Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/147

XI ] Approbation of what? Naturally he took it to be of the system which he had worked out concerning the interrelationship of soul and body. And so he stressed more and more the mastership of the soul, the way in which vessels and organs ministered to its purposes, although those could be foiled and spoiled by selfish instincts in the mind and the animus. But he still solemnly invoked experiment as the only way in which truth could be found. He admitted that faith was better, but he said he was writing his book for those who had to go the way of reason, "who never believe anything but what they can receive with the intellect . . ." 19

His own intellect had not suffered. Some of his keenest deductions were in his work on the brain, which was meant to be a part of the Animal Kingdom. He believed firmly that he was on the right track for finding the soul, because the body was its image "if not exactly, yet quite sufficiently . . . Thus by the body we are instructed respecting the soul, by the soul respecting the body; and by both respecting the truth of the whole." 20

If he had been, as he said, "too hasty" in publishing the result of his findings after only investigating the blood and the brain, he now meant to make up for that by really going into the body's every detail.

Yet Swedenborg was not really happy. He should have been. He had an official position which gave him work that interested him, and in his physiological studies he had outside interests so great that they were really inside. Most important of all for him, he was convinced he had found the right religious philosophy. He was satisfied with the way he had fitted together the pieces of physical and spiritual information he had labored to acquire. In fact he had the comprehensive hypothesis every scientist craves, and it seemed to him to provide all the answers, bar slight details.

Still, it is known from a diary he began to keep in 1743 21 that he was far from happy. He had indeed formulated his religious beliefs, but he was now confronted by the struggle to live up to them. He was not mildly dejected now and then as every thinking human being must be at the gap between knowing and doing; it was more than that. Swedenborg was suffering. He suffered in proportion to the joy he had experienced when he perceived "the light"—an experience which, all mystics testify, makes a hypersensitive