Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/239

XVII ] lives in the body, and many will say that it is all fancy, others that I relate such things in order to gain credence [presumably for his theology], and other will make other objections. But by all this I am not deterred, for I have seen, I have heard, I have felt." 21

Emanuel Swedenborg was a brave man. Charles XII, the warrior king, was no braver. But Swedenborg might have flinched from publishing his other-world observations had he known that they would generally be taken as of things he had seen, heard, and felt materially. Even a psychic researcher has been heard to say, "Why, Swedenborg, he believed that there were actually palaces and gardens and food and drink and so on in the other world!"

Swedenborg claimed that before his "sight was opened" the idea he cherished concerning the other life "differed but little from that of others"; he thought it must be immaterial, and, being so, that either "no idea of it could be grasped, or it was nothing." Either incomprehensible or nonexistent. "And yet," he said, "the fact is just the reverse, for unless spirits were organized, and unless angels were organized substances, they could neither speak, nor see, nor think." 22

He did not say or believe that the organized substance was material in any sense we know. He said it had "extension," not materiality. He had long ago convinced himself on scientific grounds that something could exist such as a magnetic field which had extension, although immaterial, and he had also made up his mind that "the animal spirits" constituted a subtle kind of organism used by the rational mind after withdrawal from the body. He scorned the idea of spirits having fleshly body and organs, but he insisted strenuously that they were capable of sensations, since it was the spirit in the body of the living man and not the body that was "having" the sensation. (That "psychic factors" or detached thoughts could drift around without either being part of a thinking subject or originating from one, he specifically rejected.23)

In a passage that fits nicely into the idea that the psychon-system carries its sense impressions with it for a while after "death," he wrote: "Certain [spirits] greatly wondered that spirits had the sense of touch, and, indeed an exquisite one, when yet they were