Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/163

XII ] sense reports. This took place in the cortex. Writing with the awe that nearly made him a poet at times, Swedenborg said: "There [in the cerebrum] the soul resides, clad in the noblest garment of organization, and sits to meet the ideas emerging thither and receives them as guests. This high and noble place is the innermost sensorium, and it is the boundary at which the ascent of the life of the body ceases, and the boundary from which that of the soul, considered as a spiritual essence, begins." 22

Swedenborg did not think he had shirked "the laws of physics," however. About the body and mind relation he specifically said that "there is a continual influx to be explained by the laws of physics," adding, "This also falls under demonstration, yea, God willing, it shall fall." 23

And he sketched out discussions of the "changes of state" by which an external stimulus reached the soul as a conscious sensation, first as a "modification" or vibration in the external sense organs, then carried by "the spiritual essence" or energy-stuff in the nerves to the "cortical glands" and/or that inner sensorium where mind and soul interacted and the "field" of the memory could be consulted, that "field" not being anything "material" nor yet separate from "an eminent organism." 24

But all that, he said, could not be really understood until the brain had been fully studied, also "changes of state." He thought he was on the right track. What dragged him away from continuing to follow it, at least in more or less orthodox scientific fashion, was that he had become occupied with another question: To what and have we this mind, this intellect, that may or may not accept instruction from the soul?

All through the draft of The Five Senses runs a refrain that seems to have little to do with science—the love of God, reached as a result of the conquest of that which is "inferior and external" in man.25 Swedenborg here shows himself to be as God-intoxicated as ever Spinoza was, and, like Spinoza, he thought he could demonstrate the things of the spirit "geometrically." Not only true and false, but also good and evil, though he saw the two pairs of opposites as linked. For those assessments, however, sciences were not enough, he now stressed, they involved truths, "wisdom is what also involves goodnesses." 26