Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/142

126 as if they tended to some definite end, as if they were directed by the soul. A couple of years later, in 1736, he had begun making notes of his dreams (they were subsequently lost).

Then, while he was writing the Economy, and puzzling over the problem of how to keep the lower mind (animus) in order,6 he wrote that the rational mind could keep watch and wake while the body slept; and one gathers he felt he had solved something while dreaming, much as did the assyriologist who dreamed the correct interpretation of a difficult inscription.7 But, besides this, he said, the mind could in a measure stand away from the senses and thus receive a fuller light from the soul. By this statement he was probably referring to a different experience.

In Amsterdam, it may be remembered, when he came there in late August, 1736, he was shocked at the "spirit of gain" pervading the city, and in his diary he made a long entry about God and the Dutch. It was an unusually "interior" entry in that concrete and guidebook diary, but it happened that in Amsterdam he had had an unusual experience.

Together with what he remembered from his childhood of the effect of inhibited breathing, this was perhaps the very experience which led him to make a special study of the connection between the motion of the brain and the motion of the lungs, one of his titles to fame. While discussing the proofs of this in The Economy, he several times referred to the mind's power of cutting off the sense impressions when it desired to think intensely, especially the "olfactory impressions" 8 (no doubt canals smelled badly whether in Venice or in Amsterdam, and his sense of smell was keen).

He insisted that the mind's way of cutting off sense impressions was by breathing very quietly through the mouth, or in any case by breathing very shallowly. He spoke of the breast fearing "by any deep breath to disturb the quiet of the brain," and of its compressing itself and admitting only a small amount of air.

Reduction of the amount of air may help intense thinking; if it is carried too far, however, it may lead to something else. (Six or seven years later, Swedenborg wrote in a very diflerent kind of diary that "in the morning the same kind of faintness or weakness came over me as I had in Amsterdam, when I was beginning the Economy of the Animal Kingdom." He continued, "it came when