Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/244

228 sensations (their psychon-systems by now apparently having forgotten) they would sometimes pester him—such as the spirit "so goaded by a longing for a linen under-garment, that he said he could scarcely live if I did not put one upon him." The spirit showed nice psychological distinction, however. "I asked him whether he had a sensation together with mine, when I touched the linen for which he so much longed," Swedenborg noted, and "He said that he had no sensation himself, but he perceived that I had." 33

Much more elaborate conversations were held, however, for small talk about physical sensations did not interest Swedenborg, and he rather disapproved of the spirits who would not move on to higher things. But that ideas could be made visible greatly interested him. In one entry he said that the spirits told him that his ideas "appeared before them as if alive . . . so that when peoples, camps, and the like were displayed representatively, they appeared before spirits just as if they saw them . . ." Here it is not clear whether he saw them himself, but he said, "In like manner representations of spirits very frequently have appeared to me, when my eyes were closed, entirely as alive, as if in the highest light." 34

The more advanced spirits, or angels as he called them, were especially expert in this kind of communication, in fact he sometimes called it "angelic speech."

Connected with what might be termed the telepathic facility of the psychic organism was its extreme responsiveness to suggestion, or what Swedenborg spoke of as "induced phantasies." They could be good and they could be bad, they could be heaven and they could be hell. It was a case not of "seeing is believing" but very much of "believing is seeing."

He tells of one newcomer—a good soul—who "knew not at first where he was, supposing himself to be in the world altogether as if living in the body, for of this impression are all souls recent from the life of the body, inasmuch as they are not then gifted with reflection upon place, time, the objects of the senses and the like," but when he discovered how it was with him he began to feel "a certain anxiety," "not knowing whither he should betake himself, where he should dwell, etc."

Good spirits and angels came to his rescue, and by means of this suggestibility of his new form, they gave him "whatever he was