Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/272

256 themselves as they were. Out of these memories they scaffold "the phantasies which they love," which he also now and then describes as a kind of dream world. When they are in "these physical phantasies," he says, they are really asleep and dreaming.21

They cannot, however, remember at will details from their life on earth, which often seems to make them indignant. ("Indignation and restlessness," Swedenborg says elsewhere, are characteristics of the less evolved spirits.) He tried to soothe a certain morose spirit by telling him that he ought to be grateful that he was now gifted with a much subtler understanding and not mind being unable to remember everything, but the spirit seems to have been no more grateful than the elderly in the body are when their memory fails to function.22 But, as with them, so the memory of spirits can be excited into action by giving it a clue (Carington's "K" idea).

"Souls in the other life seem indeed to themselves to have lost the memory of particulars, or the corporeal memory in which merely material ideas inhere, because they are unable to excite anything from that memory, though they still have the full faculty of perceiving and speaking as in the body. . . . Still, that memory remains, not however as active but as passive [subconscious?], and it can be excited by others, for whatever men may have done, seen or heard in their lifetime, when these things are spoken of to them with a like idea, then they at once recognize them and know that they have said, seen or heard such things, which has been evinced to me by such abundant proofs that I could, in confirmation, fill many pages with them." 23

Swedenborg asserts that in the first bewildered period following the death-shock, spirits do not always know even who they are, as when he mentions a spirit who first recognized himself from seeing his own image in Swedenborg's mind.24 In another case, "A certain one whom I had not previously known, and who seemed to have but recently died, was with me today, and when it was permitted to inquire whence he came he was led by my memory through various cities which he did not know, but when he was conducted through his own city then he recognized the streets and everything connected; and if I had known the situation of the