Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/316

300 light. There even the necessity for hallucinating oneself a body seems to have vanished, though blissful consciousness remained; but in the lowest realms of the spirit world the inhabitants attempt to carry out "the lowest functions of the body."

In the societies of the lower heavens, he often said, the spirits, although they may reproduce seeming earth conditions, experience a flow and a change in themselves and their environments according to their ethical state. Their houses, gardens, clothes, even faces, vary. If evil or insincerity had crept into their minds "when they go out, the garden products seem to have either vanished or changed as regards varieties, or beauty or brightness." Then they begin to think about what they may have thought or done, and if they repent, "the former loveliness returns. Spots on their clothes call for another examination of conscience, before the garments are again lustrous, white or roseate," and "maidens are also admonished through changes of beauty in the face." 38

Swedenborg said he "wondered exceedingly" that spirits and angels noticed these curious aspects of their life so little, but he concluded it was because they did not "reflect" on them, or, as we might say, no externally acquired knowledge from material things reminded them that once life was not in such a flux.

Modern psychical researchers sometimes stop measuring "quantitative phenomena" and speculate on what life apart from the body might be like. Whately Carington thinks that

Mr. Carington had not read Swedenborg.39 Indeed, Swedenborg's convictions as to the illusory reality of the other world he only wrote about explicitly in his private notebooks, no doubt