Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/269

XIX ] changes of state; that is to say, they appear in the world of spirits as changes of place, but in heaven as changes of state."

Swedenborg realized that "thinking makes it so." He also could conceive that a three-dimensional space might be interimagined by a group who would then seem to themselves to live in it. But, as Tyrrell says, "If problems about space are mooted, people turn at once to geometry. It seems that it may be more enlightening to turn to the observer. These suppositional spaces provide a universe with plenty of room in it." That is, every like-minded group, or even individual, could have its own hallucinated three-dimensional space, which "they no doubt would call 'physical' space, and this would be spatially unrelated to what we call physical space." Yet it would not be entirely subjective, but the question of "where" such spaces could be "simply disappears and becomes meaningless." 8

Swedenborg, despairing of "natural terms" with which to explain these subtleties, did not think the hallucinatory space was entirely subjective either. Again and again he repeated that the reality of the apparent change of place was due to a real change of state—mental or emotional. Later on he tried to sum it up:

"Approaches are likenesses of the state of the interiors, and separations are unlikenesses; and for this reason those are near each other who are in like states, and those are at a distance who are in unlike states; and spaces in heaven are simply the external conditions corresponding to internal states. For the same reason the heavens are distinct from each other, so are the societies of each heaven and the individuals in each society; and furthermore the hells are entirely separated from the heavens, because they are in a contrary state.9

"For the same reason, again, anyone in the spiritual world who intensely desires the presence of another comes into his presence, for he thereby sees him in thought, and puts himself in his state; and conversely one is separated from another so far as he is averse to him . . . whenever in that world several are together in one place they are visible so long as they agree, but vanish as soon as they disagree." 10

Presumably they seem to themselves to walk away. Swedenborg said, "Walking, going and departure are nothing else but changes