Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/324

308 Höpken was right, these "memorabilia" do present a stumbling block. They are too well suited to their expressed purpose to have just happened as Swedenborg perambulated the heavens. In fact he expressly says of one of them that it was "written against Dr. Ernesti," a German theologian who had attacked him.12 But he also describes just how it took place in the spirit world, Dr. Ernesti being represented by one of the spirits "adjoined" to him. In this particular case the easier way out is to suppose that Swedenborg did what he so often said the spirits did; he saw and heard what he wanted to see and hear, by means of "phantasy." Likewise when he described how he heard discussions in the spirit world between disciples of Aristotle, Descartes and Leibnitz,13 and so forth. Vivid and circumstantial though these accounts are, they prove too obviously what Swedenborg wants them to prove.

Of course this could be said of all his other-world experiences. But there is a vast difference between the hesitating, fragmentary, feeling-his-way notations of the diary, mixed as they are with stuff evidently from his unconscious, and the posed recitals of the later books. Yet many of these recitals contain elements that one recognizes from his diary notes, so that Swedenborg might feel he was in his right to say the stories were true, since he had made them up out of actual observations. (Many a good reporter has made up a nice, connected story out of events that happened, but not at the same time and place as represented.)

Swedenborg was in the spirit world one day, so the story at the beginning of Conjugial Love starts, when he saw an angel who told him the other members of his society could not believe that among the Christians in the spirit world such crass ignorance prevailed as to the real nature of the joys of heaven. They said to the angel messenger that he must go to the spirit world and collect newly arrived spirits, find out what were their ideas of heavenly happiness and then give it to them, for "You know that everyone that has desired heaven . . . is introduced after death into those particular joys which he had imagined . . ."

Six companies of spirits were selected "among the wisest," and they were brought to their "heavens," where were "those who in the former world had had the same conception of the joys of heaven."