Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/335

XXIV ] Even in his most private diary Swedenborg hardly ever put down names, only feelings.

According to his theories there was nothing to prevent his having met an unattained love in the world of spirits even before either of their deaths. In a charming passage,8 he describes how once, when he was "in the spirit" and yet now and then concerned with worldly matters, he was asked by a teacher-spirit what it meant that he kept appearing and disappearing from their sight, was he really of their world? Swedenborg explained that he was of both worlds. Since to him man's real self was his spiritual self, he believed that when man was in such deep abstract thought that his soul was unaware of the body, or when he was asleep, his spiritual self, or soul, might become visible in the spirit world. Such thinkers are sometimes seen there, he asserted, deep in thought, visible to the inhabitants, but not aware of them, except in cases such as Swedenborg's, amphibious as he was. In this way too, he had seen, he said, and even conversed, with people still alive, whose spirit was set free in sleep.

But it is guesswork as to whether he felt he had formed a kind of precelestial marriage with the Countess Gyllenborg while they were both alive. He had rented an apartment in their house in Stockholm, calling them his friends, as early as 1733. The Count had borrowed money from Swedenborg. After the Count's death, Swedenborg noted in the diary that Gyllenborg became one of the worst of spirits; one, moreover, who was always trying to injure Swedenborg. The Countess died in 1769. It was after that date that Swedenborg is said to have spoken of a Countess Gyllenborg as his future mate to the English Member of Parliament, C. A. Tulk.

In any case, while in the book Heaven and Hell, published in 1758, he had spoken of marriage in heaven as purely of minds, in Conjugial Love, published ten years later (but which he had planned at least as early as 1759),9 he had concluded that heavenly marriage included the same physical sensations as a successful marriage on earth. It was logical for him that he did so, because of his belief that sensation was a power of the soul rather than of the body, a power the soul continued to possess after "death," to such an extent that it could hallucinate itself a spiritual body with more exquisite sensations than it had before.