Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/133

X ] Swedenborg held to it that the soul was the formative force causing the body, and that it was lucky for mankind it was not identical with man's so-called rational mind. For even in an insane person, he declared, "all the economic functions of the body proceed according to laws in the truest order. The government would be utterly at an end, if the soul were insane at the same time as the mind." 15

The mind, he stops to tell us, is really the operation of the soul "in the organic, cortical substance," and, being this, the mind "partakes at once of the soul and of the body," 16 but Swedenborg usually treats it as an independent organism. At birth, he believes, the mind has no innate ideas, it has to acquire them from the material brought to it by the lower mind, or animus, which "conceives or takes in those things that the organs of the body feel." But the higher mind (mens) is able to recognize and to judge the material correctly only because the soul, being in touch with universal wisdom, pours "an intellectual light . . . into the sphere of our minds, by means of which we are enabled to derive instruction from ourselves." It is the soul which has the innate ideas. "Unless this soul flowed in from science, while from itself, into every point of our intellect, it would be impossible for us to perceive anything in order, or to reduce anything we had perceived to order, we should therefore look in vain for understanding in intellect or judgment in thought." 17

Swedenborg again cites Locke: "Locke has abundantly proved that there are no innate ideas in the mind, not even ideas of moral laws. This author has traced the interior operations of the mind with as much care as anatomists have examined the structure of the body; but, after having pursued them to their origin, he remarks that it must be acknowledged that something flows in from above by which the mind is rendered capable of reflecting upon ideas acquired a posteriori" or by experience. Something perceives "the operations of our own minds within us," Locke says and Swedenborg triumphantly quotes, "which Operations, when the soul comes to reflect on and consider do furnish the understanding with another set of ideas which could not be had from the things without." 18