Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/135

X ] mind may be in collision with the animus, so may the soul with the mind, and the essential life that comes from the spirit of God, with the soul." 22

How can such struggles take place?

Swedenborg founds his system of ethics on his belief that man can choose what he will do; he has free will. Then he hurries to ask and to answer what "the will" is. The will is a function of the rational mind, and the mind's office is to understand, "to revolve, what things it has understood," then "to draw a line under its judgments and sum them up," to conclude something. "To say it is concluded or to will amounts to the same thing." "Will is the closing act of the thoughts." 23

But what is free choice? This, Swedenborg indicates, depends on man's ability to judge. "Thus, the more intelligent the man, the more free his will." There is only a shadow of free will "in maniacs and idiots, a small share in the lowest grades of mankind; in all a larger measure according to their degree of intelligence . . ." 24

He does not think it is for lack of mental equipment that intelligent men so often choose evil. The rational mind is well equipped, he contests. It can draw on the soul, which is "essential science and natural intelligence," and which itself is instructed by Infinite Wisdom. From below, the mind has the reports of the senses "which are so many masters to instruct us in the nature of the world . . . And that we may know all things that all men know, speech is given us; also the memory of the past, and perpetual experience; wonders too familiar and too closely environing us to allow us to wonder at them." 25

But to be able to choose the better side more is needed than knowledge. Swedenborg says there has to be also "a reacting force to enable the mind to turn itself either to the one or the other" side. He sees the mind as sitting in the center of forces that usually oppose each other: "the soul acting on it from above, and the spirit of life acting on the soul; and the animus acting on it from below and the body on the animus."

You can think of it also as the mind holding the balance between the two forces. Then the trouble is, as he sees it, that the physical sensations weight the scales heavily, but not so the "spiritual"