Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/190

174 that there is a white patch. How that is changed into the idea of an egg is still a mystery.

Swedenborg calls this a "material idea" and says, as does of course Mr. Carington, that memory helps to classify the sense report. "There is as much memory as there is experience of the senses," 13 Swedenborg said, not the whole story by far according to him; he meant the kind of memory he called "external," but this is what Mr. Carington comes to write about when he develops his "psychon" theory of mind.

All ideas, sense reports, and images he proposes to call "psychons." The mind, for him, is a system of these units or psychons, held together by associative links, as a material system of particles may be held together by the force of gravitation. And, for him, "consciousness" is that system of forces which unites the psychons, and it is no more a "stuff" than is gravitation. For him there is no "ego" or its equivalent, no boxlike container, which is conscious of them.

The "self" is the semipermanent mass or nucleus of psychons which has its origin in sense reports, plus the images and ideas which have gathered round them, plus "events of our earlier life." Our "self" is our psychon-system. "Wherever there are two or more associated psychons there will be some sort or degree of 'consciousness' between them."

These may be strange words and stranger ideas to many people, yet it is absolutely necessary to think a little about what a mind is or is not before beginning the attempt to understand the extraordinary mind of Emanuel Swedenborg, and, if only as a hypothesis, one must try to think in the terms that have proved useful for the elucidation of psychic phenomena.

Now, if, in Mr. Carington's words, there can be some degree of consciousness among associated psychons in the same mind (or psychon-system) it follows that there can be subsystems within it—moods, sentiments, repressed complexes, "full-blown secondary personality." But, not only that, the individual psychon-system is capable of "entering as a component into super-systems."

The common subconscious of mankind would be such a supersystem, in which, according to Mr. Carington, the individual would really only be a kind of condensation, but some individuals—about