Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/265

XVIII ] so manifest that they could communicate their thoughts by words through another man, and even by letters, for they have sometimes and indeed often directed my hand when writing as though it were entirely their own, so that they thought that it was they themselves who were writing—which is so true that I can declare it with certainty, and if they were permitted they could write in their own peculiar style, which I know from some little experience, but this is not permitted." 44

He tells himself why he disliked to function as a medium. After mentioning that he had seen and spoken with many of his friends, he says: "They have desired me to tell their friends that they are alive and to write and tell them what their condition is, even as I had related to themselves many things about that of their friends here. But I replied that were I to tell their friends such things . . . they would not believe but would call them delusions, would scoff at them, and would ask for signs and miracles before they would believe, and I should merely expose myself to their derision. For at heart men deny the existence of spirits, and even those who do not deny it are unwilling to hear that anyone can speak with spirits." 45

So he continued for a long time at least to keep his strange new experiences as his private field of study. But as he had a correct idea of how the "learned" would regard these studies, he did not bother much with what is now called "evidential" material. He noted his own mental and physical states when he seemed to himself to be in communication with the other world, and he considered its chief features and in what it differed from our world. He gave especial care to the study of time and space, a great deal to memory and "speech," and some to "spheres" or "auras"; and if he had not unfailingly insisted that he was making these observations on another plane than ours, their keenness and suggestiveness would have attained recognition even here.

It is no loss of time to follow Swedenborg's probing excursions into these unorthodox fields.