Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/16

6 his experience, the nature of which was far from clear to him. In middle age he began to discover that most unusual events were taking place in his mind. Today people would call them either psychic or psychotic, according to their own bent, but he was convinced by the startling character of the events that they were inspired. For him, at any rate, they were the most important of his life.

He thought he knew the difference between what he called "phantasies" and objective perceptions; therefore the psychic part of his experience was real enough for him to make it a crucial part of his world-picture, so real that he used much the same methods to study and describe it as he had used in analyzing and classifying minerals and nerves. This helped neither probability nor readability, yet the result is still one which makes it a great adventure to try to fathom what went on in his mind.

Count A. J. von Höpken, the head of the Swedish Government, one of his shrewdest friends, said of Swedenborg's other-worldly books: "Few people have judiciously read his works, which everywhere sparkle with genius; if I meet with anything unusual or extraordinary and which might indicate a disordered understanding, I do not judge of it. We read Plato with admiration; but there is nothing to be read in his works which, if related by another person, might not be deemed extravagant, inconceivable and absurd." 8