Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/141

XI ] of the House of Nobles, or when he went on commissions of inquiry for the Board.3

Meanwhile he was carrying on his studies and writings on psychology and physiology. He was not deterred by the fact that the learned world had received the first two volumes of The Economy with tepid interest and, so far as his theories of the soul were concerned, with some alarm about his "materialism." 4

He finished the manuscripts of The Fibre, which he had planned to be the third volume of The Economy—about four hundred pages of anatomical, physical, and philosophical thinking on the human nervous system; he sketched out several smaller transactions containing his more clarified views on the interaction of soul and body, and then, feeling he had been "too hasty" in rushing into print with The Economy, he began to compose a new gigantic work.

In his former published work he had dealt with the "government" (economy) of the soul's kingdom; that is, with the cortex of the brain, with the blood and the embryo, and with a doctrine of the soul. Now he meant to go through all the organs of the body and to take up again, with fuller knowledge, the question of body-soul relationships. This was to be his final map of the soul's kingdom. In seventeen parts.

No wonder that Eric Benzelius wrote to his son Charles, who was in Stockholm: "Visit your uncle Emanuel Swedenborg as often as possible, but at such hours as he may himself appoint; for he is not always at leisure, and is most economical with his time." 5

It would indeed hardly seem as if Swedenborg had any time to ponder on flashes of vision or strange dreams. But these come unbidden and make themselves at home. The hard-working mining expert, the physicist-philosopher, the anatomist, had for several years been conscious of a rill of secret life—perhaps the very spring of his present studies—at any rate a messenger from subliminal regions which was making itself more and more evident.

At least as early as his forty-fifth or forty-sixth year Swedenborg noted something peculiar about dreams. He annotated Wolff's Psychology with the remark that although dreams probably rose from some external stimulus, yet there were dreams which seemed