Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/243

XVII ] fact. To use our terms again, the something in the human mind which can create persons and events in dreams, which can project hallucinations as if they were external, which can also succumb to suggestion by a hypnotist so that he can induce "sensations" on it—that something, called by Tyrrell "the stage-manager," becomes a main factor in the "world" observed by Swedenborg. Indeed it becomes a good servant or a bad master according to the spiritual state, one might say, of the "novitiate spirit."

In modern experimental telepathy, as has been mentioned, images of drawings have been transferred between "incarnate" minds without the aid of the usual sense mechanisms. Among discarnate minds, according to Swedenborg, something similar takes place; indeed, it is exactly the same but, being unhampered by the material body, it takes place on a grand scale. Here telepathy is an immense aid to communication. Really only newcomers use anything so clumsy as speech (and even then it is not what they think it is; Swedenborg took pains to explain to a spirit that the lips with which the spirit thought he spoke were not "real"). The more advanced inhabitants communicate by means of "representations"; that is, by mental images. But there is nothing vague about these, they can be made to appear as if they were "there."

"I also spoke with spirits by ideas alone, without words, and they understood as well as with words, by my merely representing from internal sight, as was the case when I ate," so Swedenborg entered in his diary June 8, 1748. "I represented merely from the internal sight what I ate without words, and they clearly comprehended; and if also at the same time [were represented] these things, viz., whatever a man has on his table or whatever is worn on the same occasion, or whatsoever it might be which was displayed to the sight, they were immediately understood and seen by the spirits by the discourse of ideas without words." 32

Other sensations of his, he said, could be transmitted to the spirits; "thought" was not only visible, but "perceptible," he could (as a hypnotist can) transmit the taste of what he ate, etc., but he made careful note of the fact that unless he "reflected"—that is, gave his attention to—what he was perceiving, the spirits did not perceive it. When some of his new acquaintances had discovered, he said, that through Swedenborg they could reëxperience bodily