Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/143

XI ] I saw the light," and he thought it meant "as it meant then" that his mind was being put in order "as it happened then too since it give me penetration with the pen." 9)

Three weeks after his stay in Amsterdam, in 1736, he wrote (as previously cited) that when men of science who have the power of synthesizing "after a long course of reasoning make a discovery of the truth, straightway there is a certain cheering light, and joyful confirmatory brightness, that plays round the sphere of their mind; and a kind of mysterious radiation—I know not whence it proceeds—that darts through some sacred temple of the brain."

Clearly he had had, in Amsterdam, an impression of light which he considered mysteriously helpful, a light which was an "influx" from the soul. But at times he was not at all sure about the origin. Elsewhere he expresses how the soul cannot function if the ways of communication are not open, such as in the infant or the idiot, and "yet for all this we will not cease to pride ourselves above our fellow mortals, whenever we receive a few false rays by influx from the soul; and to judge of the souls of others by their bodies."

Had the joyful brightness become a few false rays? He had said that if the mind had once experienced the cheering light ("for no desire attaches to the unknown") it would be carried away wholly in pursuit of it, despising all merely corporeal pleasures; but still he might only have been a little flowery in describing intellectual satisfaction, and so the falseness might be intellectual disappointment.

However, soon after finishing The Economy, in February, 1740, he made a terse summary of his system, and at the end of this he wrote, italicizing the sentence: "These things are true, because I have the sign." 10

What sign? The "confirmatory brightness"?

We do not know. But a few years later, he wrote, ". . . a flame of divers sizes and with a diversity of color and splendor has often been seen by me. Thus while I was writing a certain little work hardly a day passed by for several months in which a flame was not seen by me as vividly as the flame of a household hearth; at the time this was a sign of approbation, and this happened before spirits began to speak with me viva voce." 11