Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/132

116 the source of magnetism; the third, or ether, and the source of electricity, light, heat; the fourth, the air.)

Although these forces originally had started through the setting in motion and finiting of the "mathematical point" by the Uncreated Infinite, they were inanimate, but they were the means by which life streaming from the Infinite could embody itself. The "soul," or particle of life from the Infinite, Swedenborg said, must descend into matter by the same number of degrees as there are "auras" or forces—that is, by four degrees—and adapt itself to each, and form a kind of organism corresponding to each.

When he wrote the Principia, he had considered the mind as divided into "mens," or the rational mind, and "animus," or a lower, instinctual mind. He still held to that division, but above both minds he now put "soul" or "anima." The soul, and here he agreed with Neoplatonic philosophy, "is a faculty distinct from the intellectual mind, prior and superior to, and more universal and perfect than the latter." He again and again repeats that it is so high above the other faculties that it is "their order, truth, rule, law, science, art." Consciousness belongs to it, so does intuition (he quoted Locke to back him up). "And it flows into the intellectual mind much after the manner of light." 13

The first aura furnishes the material for the organism of the soul.

"The next organ under the soul" is the intellectual mind, "whose office is to understand, to think and to will." It is developed from the material of the second aura.

The third organ is the animus, or the seat of sensuous desires and sensuous imagination. It belongs to the third aura.

The five external senses are in our material, airborne world. These, with the motor organs, "constitute the body, whose office it is to feel, to form looks and actions, to be disposed and to do what the higher lives determine, will and desire. Although there are this number of degrees, yet the animal system consists of nothing but the soul and the body, for the intermediate organisms are only determinations of the soul, of which as well as of the body they partake. Such now is the ladder, by which every operation and affection of the soul and body descend and ascend." 14