Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/230

214 This would explain, if nothing else did, the interesting fact that in the so-called Spiritual Diary, mainly kept during 1747 and 1748, he often has five or six entries for the same day, each of them dated and paragraphed separately. On examining the manuscript it is found that these entries often vary startlingly in the handwriting,37 as they do in the topics. Swedenborg kept a travel diary in 1739,38 often putting a week's entries on a single page in a hurried but normal style. Comparing this with a page of the Spiritual Diary, there are often far greater variations in style noticeable between the entries of a single day (or night) in it than there are in the entries for the days of a whole week in the travel diary.

One observes further that when the Spiritual Diary notes are in the same or similar violent "automatic" type of script as passages in The Word Explained, they are usually of the same character—attacks on the Jews, interpretation of the Old Testament in terms of the New, or else accounts of what might be called his "automatic" cast of characters—such as, among others, one "Mahomet" and a "Dragon."

A graphologist could live a long and thrilling life with Swedenborg's handwritings alone, but here let it be noted only that these different "styles" offer a good guide at least to knowing whether Swedenborg was in a normal or in a specially dissociated state of mind when he used them. The violent automatic is used in most of those strange accounts that have puzzled his readers—the visits to the realms of spirits of other planets, and the report of the Last Judgment.39 There are other good reasons for believing that he was in trance or semitrance when he wrote these passages, but the handwriting is convincing, being about the same as in the passages which he says were written by "spirits" through his hand. (He says elsewhere that in regard to "visions" he was in the spirit when he saw them and returned into the body to write the account of them, presumably still exalted.40)

To return to his first script, The Word Explained. Besides the Neoplatonism and the physiology that managed to creep in here and there, and the dominating Bible exegesis, there was yet another visible strand. He indicated its separateness from the rest by indenting the paragraphs. This seemed to be himself speaking as himself