Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/301



F Swedenborg had only been willing to be considered allegorical in his other-world reports, there would have been no great difficulty about understanding those likenesses between spirits and their environments, which he set forth so vividly. No more difficulty than in understanding that a gloomy-tempered man makes a gloomy house or garden for himself, or that a gay person prefers gay colors. In a sense a house expresses a man; indeed it "corresponds" to him. Swedenborg would have agreed, to be sure; he felt that his own symmetrical garden with the artfully trimmed box trees "corresponded" to one who loved science.

But Swedenborg went much farther; he made a system of it, being a born system-maker. He believed of course that everything which takes place in the mind, even if still in the body, really takes place in the spiritual world, which is not in our kind of space. All psychological processes were immaterial events which could have an effect in the material world. And these effects were often "correspondences"; they expressed either directly or in symbolic form their spiritual cause. Smiles and scowls might be direct material expressions of spiritual events.

If the soul had left the physical envelope, it entered, according to Swedenborg, into a world where its states of mind and mood had vastly greater scope than merely throwing a cup of coffee on the floor if it were angry. That world had a kind of malleable atmosphere, or immaterial substance, which the feelings of the spirit could affect in various startling ways. Not only could it "project" its own sane or mad fancies on it so that they actually became visible to other spirits, even seeming real to both the projector and witnesses, but a luridly wicked mind involuntarily gave off effects that looked like smoke and flame, because that "corresponded" to its nature.

They were not, however, "real," nor were the dark caves, the dirty brothels, or the sandy deserts real—they were self-created by