Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/126

110 said, were related to each other as more or less of the same thing or quality, "beyond which you cannot proceed further and yet leave a unit or part of that degree." 48

He had, so he was now convinced, the principle of the mechanism by which an immaterial soul communicated with a material body. Unlike Needham, however, he ventured to say how degrees (levels of organization) had arisen. He said it happened by "influx." "Those things that are superior flow into those that are inferior, according to the order and suitably to the mode in which the substances are formed." 49

"The 'destiny' of a level," Koestler says, "is its dependence on the laws of the next higher level—laws which it cannot predict nor reduce," or, as Swedenborg never tired of remarking, it is "against order for the posterior to flow into the prior."

Swedenborg now had, in this "doctrine of series and degrees," a theory, a tool, a sort of universal jimmy, for solving the problems that stood between him and the picture of the whole he wanted to make, the system which he could not help making, any more than crystals can help crystallizing.

"The mind," he said, "never really acquiesces in any system respecting the commerce and harmony of mind and body which supposes the unknown and incomprehensible." 50

His excursion into physiology was for the purpose of reducing the unknown. For him, as well as for some modern physicists, it was a decisive experience to study embryology, but as Swedenborg had not the faintest fear of trespassing on specialist domains he took the evidence he had obtained and stretched it cosmically. He was convinced that an immaterial force built up the material body; he was convinced in the only way he could have been—scientifically, given his honesty and love of truth for its own sake. He now supposed that he was out of "the shade in which hypotheses dwell," and that the following propositions were true:

The material aspect of the world had been developed from immaterial forces. Living matter had also arisen from immaterial force, plus life, which came from life's source, or God. These changes from one form of phenomena to another did not take place "continuously," but by steps, or "degrees of height" (modern: