Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/241

XVII ] devoid of everything organic or extended." The phrase "or extended" was added by Swedenborg when he was commenting on this interview, and he also said that "this shows very clearly that the learned have no other conception of the soul or spirit than that it is mere thought, and so cannot but believe that it will vanish when they die." 26

Apart from the ghosts of the learned professions, however, Swedenborg usually had the opposite opinion to combat, of which the following is a little example:

"A certain novitiate spirit, on hearing me speak about the spirit, asked, 'What is a spirit?' supposing himself to be a man. And when I told him that there is a spirit in every man, and that in respect to his life a man is a spirit, that the body is merely to enable a man to live on the earth, and that the flesh and bones, that is, the body, does not live or think at all; seeing that he was at a loss, I asked him whether he had ever heard of the soul. 'What is a soul?' he replied, 'I do not know what a soul is.' I was then permitted to tell him that he himself was now a soul, or spirit, as he might know from the fact that he was over my head, and was not standing on the earth. I asked him whether he could not perceive this, and then he fled away in terror, crying out, 'I am a spirit! I am a spirit!' " 27

It must be admitted that when Swedenborg spoke of spirits and angels as being organized "substances," he laid himself open to misinterpretation. We find it hard to think of a substance as immaterial. What did he mean by the "form" of the spirit? Later he was to say that it constitutes the "cutaneous covering of the spiritual body which spirits and angels have. By means of such covering which is taken from the natural world, their spiritual bodies maintain existence; for the natural is the utmost containant; consequently there is no spirit or angel who was not born a man." 28 (There are no wings on Swedenborg's angels.)

An angel, he came to believe, was a human spirit who had developed far enough to be admitted into a higher spiritual sphere (various kinds of "heaven"). As for the cutaneous covering taken from the "natural" world, here a backward glance must be taken at the conclusions he had arrived at in The Economy of the Animal Kingdom and in a lesser, unpublished, work, The Animal Spirit.