Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/144

128 In another important reminiscent passage, he wonders that he had not realized before what was happening to him, because for many years, he says, such remarkable proofs existed. "Not only were there dreams for some years, informing me concerning the things that were being written, but there were also changes of states while I was writing: a certain extraordinary light in the things that were being written . . ." 12

There is no doubt that for a scientifically minded man, as he looked on himself, he was in an embarrassing situation with these "occult" experiences and in a state of painful bewilderment in regard to his sanity. In his work on The Fibre, written in 1741-42, he said some things about mental diseases in which may be seen veiled references to the suspicions that most likely beset him.

One form of mental disease he calls fanatic imagination (it clearly means a state of hallucination), and he says that it may be due, among other things, to a condition of the brain in which it is "rigid," and refuses to admit the testimony of the senses, "or else admits them by way of exasperants." It does not in this state, he says, dispel "strange and illy consociated ideas," but may absorb them and thereby "immensely augment the idea conceived . . ." 13

Various physical diseases may cause this, but also sicknesses of the emotional mind (animus), such as hope deceived, or sorrow, but even the rational mind may originate the evil, he says, if it has been too intensely applied, especially to the problem of life after death.

"But so long as the mind is still sane," he reassured himself, "such illusions can easily be dispelled . . ."

On the other hand, in writing about a state which he termed "ecstasy energumene," he regarded it as possible that, besides the half-dead condition of the partly drowned or partly suffocated, there was a state in which the soul voluntarily separated from the body. As proof he cited the case of persons "skilled in the art of magic" from the northern regions. (The Lapps in the north of Scandinavia have always had a reputation for shamanistic mediumism.)

Such persons, Swedenborg said, "are credited with being able to