Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/271

XIX ] at its persistence. In the summer of 1744, in his draft of the book on the five senses, he sketched out what he meant to say about memory—for instance that the memory was the "field" (campus) "which the external senses establish, as also the internal." 16

What he thought changed was "the cortical substance," but by that he usually meant the energy-stuff of the psychic organism, in this case its brain, from which the physical brain derived, not the other way around. "That all thoughts are changes of state is confirmed by all philosophers, but that such changes really exist, and indeed in an eminent organism, has not yet been demonstrated, nor can it be demonstrated until the brain shall have been scanned . . ." 17 and the connection between superior and inferior forms made clear, or the mind-body relationship again. This is what he meant to do in his future brain studies, but as it happened he completed his study of memory, so it seemed to him, in the other world, where he had the vast advantage of being "taught by conversation with souls and spirits on this subject," and indeed of actually seeing the field of memory in operation.

In brief, he would have agreed with Bergson that "memory is something other than a function of the brain, and there is not only a difference of degree, but a difference in the nature of perception and remembrance." 18

Not unlike Bergson either, Swedenborg had decided that there were different levels of consciousness and subconsciousness in man, and "memories" corresponding to each.

First of all, Swedenborg maintained, there was the external or corporeal memory of "material" ideas, by which he meant those images which man had acquired as a result of the physical "affection" (stimulus) of his sense organs, and which was "useful for man inasmuch as it is suitable to those things which his life in the body and the world require." 19

This external memory, dependent on sense reports or their associated ideas, is the one, according to Swedenborg, which seems to die or to become at least passive immediately on the death of the body.20 But after a brief period of stupor, the recollection of physical sensation is still so strong that the recently arrived souls continue to think of or to remember themselves as they were in the body, with clothes, possessions, appetites, etc., and thus in a sense they re-create