Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/209

XV ] knew or of whom I could form no idea I neither could nor would wish to speak with."

In Mr. Whately Carington's terminology, Swedenborg needed an association or "K" idea in order to get in touch with the psychon-system, if such survived, of the deceased.

However, since the Queen herself knew about her secret correspondence with her brother, there is no way of proving that Swedenborg on the "producer" level of his personality had not got hold of the secret from the Queen's mind and dressed it up for his conscious mind as a communication from her brother.

But there is a story involving a secret which seems not to have been known to any living person, the story of the Marteville receipt.

Green's account to Kant of the case of the lost receipt was as follows: ". . . the widow of the Dutch ambassador in Stockholm, some time after the death of her husband was called upon by Croon, a goldsmith, to pay for a silver service which her husband had purchased from him. The widow was convinced her late husband had been much too precise and orderly not to have paid this debt, yet she was unable to find the receipt. In her sorrow, and because the amount was considerable, she requested Mr. Swedenborg to call at her house. After apologizing to him for troubling him, she said, that, if as all people say he possessed the extraordinary gift of conversing with the souls of the departed he would perhaps have the kindness to ask her husband how it was about the silver service. Swedenborg did not at all object to comply with her request. Three days afterwards the said lady had company at her house for coffee. Swedenborg called and in his cool way informed her that he had conversed with her husband. The debt had been paid seven months before his decease, and the receipt was in a bureau upstairs. The lady replied that the bureau had been quite cleared out, and that the receipt was not found among all the papers. Swedenborg said that her husband had described to him how after pulling out the left-hand drawer a board would appear which required to be drawn out, when a secret compartment would be disclosed containing his private Dutch correspondence as well as the receipt. Upon hearing this description the whole company arose and accompanied the lady into the room upstairs. The bureau was opened; they did as they were directed; the compartment was