Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/175

XIII ] attempted to deal with Swedenborg in absentia mainly by the aid of excerpts from his so-ocalled dream diary and "spiritual" diary. They do not seem to have been well acquainted with his scientific work, nor do they seem to have studied history with a view to finding out whether Swedenborg could not at the time have held certain ideas without differing much from his contemporaries.

Nowadays certainly a man who claimed to communicate with spirits and to have received a divine commission to reinterpret the Bible might legitimately be committed for observation if that served any useful purpose. But, hard as it is to remember with the often so amazingly modern Swedenborg, he did live and these things did take place over two hundred years ago, when the mental climate was different.

What Professor C. D. Broad of Oxford in our day has called the "antecedent improbability" 5 that renders belief in even the best-attested psychic phenomena so hard, was then not so improbable, both for people in general and for Swedenborg in particular.

As for his specifically religious ideas, they were far from unrelated to those of his time and that immediately preceding it. Among the pietist Protestant sects, and especially with those who had a tinge of mysticism, there was a strong belief that the "visible church" had lost authority after the death of the last of the Apostles, and that a new, world-wide "invisible church" would come. This was particularly true of the "Collegiants" in Holland. One of their leaders, Cornheert, had pleaded for people to wait—wait "for the coming of new and divinely commissioned apostles, who would really reform apostate churches and unite all divided sects and gather the world in a true Church of Christ." He also wrote a great deal about the "Inner Word of God," and about symbols and ceremonies as nothing in themselves but as pointing to spiritual realities.

The same ideas were held by the so-called "Seekers" in England. Both Holland and England pullulated with books expressing such views.6 They often literally coincided with those of Swedenborg, as in the case of Castellio's. ( See page 151.)

Mitigating circumstances, however, do not prove sanity. In our day, Professor Martin Lamm of Stockholm has exonerated Swedenborg from insanity on the ground that his visions and voices were only pseudohallucinatory, and that only once or twice did he