Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/164

148 Swedenborg had stopped walking around life and viewing it mainly from the outside, yet he had not renounced reason, he felt he had given its exercise a divine object. Through his mystical experience he had been dragged like an iron filing into a celestial field, and from then on he was still concerned about truth, but even more about "wisdom"—the use of truth in the service of goodness. Our rational mind should enable us to choose the best, to know good from evil. "This is the work of science and wisdom. To the extent that we are affected by the love of the truly good and especially of the supreme best, to that extent are we united to it . ." 27

Carefully noting that the love of God should not be for the sake of experiencing "felicity," Swedenborg nevertheless seems to have been so overwhelmed by his experiences that, about three weeks after he had ceased his work on physiology, he began to write another book. The title he felt had been given him when he was in a state "neither sleep nor wakefulness." This state, the forerunner of his later "trances" (or "dissociated" conditions), he mentions often enough in the dream diary to show that he was becoming accustomed to it, at least for the reception of mystical joy. But there were other signs in the same diary that he was increasingly puzzled by certain things he thought he saw, felt, heard, and even smelled, half in dream, half out of it, mostly trivial, but which he did not know how to interpret.

This did not bother him very much. The great experience into which he now wholeheartedly flung himself was the new book.

This book was 0f the Worship and Love of God. Like a stream long dammed up it poured out of him. This poetic-pedantic allegory of the creation of the world and the creation of Adam and Eve was a kind of summary of everything Swedenborg had been trying to tell in his other books. It was in Neoplatonic terms, with the odd addition of God's Only Begotten Son, while the story of Adam and Eve was far from literally Biblical. Significantly their mental faculties, their "intelligences," were personified as beautiful women who told them how the Supreme communicated via the soul through intelligence.

No more blackening of reason as against "faith." This book was