Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/137

X ] Man has indeed got free will in proportion to his intelligence, and every kind of knowledge is available for him, but whether he chooses the better or the worse, ethically speaking, also depends on something else. Swedenborg says it depends on desire. "The freedom of willing depends upon the love of the end, which results in desire." 31

The lower agents, working through "the love of self" in the mind, have great advantage over the higher when it comes to instilling desire. "There are always incentives at hand to persuade it [the mind] to descend, and to dissuade it from rising above itself to something that is incomprehensible, that hides its delights in secret places, and remits them away from the present to the future." 32

The worse is chosen in place of the better, not for lack of knowledge, but because "the desire resulting from love is not present whenever the mind begins to exert its choice. Although here above all a surpassing love should be present, to put out the flames of other loves." 33

Rigorously honest, Swedenborg admits that he thinks we have no power to light this sacred fire ourselves; worse still, we have hardly the power to want it to be lit, except with a kind of passive wish.

But from somewhere in his reading or experience Swedenborg finds that which at all times he craves, a law. He says, as Plotinus did, that God will compel no man, but if he finds even the faintest spark of reciprocity in man he can kindle it into the sacred fire. "Granting this, it follows that there is a universal law," and if we obey this we shall at last be able to "desire that which at first we tacitly and coldly wish. This law, of His ordaining, appears to be that our willing should excite His willing . . ." 34

The struggle between the internal and the external man was in the last instance decided by man himself. He had at least to show a minimum of interest before God could help him without violating the divine principle of freedom.

In this picture of the whole that Swedenborg had drafted, he was sometimes inconsistent, not from lack of intelligence but from a kind of swiveling excess of it. He was able to take in too many points of view; perhaps he was now and then dazzled by too many