Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/252

236 omitted or only referred in passing to what he meant by saying that the "objects" in the "other world" were "appearances" only. This may have been prudence on his part—orthodox churches still had power—for although his books were anonymous their authorship did leak out eventually; but he may also have become tired of forever having to explain his theory that matter was energy and psychic organisms still finer energy, and thought something still subtler which could be visibly projected by the psychic organism.

It may have been something like the weariness that overcomes the writer on psychical research, who has to say for the nth time something like "the dissociated fragment of the medium's personality and or the alleged communicating spirit," and who finally lapses into saying "the spirit" or "Jones," slipping in an "alleged" now and then to pacify his conscience.

In any case, Swedenborg thought that he had cited particular cases enough in the Arcana Celestia (eight volumes of which people could go and buy if they wanted to, and if they could read Latin). In Heaven and Hell (1758) he went in more for general principles, giving a partial survey of the world he felt he had visited without putting in very much of his theory about its "reality" and without quoting many of the specific experiences on which the survey was based.

It is convenient to take a look at this map14 before going into his absorbing account of what he felt was the symbiosis, the close "living-together," of men and spirits, especially Swedenborg's own case.

To read the map, his ideas must be reviewed once again. Swedenborg brought to his experiences the belief that man had several "natures," one dependent on the other, and yet, in subtle ways, each distinct and capable of taking dominion over the rest, because of a certain amount of free will. He also believed, as firmly as the most convinced worshiper of Brahman, that no "real" life existed except God's. The spirit or soul of man was created to be a receptacle of the divine life, whose essence was love and wisdom. With this indwelling capacity, the soul made for itself a physical body, vivifying it in every cell by means of "the animal spirits." This was itself a psychic organism, in between the material and the spiritual. It had its own kind of instinctive sensual mind which