Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/194

178 Mr. Tyrrell points out, all agree on certain features that apparitions have in common and on certain features that they never have, usually those dear to fiction-writers. "Ghosts" do not perform physical actions. The one thing, according to Mr. Tyrrell, which the perfect apparition is not—be it of the living, dying, or alleged dead—is physical. Literally "nothing" is there, even if you should feel the touch of a hand, for a sensation of touch can be hallucinated by the producer as well as any other sensation. You might even, he says, feel the hand of an apparition, while your own passed right through it.

Mr. Tyrrell catalogues the nineteen points of the Perfect Apparition with the conscientiousness of a judge at a fox—terrier show, and he convinces us that nearly all the apparitions of fiction show how "their authors have not even dimly conceived the idea of a visible, audible, and tangible, yet non-physical ghost."

But, "I have seen, I have heard, I have felt," Swedenborg said in solemnly asserting that his experiences in and of "the other world" were real. No well-meaning friend could budge him from that attitude.

Here it is extremely pertinent to ask what he meant by "real." In his diary he notes a "dream," which, however, was like a "wakeful persuasion of being awake," and in this state he saw a being "who appeared in all respects as a man," yet Swedenborg proved to him that he, the man, was a spirit, "by the fact that when he would touch me with his hand and arms, he actually passed through my body, though subsequently the experiment was made with a different result, as he did not pass through, and the sensation of touch was felt just as in the waking state." 17

Throughout his nearly thirty years of familiarity with "spirits," Swedenborg constantly insists that although "newly arrived" spirits only think they have physical bodies, still as long as they think it they have the same sensations as if they were actually in the flesh. In fact, according to Swedenborg, he spent much of his time in that world doing a kind of missionary work by explaining to its denizens something very similar to the modern theories of sense data. He tried to make them understand that, although they did feel the same old sensations, this did not mean that they weren't