Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/263

XVIII ] shirt, had been delirious and spoken strange things about angels, had spent an undue length of time washing his feet, and in general behaved very queerly.34

Exaggerated as this undoubtedly was, some of it had a basis in fact, as can be seen from what Swedenborg wrote in an aside of The Word Explained about the spirits having persuaded him to wash his feet "when I was in that state." 35 And in his diary he speaks of hypocrites in the world who can be very persuasive, as "when they persuade others that I was insane." 36 Did he think he had been? No, but he was apparently aware that he might have been thought so. He said he had chanced several times to have spirits "act out their insanities" through him, but "it was granted me to know that it proceeded from spirits and not from me," and he was "told" that a man who had "faith" might sometimes "appear to men not like another," or that he might be "insane in the body but not in mind or thought." 37

"It is wonderful," he comes right out and says, "that I have been obsessed, and yet nothing has ever injured me—further, I could enjoy my rational mind, just as if they were not present." 38

Although in the above entries, from 1748, he speaks as if that state of occasional obsession no more occurred, he continues to note that certain spirits who cannot get used to the new existence try to get a kind of bodily satisfaction through his senses. One in particular was told by Swedenborg that he should desire to be free of physical desires, but the spirit said that he was a young man and wished to return into the world. Swedenborg did not oblige him, as he said he was a wicked young man, but elsewhere he complains that spirits wanting bodily experience try to make him eat greedily, seeking to make him take up his "almonds, cakes, pears and pigeons" 39 with his hands and shove them into his mouth, or to make him buy or steal something they covet. But by this he usually means that they excite his desires.

He often repeated that spirits could not "see" the objects around him unless he directed his attention to the objects, thus forming an image in his mind which then became visible to them. In fact, he said, even if he were only thinking of certain persons or places the spirits would be sure that he really was with those people or in those places.