Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/273

XIX ] houses I could also have found the house where he had lived." 25

He concluded that the reason spirits were not "allowed," generally speaking, to remember more details from their earth life was that the Lord meant them to lead a more "interior" life now, but he often sorrowfully mentions that spirits do not at all relish this wise provision or even realize it. "Souls are not at all aware but that they speak from their own memory, and do in fact sometimes thus speak, as I have heard, but then it is from the interior memory, through which the things in their corporeal memory are excited." 26

Here Swedenborg touches on what he considered the relationship between the different levels of memory or "memories."

Swedenborg defines the corporeal or external memory as that which is useful and necessary for life in the body, saying moreover that this memory only retains those things on which man has consciously "reflected"—his word for "attended to." "Although the human sight is diffused into thousands and thousands of objects," he says, "yet out of those the external memory retains only those which it has reflected on." 27

This is not too dissimilar to Bergson's saying that "perception" is essentially dependent on what is useful to the body, so that only the object is selected, and therefore perceived and remembered, which serves that "centre of action," the body. Bergson also supposes "a plane of pure memory where our spirit preserves in every detail the picture of our past life," and, according to him, it is from this enlarged plane that consciousness selects the recollections that are to stimulate the apparatus of the physical brain into present perception.28

According to Swedenborg, the interior memory "is as it were the interior faculty of taking forth and viewing the particulars of the corporeal memory." 29

And the "plane of pure memory" of Bergson corresponds exactly to the "interior memory" of Swedenborg in its all-registering capacity, even of things to which the attention has not been consciously directed, "so that," as Swedenborg says, "there is not even the least thing whatever that has reached the sight of the body and whatever has reached the internal sense but is most accurately impressed . . ." 30