Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/149

XI ] who worships God, thrice best and greatest, and by faith aspires to eternal bliss; and the wisest is he who regards not even this bliss except as a consequence, but the glory of the deity as the principal thing."

From this description of wisdom, it was clear, he said, what the degrees of insanity were, and the test of the insanity's "nature and intensity" could be found out by knowing "the ends the mind has in view and follows up." It was obvious to him that deranged minds might have noble ends in view, but the "follow-up" belonged to the sane. If the following up of the end carried away from wisdom, from the Deity, then it was toward insanity, he declared, but he added that this diametric opposition to the Deity was not what was commonly known in the world as insanity, "because it is universal and is believed to be truly human, and indeed of such nature that the world declares those to be insane who are not insane." 24

Showing that he knew well enough what the accepted definition was, he said, "Medically speaking, an insane person is one who acts contrary to accepted propriety and the customs of society, or, still more, who obstinately defends his own opinion against acknowledged truths and the judgments of a sound mind, and pursues it to the contempt and derision of the vulgar, that is to say who, deranged and empty of mind, exposes himself to public sport." 25

He gave himself a clean mental bill of health according to the world's definition. But—was he sound from God's point of view? He was sure he was following up a good end in trying to justify faith by reason, but could the mind ever present us with pure truth while it was entangled with the body? Could it ever be rid of the mistakes of the senses? 26 So he asked at the beginning of the Animal Kingdom, and there too he stressed the purity the mind must possess, and the concern for only universal purposes, before it can receive the light of truth from above.

A humble man, Swedenborg was very doubtful about his own purity, and now he had reached a point where his own reasoning did not satisfy him. He had had a glimpse of what he thought of as divine approval, and he yearned for more, for enough so that he could put out of his head the suspicion that the blissful light had been the "weak fires" of the body or of the animus or even of