Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/216

200 there is more in the avoidance of such topics than this. There is the primitive fear of letting the mind dwell on the thought of death. Or the equally primitive fear of ridicule.

For the unafraid, however, there is a vast realm of ideas necessarily connected with Swedenborg's beliefs regarding disembodied states. No intellect so mature as his, so well trained, with such an amount of scientific knowledge, has ever reported "from experience" what it was like to be "as a spirit among spirits, while still a man among men."

To the modern reader it may still remain a matter of speculation, but he has to note a good deal of similarity between these reports made by Swedenborg on "the new structural relationships" and the more recent findings of psychical research as to how these relationships ought to be if they were.

It is no use denying that any such modern reader is up against discouraging handicaps in studying Swedenborg for this purpose. If he follows him beyond 1745 he will be richly rewarded, but patience and understanding are needed. Time and again he will hold his head or wring his hands and ask: How could an extremely intelligent and scholarly man like Swedenborg mix up his subtle psychological observations with these fantastic interpretations of the Bible, and with ideas of the cosmos that seem to belong to the Kabbalah and other books which he used to disdain as "occult"?

No questions are more legitimate. Nor are they easily disposed of. Perhaps they never can be. But any approach to an answer must start with a consideration of what were the special reasons which led Swedenborg to believe he received his information from some source outside of himself, which he could not disregard, even though he knew with awful certainty what the "learned" would think of him.