Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/237

XVII ]. This is a representative vision which has been made most familiar to me, but it is rather obscure; it differs entirely from the common imagination of men." 15

Possibly this was the state in which the Danish General Tuxen found him many years later when Tuxen happened to enter unannounced in Swedenborg's cabin on board ship off Elsinore. "I found the Assessor seated in undress, his elbows on the table, his hands supporting his face, which was turned towards the door, his eyes open and much elevated. I was so imprudent as immediately to address him, expressing my happiness at seeing and speaking with him. At this he recovered himself (for he had really been in trance or ecstasy as his posture evinced), and, rising with some confusion, advanced a few steps from the table in singular and visible uncertainty, expressed by his countenance and hands, from which, however, he soon recovered." 16

(It is worth noting that in Of the Worship and Love of God Swedenborg makes one of his characters come out of a state of ecstasy in this way: "She briskly wiped her eyes with her finger, that her mind might recover its former ken." 17)

Swedenborg's description of the third kind of spiritual sight is as if he considered himself a stationary spectator (as indeed he always considered his physical body stationary in trance experience) with other-world visions being induced (or telepathized) to his brain, or, as he also put it, with mental images being represented to him. He was sometimes hard put to it to decide whether they were of symbolic significance or not, but he often says that his "conversation" with the more evolved spirits was by means of mental images.

All the other states he definitely distinguished from the one he called the fourth kind: "that in which a man is when separated from the body and in the spirit. In such a state a man cannot know otherwise than that he is in wakefulness, and in the enjoyment of all his senses, as touch, sight, hearing, and I cannot doubt respecting the other senses. The sight is more exquisite than in a state of wakefulness, nor does man perceive it any otherwise than such, except by this that a man [who is in such a state] relapses into the wakefulness of the body." 18

By this he clearly means that he comes out of the deep trance