Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/280

264 was only apparent. It was really transmission of ideas; obviously spirits had no "real" vocal apparatus and no real air to set in motion. He had no hesitation at all about setting them right on this point. Not without a certain satisfaction he tells that "When a certain spirit who had been known to me in the life of the body conversed with me he appeared to be as though he moved his lips and as though he spoke with his lips; which, when I mentioned it to him, he said that so he did speak with his lips to me; but when I told him in reply that spirits have no lips and that consequently he could not speak with them, he nevertheless persisted, until he was instructed by a lively demonstration . . ." 3

Swedenborg does not explain how—but one has a faint feeling that it was perhaps the spirit of one of those members of the Board of Mines who kept him so long from becoming a full Assessor.

Perhaps he very soon explained to the said spirit that, if the deceased is "utterly unconscious" that his sensations are not physically "real," then, in spite of the absence of "any organ or member of sense" they are real.

When "spirits" spoke with him, however, he noted they did have a reason for believing their speech to be one of real sound—that is, of pronounced words. Among themselves, he soon found out (being as curious as when he first went to England) they had a universal way of communicating by means of ideas, or clusters of images, and in using this they attended only to "the sense of the words"—not reflecting, he said, on "the words or articulations" any more than a man does when he speaks. But, Swedenborg maintained, when a spirit turned to him and transmitted its image-ideas, then "their ideas fall with me into words, and thus they suppose that the words and tone of voice are from them." 4

That is to say (using the Willett report terms) the "spirit" telepathizes its message in image form to that layer of Swedenborg's mind which is receptive to it and which can retransmit it to the conscious part either as an image or by using the vocabulary in his memory, and the machinery of his physical brain for writing or for hearing.

Swedenborg's reply presumably seemed to him to return in the same way, while the "spirit" heard and understood the words as if