Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/139

X ] his system it flowed naturally that the soul had not created the body to torment it. The delights of the world and of the sensual part of man served, he said, as "the fuel and incentive of bodily life." He condemned those persons as "somewhat beside themselves who aim not to moderate but altogether to exterminate the pleasures of the senses and the delights of the world as if they were so many deadly and pernicious poisons." 38

Taste and flavor, he said, stimulated the body to repair its tissues. And "the desire for sexual connection descends from an innocent and burning desire of the soul to multiply the individuals of its kind . . ." 39 By what he seems to deem a fortunate dispensation, he considered that the delights and hence the keenness of desire increased in proportion to the universality of the purpose, so that those delights "which if legitimate are known as connubial" 40 were the most alluringly delightful of all.

He was in no morbid state of hatred of the body. Though he was well aware of its weight in the scales as against spiritual force, he was even more conscious of the power of egoism. "I know not what darkness overspreads the rational faculties when the mind begins to swell with pride . . . it is like pouring a liquor on some exquisite wine, which throws it into a froth, sullies its purity, and clouds its translucence." 41

An ardent and ambitious man, he had had the normal struggles with body and with mind. But in nothing he had so far written was there any arrow pointing to even an unconscious conflict of the kind that make potential mystics appeal so hard to higher powers for help that they dream strange dreams and see lights from beyond sun, moon, and candle power.

Yet these phenomena had already puzzled Emanuel Swedenborg.