Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/124

108 " laws. "There are no two natures." Nature was one, with one set of laws.41

Now, by spiritualizing matter it would seem as if he had satisfied himself, but he had not. He saw that there was still a problem in the "mechanism" by which the organic and the inorganic communicated. According to the Cartesian physics of his time, the chain of causation should be continuous, but that did not seem to be so. There was a jump by which dead matter became living, as there was between immaterial force and the material atom. Yet there was, there could be, only one nature.

Swedenborg stuck to that, but he abandoned continuity. Nature, he said, progressed by steps, or "by degrees." This hypothesis of his is so vital for an understanding of his whole future scheme of things that it becomes necessary once more to beg aid of modern science, and to compare its findings with Swedenborg's.

The way has been made easy by Arthur Koestler in the last essay of his The Yogi and the Commissar.42 Modern scientists are not unaware that there is an unexplained "jump," be it ever so small, from the immaterial atom to the living cell and from it again to consciousness and to the higher mental states. Relying chiefly on the biologists Needham and Woodger, Koestler gives a summary of the significance of these "jumps."

He uses the simile of a staircase. On each tread the things or phenomena are of the same nature; what makes them seem to differ from the phenomena on the other treads is the way in which they associate, and "the new properties and values which emerge by this specific type of association." Each level depends on "the laws of the next higher level—laws which it cannot predict nor reduce" to its own level.

But, looking at the staircase from in front, only the vertical jumps between the treads are seen, and "everything becomes unexplained mystery." Koestler quotes Needham:

"What has not yet been done, however, is to elucidate the way in which each of the new great levels of organization has arisen . . . It must always be remembered that though we can chart out quite fully the laws existing at a given high organizational level, we can