Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/138

122 facets of a subject. In his anxiety to bring out a truth, he often became repetitious, doubling and redoubling on his track like a meandering brook that with each new turn reflects the same sky a little differently.

But it was always the same sky. Slightly wavering as his conclusions and terminology were, a whole and essentially consistent picture does emerge from the wealth of scintillant detail in The Economy of the Animal Kingdom. It was not a particularly Christian one. Not one dogma is visible in it. Swedenborg showed himself as caring more for the spirit of Jesus than for Christian dogma. At the end he gave it as his conviction (not as anything he had direct knowledge of) that the soul survives the death of the body, happily rid of all interference from the "non-intellectual spheres," living beyond time and almost free from space. Heaven would be a "society of souls" and the City of God on earth the seminary of it. "The most universal law of its citizens is that they love their neighbor as themselves and God more than themselves. All other things are means, and are good in proportion as they lead directly to this end." 35

It was the creed of a calm scientist and of a good man. It was really summed up when he said, during the discourse on free will: "If then we strive to the utmost of our power to will and to be able, it follows as a matter of course that a higher power then breathes upon us, and raises our efforts to powers not human; and thereby brings us back into a state emulous of that liberty which we have lost." 36

Swedenborg was far from believing, however, that he personally had reached this state. Here and there on the pure white snow of his intellectual arguments an odd stain and some scattered feathers mark a struggle. After he had pointed out that anger and revenge consign us from liberty to slavery he admitted that "similar remarks apply to inclination and love, by which we are frequently consigned to chains, and the mind itself sees its own will put in fetters, and sometimes smiles with bitterness the while, but without having the power to shake off the yoke." 37

Physical passion, we can surmise from his diaries, had galled him, but he did not think of physical pleasure as immoral in itself. From