Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/284

268 from the face, speech and actions of another, of what quality he is, whether stimulated or sincere, and many other things which are manifest to a man's internal sense." 16 (Swedenborg had used this sense of his in spotting a dishonest servant.)

This power was, he said, much more perfect with spirits, with whom the quality of another spirit could be at once revealed "even from his mute presence." He explained this by saying that the "interiors" of either man or spirit "are in a kind of unconscious activity" and that this forms a kind of sphere which "not only extends itself to a distance but that sometimes also, when the Lord permits, is in various ways made perceptible to the senses." 17

As spirits, worse luck, generally have an exquisite sense of odor (according to Swedenborg), they were very sensitive to those spheres of other spirits which manifested themselves through smell. There was a definite smell-register. When the sphere of hypocrites was "turned into an odor" there was "a stench of vomit." "When the sphere of those who have studied eloquence in order that everything may redound to self-admiration, is made odoriferous, it is like the odor of burnt bread." 18 (One of the heavenly odors, he said, was like good bread freshly baked.) Mere pleasure hunters who had neither believed in nor loved anything had a sphere as of excrement in odor; that of the adulterous was even worse. If the sphere of the revengeful and cruel were offered to the nose, the stench was cadaverous. The sordidly avaricious smelled like mice, and those who persecute the innocent like lice.19

The stench of a certain woman who though fair was evil was perceived as "deadly" he said, yet she knew nothing of it. Certain spirits were sometimes surprised when others fled at their approach; their circumambient perfume was unknown to them.

Swedenborg developed a whole doctrine of odors. The societies of the other world had their own general spheres which also could manifest as odors. The "infernals" love stenches; they cannot bear the heavenly odors of fruit and bread and flowers and frankincense. In fact it makes them sick. "Once I saw," Swedenborg tells, "an astute devil like a leopard ascending a high mountain where there were celestial angels encompassed by a hedge of olive trees; after he had drawn in a full breath of that odor, he was seized with spasms, became stiffened in all his joints, writhed like a snake, and