Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/182

166 and intercourse with whatever forms of the Godhead his religion called for, he would probably not have been thought different from them. All of them insist that man has a soul and that it somehow survives the death of the body, so even that belief need not have disqualified him from respectful attention. Oddly enough it comes down to this: Swedenborg is blamed not so much for saying that the soul survives the death of the body as for insisting that he became capable of talking with such souls, or spirits. It is as if at the word "spirit" such fears of superstition arise in modern man (because he is still so close to it) that all power of objective judgment departs from him, and the label that means "insane" to him is hunted out and affixed to the sinner who said "spirits."

It might be possible for us, instead of giving way to panic, to try to find out whether Swedenborg could not have believed in "spirits," given his background and experience, without having been "psychotic." (Many people nowadays cherish, one might almost say, a pet psychosis, convinced it can do no harm provided they know its name.)

Or again, it might be worth while, if it is true that Swedenborg had a "split" mind, to investigate whether that very fact could not have helped to produce phenomena for him of the kind that some scientists of today call "psychic," such as telepathic phenomena. Dr. Jaspers suggests that a split mind is almost essential for attaining the creative glimpse of the Absolute, either in art or in religion. If, in other words, the common-sense mind is in full control all the time, feeding and protecting the body, few if any magic casements will be opened on this or any other possible world.

Suppose we translate the "split" of the schizophrenic into the "dissociation" which may tend to produce either "inspiration" or psychical phenomena.

For, it can never be shouted too much, in the matter of understanding mental events "not by one road alone is so great a goal reached."

Arthur Koestler in Arrival and Departure speaks of a childhood puzzle that looked like a tangle of red and blue lines. But if you put a blue tracing paper over it a clown emerged. And if you put red tracing paper over it a lion emerged. You can explain man both ways, he says; "the method is correct, and the picture is complete