Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/267

XIX ] although it was a real enough expression of their mental and emotional states. As he said: "I have frequently conversed with spirits concerning the idea of place and distance among them—that it is not anything real, but appears as if it were, being nothing but their states of thought and affection which are thus varied, and are in this manner presented to view in the world of spirits . . . the spirits to whom bodily and earthly ideas adhere do not apprehend this, for they suppose that the case is exactly as they see it to be. Such spirits can hardly be brought to believe otherwise than that they are living in the body, and are not willing to be persuaded they are spirits and thus scarcely that there is any appearance or any fallacy in relation to the matter, for they desire to live in fallacies." 2

He told them that "it is thought which conjoins, for to thought there is neither place nor distance . . ." and, elsewhere, he wrote that the case was the very same with men in the flesh. Men's souls were "constantly bound to some society of spirits and of angels . . . it matters not that they are distant from one another on earth . . . still they can be together in the same society—those who live in charity in an angelic society, and those who live in hatreds and such evils in an infernal society. In like manner it matters not that there be many together on earth in one place, for still they are all distinct in accordance with the nature of their life and of their states, and each one may be in a different society." 3

In the same paragraph, he touched on apparitions. "Men, who are distant from one another some hundreds or thousands of miles, may when they appear to the internal sense, be so near each other that some of them may touch, according to their situation." And a kind of two-oway telepathy: "Thus if there were a number of people on earth whose spiritual sight was opened, they might be together and converse together, though one was in India and another in Europe, and this also has been shown me."

Swedenborg did not think that this would necessarily be by means of their "spirit-bodies" or psychic organisms. "I have been informed," he said, "both by conversation with angels and by living experience, that spirits as spirits, in regard to the organic forms which constitute their bodies, are not [always?] in the place where they are seen, but may be far away and yet appear there." 4