Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/171

XII ] indeed he seems at times to have doubted everything, even the Delft vision.41 But the experience of being with his "dead" friends and acquaintances was nothing he had apparently been either wishing for or preparing for. There was not one word in his diary preceding this experience to show that he was at all interested in proving "survival" so as to be reunited with the loved and lost. He wanted to prove by his science, and he felt he had done so, that man's body was governed by a "soul," because he thought this a necessary step in proving that there was a receptacle in man into which God could flow or with which He could unite Himself. Of course a consequence of believing in a soul was that he believed in its survival, but neither in 1742 nor in the summer of 1744 did Swedenborg touch on a description of the other world as a state with a great resemblance to this one—at least for a while. It was either heavenly felicity or else hellish damnation.

But, if Swedenborg thought that what seemed to him the stark reality of the spirit world would help to convince other people, he had a lot to learn. And he was wise enough to say nothing about his experiences when, in August, 1745, he was back at his old job in the Board of Mines. During the next two years his health was even better than usual; he was listed as absent on account of illness for a total of only eleven days.42 To his colleagues life must have seemed to go on as before for Swedenborg—metals were tested, charcoal allotted, claims judged, mining districts inspected.

Little they knew!