Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/351

XXV ] Robsahm a protest to be submitted if his writings were condemned in his absence. He certainly did not leave in either 1769 or 1770 out of fear. He had the stuff of martyrs in him, but his books, his work, his "mission," sent him to his printers abroad.

As his works were being more and more widely read, he began to receive letters about them. The learned German prelate Oettinger, mentioned before, who was a reader of Jacob Boehme, was extremely enthusiastic about Swedenborg too—but not about "the internal sense" of the" Bible, nor about "correspondences," only about the experiences Swedenborg reported from the other world. He told him so directly: "Your experiences command more belief than your explanations of scripture." 11

This was decidedly not what the aged Swedenborg wanted to hear. He had not relinquished his job, science, preferment, honor, nor had he spent his life struggling with "temptations" and arguing with men and spirits in order to be what he called a "subject," a mere transmitter of spirit-messages. He often said that these experiences were unimportant in themselves; they were only of value in proving that he did have access to much higher, angelic information on the subject of the Bible than anyone else.

He could not explain the reasons for his certainty, which perhaps was not so much of a certainty after all, since he became really annoyed when it was questioned.

He had no doubt forgotten about "the marvellous powers of the human mind," especially the memory. Long ago he himself had written that "in the whole study and pursuit of psychology nothing more wonderful is met with than the memory, nor anything more difficult of disentanglement . . ." 12

Though he knew that man's "ruling love" was what to a large extent determined his thinking, he did not seem to realize that it not only determined what a man would remember but also how and in what guise it would present itself. Memory would register indifferently a real and an imagined event, an objective and a subjective one, but the ruling love would often pick an imagined event and insert it into the series of real events13 and the passage of years would gloss it over with the patina of belief till not its own father could tell the difference.