Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/125

IX ] never hope to understand how they fit into the picture as a whole. . ." 43

This picture was precisely what Swedenborg had always been searching for, and his "degree" corresponds fairly closely to the modern "level of organization."

The formidable name of Swedenborg's theory, set forth in the Economy, was The Doctrine of Series and Degrees.44 Without it, he warned the reader again and again, nothing in the whole universe could be properly understood.

It was, he said, that doctrine which nature "in acting has prescribed for herself," her way of "subordinating and coordinating" things. "Series are what successively and simultaneously comprise things subordinate and coordinate."

A series, to put it simply, is the modern biologist's staircase. Swedenborg called it a ladder when he wasn't being pedantic. "The soul," he said, "does not flow into the actions of its body except by intermediates, nor by a continuous medium, but as it were by a ladder divided by steps." Also, "The intercourse between the soul and the body . . . (is) a kind of progression . . . according to natural order by a ladder divided into degrees." 45

These degrees, he said, were of two kinds. Later he was to call them degrees of height and degrees of breadth.46 The degree of height is the modern "jump" in the staircase from one level of organization to another. The degree of breadth is the surface of the tread, the things of similar nature on the same level.

Swedenborg's degree of height (also called by him a "discrete" or a "determined" degree) was separate from the one above and below it. By "separate" Swedenborg meant separate, even as modern scientists mean it. "We cannot arrive," he said, "from a substance of an inferior degree to a substance of a superior degree, except by the division and as it were destruction of the unit of the inferior degree." 47

On the other hand, by the degree of breadth (also called by him a "continuous degree" or "degree of composition") Swedenborg said he meant "an aggregate of things coordinate"—as we should say the phenomena on the same tread of the staircase. They, he