Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/266



F a man who has followed the sea settles down on land in an office, he will continue just the same to will the air and notice the wind and the stars, as he goes to and from his cave; and so Swedenborg, with the best will in the world, could not become entirely theological; he kept casting side-glances at his previous interests, often dragging them by the ear into the most incongruous exegetical surroundings, where he could retain them only by the unfettered use of symbolism. But he loyally let them remain side-interests, and one has to dig them out piecemeal, mostly from his diaries, because there he did not always try to make them work to prove his theological points.

It was in his talks with what seemed to him spirits that his old interests of physics, physiology, and psychology mostly got a chance, and there is something convincing even in their fragmentary character. On the whole, as his other-world experiences continued, the fragments really turned out to fit together well enough to make a fairly consistent picture of the various phenomena which interested him. Of these the interlocking questions of time and space preoccupied him a good deal.

When he said that the spirits who were "near" him perceived his thoughts, he made it clear that the use of such a spatial word was only a makeshift. For in that world, he insisted, "change of place and distance is only an appearance, according to each one's state and its change." 1 If he were thinking of a certain topic, the spirits with whose mental or emotional state it had some relation would be "near" him; in fact their thoughts might be so closely linked to his that they would believe they were doing the meditating.

Space in their world, in other words, was "psychological"; something which, Swedenborg said, the angels or advanced spirits understood, but which was difficult to explain to newcomers, since to their view it really looked as if they were still in place and space. Swedenborg tried to make them understand that this was a kind of illusion,