Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/250

234 little bone of supposed fact, only to have to confess later that he had been wrong. His assertions in regard to memory, for instance, had often to be modified—in other words, his behavior was like that of a scientist coming into an entirely new field armed with an inadequate working hypothesis, and having to yield to first-hand observation of the phenomena.

He was right in having said that popular notions of heaven and hell were simply that there was felicity in the one and torment in the other, but he must have known that there had been people before him, even in Europe, who had progressed farther. Many of Jacob Boehme's sayings10 about self-will being the cause of torment in hell and abandonment of self being the cause of "heaven" even here on earth, could have been said (and often were) by Swedenborg.

Indeed the ethical, mystical and religious speculations of Boehme bear so much resemblance to Swedenborg's that later on he was constantly being asked if he had read Boehme.

This he constantly denied, but he could easily have found the same ideas in other books to which he had access. J. G. Gichtel,11 who lived forty years in Holland and who wrote a book whose doctrine of the Grand Man much resembles Swedenborg's, was a disciple of Boehme's, while others of the "occult" fraternities entertained many of the ideas of the Beyond which Swedenborg seemed to regard as "arcana" revealed to him alone.

And, on the spirit hypothesis, perhaps they were, as far as he knew.

But where others had described heaven and hell as immaterial states of mind in exalted but vague language (though often surprisingly similar) Swedenborg was as specific as when he had been sent out by the Board of Mines to report on the supplies of charcoal and metal in Sweden. His contribution was not so much toward a new understanding of those ultimate conditions of joy or sorrow as toward a factual survey, more especially of the in-between state, which he called the world of spirits. It was, he said, beyond our space and time, yet with local or psychological space and time, into which human beings consciously arrived soon after the departure of the spirit from the material body. Unconsciously, he maintained, their spirits while still in the body could commune with this region