Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/13

I ] with the same brightness, such as the theory of matter as force, and the relativity of space and time.

It has been said that in the eighteenth century "men turned from the attempt to apprehend the whole by reason and began to study the part by experience." No one was more enthusiastic about the beauty of experimental science than Swedenborg. Incredibly energetic, he experimented with such apparatus as was available—and it is worth remembering that not better brains but better technical equipment has produced modern discoveries—but for all his belief in studying the part by experience he did not want to throw the right to generalize overboard.

He said, in 1740, to the Swedish Academy of Science that "some of the learned of the present day seemed to have agreed to let thought rest, and to make experiments to appeal to the senses; yet they did so with the hope and intent that some day experience would be connected with theory; for experience deprived of an insight into the nature of things is knowledge without learning, and a foundation without a building to rest on it." 5

It was for the object of gaining insight into the nature of things that Swedenborg dug into astronomy, physics, chemistry, physiology, and psychology, not for the dubious joy of being an encyclopedia. He acted on the belief that insight not based on experience would be the building without any foundation. So for nearly two thirds of his life he went on working at this, the meticulous digging and bricklaying of science, fact by fact; but what he cared most for, the real motive behind it all, was the building.

That building was to be his answer to the questions: What are we, Why are we, and What is to become of us? Or, as he put it, If there is such a thing as the soul, how is it connected with the body, and does it survive bodily death?

Not a new question, nor even a respectable one from the point of view of the kind of science which rules out problems that cannot be given laboratory answers. Moreover in this sphere "purpose" and "motive" are suspect words, and most rightly so, unless they can be phrased as working hypotheses.

Worse than suspect, the "soul" has long been ruled out, though of late it has been creeping back quaintly as "psyche," even trying to recommune with the body in "psychosomatic," "