul of the Universe).36

Dr. Strömberg reminds us of the immateriality of the pilot wave that guides the electron in space and time, emphasizing that the particle aspect of nature is material and the wave aspect is immaterial. The atom consists of particles which are made units by an immaterial wave structure with certain time and space properties.

Dr. Strömberg could almost be used as a guide to Swedenborg. The Californian says, "There is another world than that of space and time." The two worlds, he continues, are not entirely separated; they interact at certain points. These points he also calls "sources," because through them certain forces enter our world from that other. Through some of the sources "electricity" enters our world; it is associated with wave systems identified with "material" particles.37

But from other sources "living wave systems of different degrees of complexity" enter our world. These wave systems are "immaterial."

With confidence, for his biology was approved by Thomas Hunt Morgan, Dr. Strömberg says that such a "source" having caused a "living" but immaterial wave system, the latter is responsible for what happens in a living cell when its chromosomes divide. "The material elements follow the changes in the immaterial structure." 38

He traces the development of the embryo, showing where subordinate wave systems are as it were commissioned to take charge and "expand in a certain order and gradually become 'fixed' or 'materialized' " in the structure and function of the different organs. The signals of the organizing wave system, Dr. Strömberg says, can be thought of as traveling along definite structural channels, and, he italicizes, the channels often become observable as nerve fibers.39

Swedenborg thought of the "formative force" as traveling along the nerve fibers after having created them."40

In 1734, five or six years before he wrote his Economy, Swedenborg had asserted that both soul and body were subject to "