Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/180

164 interpretation would leave any more room for Swedenborg as an experiencer of spiritual truths than Freud's study of Da Vinci leaves for the great painter is a question that really seems to have been answered by the psychoanalysts cited above.

In Swedenborg's diaries material can certainly be found which shows that he "projected" many of his fears and wishes into "visions" of both good and evil, things that nagged and haunted him apparently from outside of himself. We can see that fairly easily now when those realms have been more or less charted. But if such material is all that is used for a picture of him there would indeed be little difference between it and that of some poor wretch in an insane asylum. From this point of view it would be impossible to fit in his contributions to ethics and his deep and subtle religious experiences. He would be just another case history, pegged out on the conventional pattern.

But the religious impulse has its geniuses as well as its idiots. The cause of truth is not served by classing the former with the latter just because the case history of every religious genius, if it were as well known as Swedenborg's, would be found to contain false sense perceptions, conflicts, terrors, and even beatitudes which could be pigeonholed under the same labels as those of the idiots.

It is not meant to imply that such is the constant practice of all modern soul doctors whether they call themselves psycho-this or psycho-that. Many, especially of the followers of Jung, "admit" the "religious drive" (as has been mentioned) as something not pathological. Others, even if they apply pathologic labels, do so with the same breadth of understanding that made Ibsen in The Wild Duck plead for the preservation of the "vital illusion."

A good example of this in the Swedenborg case is the treatment of it by Dr. Karl Jaspers (doctor of medicine and professor of philosophy at Heidelberg), who wrote, in 1926, a psychiatric study of Strindberg, Van Gogh, Swedenborg and Hölderlin.1515 Dr. Jaspers is not concerned with tracing the origin of all emotion to infantile perversions,16 he is busy fitting four different personalities into a grandly elastic frame of schizophrenia. Dr. Jaspers proves to his own satisfaction—again apparently on the sole basis of Swedenborg's notes of dreams and visions—that all four of his subjects were schizophrenes (suffering from split mind and consequent