Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/174

158 or obstinately defending one's own opinions against acknowledged truths."

From that point of view he was not insane.

There is, however, a story (circulated later by John Wesley, who did not care for competitors) that once in London (during his crisis period) Swedenborg behaved as if delirious in the house of his second Moravian landlord. It was recorded many years later by Mathesius, a Swedish clergyman, who was averse to Swedenborg, and there is testimony that the Moravian later retracted most of what he was alleged to have said, also that Swedenborg had left the house because the man meddled with his papers. The story of Swedenborg's fit of madness could have been told in revenge for Swedenborg's removal to lodge with the wigmaker Shearsmith.4

The truth probably is that although this, like Andersen's story of the feather blown up to five hens, had little foundation, yet there had at least been a feather. Perhaps under the double impact of a fever which he is reported to have had and his puzzling new "spirit" experiences, Swedenborg had appeared to be delirious at least once. A later reference in his diary shows he was aware that at one time his behavior could have been interpreted as insane (see page 247), but there is nothing in his previous or subsequent life that hints at any overt oddity of behavior, barring of course the considerable oddity which remains to be discussed—his claim to familiarity with "spirits." But as far as social behavior went, his polite correctness was often praised by people who knew him, as well as by casual acquaintances.

But he might have suffered from a subtler unbalance. His continued intellectual interests after 1745 (he wrote his clearest book at the age of eighty-two) would not prove to a psychoanalyst that his visions and his ideas were not the result of unresolved complexes. But from that point of view Luther, George Fox, John Wesley himself, and many other of mankind's religious teachers, both in the East and the West, would be considered unbalanced. They had "visions" and heard voices ordering them to do this or that, which they usually obeyed. As has been said before, it comes down to whether it is believed that such "projected" religious experience is always due to a neurosis.

Some of the psychoanalysts who believe this—religiously—have