Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/181

XIII ] delusional thinking), yet the Swedenborg conjured up by him seems as weirdly unlike the whole man as that of the various psychoanalysts quoted.

Nor is it possible to find any real likeness between Swedenborg and the three others considered by Dr. Jaspers. After all, Strindberg's mania went so far as to make him assert publicly that "all women" were out to slay him and poor Van Gogh cut off his own ear in a fit of depression.

What similarity is there between the Swedenborg of Dr. Jaspers and the man of whom Count Höpken, the wise Swedish statesman, wrote (as cited previously), "He possessed a sound judgment on all occasions; he saw everything clearly and expressed himself well on every subject. The most solid memorials on finance and the best penned at the Diet of 1761 were presented by him"? And, Höpken said, Swedenborg "was a true philosopher and he lived like one." Could such tributes have been paid to Strindberg?

Either Dr. Jaspers was not going by all the data or he did not have them. But he is also a professor of philosophy, and he can look beyond psychiatry. It is conceivable, he says, that something subjectively spiritual exists, and that this Spirit (Geist) is timeless, but may reveal itself in time through "emotions." It is as if, he says, this demonic force under control in the healthy can break through at the beginning of the schizophrenic process. Not, Dr. Jaspers explains, that it is either sick or healthy, "but the morbid process gives a chance and a condition for this breaking-through, though it may be only for a short while. It is as though the soul were unlocked," and made creative, if it has native talent.

These creative schizophrenes do us good, Dr. Jaspers continues, "when we experience the appeal of their being, their inward quesotioning orientation, and when we find in their works, as in all that is genuine, that gaze into the Absolute, which, always hidden, only becomes visible for us in its final form."

With a certain amount of German indefinition, this amounts to saying that even the insane, if they have native talent, can be peek-holes for the Absolute, which, in Swedenborg's case, was called God.

It is most curious to consider that if Swedenborg, like many a mystic of every religion, had limited himself to reporting the visions