Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/205

XV ] experiments, have them properly recorded and controlled by trustworthy witnesses?" Why, in short, did he not behave as if he lived in the twentieth century and was a member of the Psychical Research Society in Tavistock Square, London, or at 40 East 34th St., New York!

The mental climate has to be considered. On the one hand were the few Voltairean intellectuals who would have greeted such experimenting as ridiculous. Few of them were as liberal as the eighteenth-century Danish playwright Ludvig Holberg (rightly called the Danish Molière), a most learned and acute man, who, being asked if he believed in "ghosts," said that although no doubt most of such stories were due to a superheated imagination he would not altogether deny them, chiefly because "many credible people testify that they have both heard and seen things which they by no means can explain naturally," and also, he said, because he himself together with another person once had an experience which completely convinced him of the reality of such experience.20

Such an attitude was rare, especially in a man like Holberg whose genius was entirely at the service of rationality. But, besides the rationalists who then kept their opinions more or less to themselves, there were the orthodox Christians, like Count Tessin, who thanked God that their "faith" was so strong they could not believe in Swedenborg's alleged intercourse with spirits. And then there was the semi-medieval mass of the people and the still-powerful church.

In Sweden right into the eighteenth century people were brought into court for witchcraft, if they showed "psychic" or even unusual mental powers, and sometimes condemned to death.21 Late in the seventeenth century, in Swedenborg's own lifetime, the witchcraft hysteria in the country took on terrific proportions, and while most of it was "superheated imagination" it was also mentioned at a trial that some of the "possessed" could describe things that were going on in a different part of the city of Stockholm at the same time. It was of course all ascribed to the Devil, and sentences of decapitation and burning at the stake were frequent.

It did not conduce to much public appraisal of clairvoyance or kinder abilities. Perhaps it was for this reason that hardly any