Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/153

XII ] —but he had been perfectly ready to publish his views on sex in a book written only a year or two before the dream diary.

It was the draft of a book on "Reproduction" (De Generatione), and in it he not only described the objective anatomy of the sex organs, but the subjective feelings associated with "this most pleasant and delicious violence and necessity." He described the psycho-physical pleasures of love with a kind of pure and glowing factual frankness, which was equally far from the ineffable or the lascivious—and from the theoretical; though the still eager mathematician in him quaintly enough wondered whether the number of "tacit titillations" of which certain nerves were capable could not "be reduced to calculation," because they "must equal the sum of the papillae." 3

So when he set down undisguisedly those dreams in which he had had sexual experience, it was not as examples of something which he held in horror, it was because he had come to look on his dreams as symbolic, quite in the modern way, but from another angle. Instead of seeing his dreams as symbols of striving sex desires, he interpreted his sexual dreams as symbolic of striving spiritual desires, either intellectual or religious, or both. One of his dreams, for instance, was of two women, one young and the other older; he kissed the hands of both, but was in doubt as to which of them he would make love. Having decided that women in dreams represented sciences, he interpreted this dream as referring to his doubt whether he would keep on with his older, intellectual work, or take up a newer and more spiritual work also in his thoughts.4

After one dream involving successful physical intercourse, he interpreted it as "love for what is holy," since, he said, all love has its origin in what is holy, "it is a series, in the body it really is in projectione seminis . . ." 5

The key-word here is "series." As early as in The Economy of the Animal Kingdom he had placed different kinds of love at the different levels of man's personality. At the level of the body was the physical act, this had its "correspondence" in the unthinking desire of the lower mind, and to this again corresponded, in the higher mind, "a purer love, lacking a name of its own, with the representation of another in oneself and of oneself in another, that