Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/148

132 of their own shortcomings inevitable, so that after the first glad recognition of feeling "saved" a period of dark doubt occurs.

Probably Swedenborg suffered equally at the thought that the very light he clung to might be a will-o'-the-wisp, might even be insanity. It is not likely that he had anyone to whom he could talk freely on such matters. Eric Benzelius was away in Linköbing. Furthermore, Benzelius, being now a bishop, was presumably a believer, and believers would merely wonder why Swedenborg had to drag in his reason to be satisfied. As for the skeptics, they would have wondered why he needed to believe. Both groups would have distrusted and rejected his visions and his "informative" dreams, either as from the Devil or as insanity.

Unlike Socrates, Swedenborg was too modern a man to listen peacefully to his "inner voice." He had to find out what kind of voice it was, what kind of dreams those were in which he foresaw things that later happened. As early as about 1741, he had made a list of quotations mainly from Aristotle and Plato concerning presages of the future in dreams.22 There were no psychic researchers about with tabulated results of mechanically regulated experiments of precognition. It must have comforted the worried Swedenborg that Plato, although relegating the art of divining to madness, nevertheless thought it behooved a man of prudence to pay attention to signs that come in visions or in dreams.

Swedenborg did not doubt that there was a divine light which could flow into the soul from God and from the soul into the mind, but he was not sure about the receptacle. Putting his anguish into scholastic sawdust, he had written, "We cannot say with what power, according to what laws, and in what manner, the subject reflects, infracts, diminishes and intercepts these rays, opposes to them its own mists and beclouds itself; how again when these mists are dispersed it emerges into the light; how it warms with zeal; and, on the other hand, how it cools from want of it . . ." 23

He knew right well that he cooled from want of it and that he felt dangerously lost in the mists. Then it was, no doubt, that he applied his test for insanity, the test he had formulated when he wrote in The Fibre about mental diseases.

He began by saying meaningfully, "There is hardly a mortal who is not in his own way insane. He alone is sane and acts wisely