Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/161

XII ] taken lodging with a "pious shoemaker" whom he had met on a Dutch canalboat. The shoemaker's piety was of the crudely literal Moravian brand, and from his house Swedenborg moved to that of another Moravian, a watchmaker, following his old practice of taking lodgings with artisans.

At first he seemed to feel that he had been "led" to these "Moravian Brothers" who "only reckon with the grace of God and the blood and merits of Christ," and this belief was doubtless strengthened by the fact that three months previously he had had a dream in which he had seen their church, "just as I saw it later, and they were all dressed like parsons." 15

Gradually his enthusiasm for them seems to have cooled (nor were they, apparently, at all keen to have such an intellectual aspirant) and he did not join their community of faith. Emanuel Swedenborg was beginning to find his own way out of his dilemma.

While he was recording his strange dreams and spiritual struggles in his diary, he was very busy by day with entirely different matters in this London summer of 1744. By July 3 he had finished a first draft of his work on the senses, two hundred folio pages in less than six weeks.16 The work seeped through into the dreams. He wrote that a dream of kissing a girl tenderly good—by was his farewell to The Five Senses, while another girl "seen farther off" was the further elaboration of his treatise on the brain.17 But the dreams also seeped into the work. Here and there in the draft of The Five Senses, written in the summer of 1744, he refers to admonitions and instructions that he feels he has received in sleep, regarding what is to be written and in what order. (They are personal asides, not meant for publication.)

It is not strange that he thought he was receiving other-worldly aid, for, together with the epilogue to Part II of the Animal Kingdom which he had written in the spring of the same year, this brilliant and remarkable sketch of The Five Senses was concerned not only with the very essence of the problem he had been trying to master—the body-mind relationship—but reached out and up still further, to "a principle in which life is involved, and the force and life of which all other things carry out and live, and which causes the sense itself to be and to live: this principle is what we term the Soul." 18