Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/363

XXVII ] latter "being in itself dead and only adapted to receive the living forces flowing in through the soul from God."

So it was not, according to Swedenborg, merely a case of the soul acting on the body, though that he regarded as a true answer, but, as "there is only one life," a case of this life flowing "into forms organically adapted to its reception." Elsewhere he had made clear his belief that the soul, a fragment of divine vitality, itself created these organic forms, endowing matter (which was energy) with life—which was something more than energy.

In effect, then, Swedenborg was an interactionist of the kind who was also a monist—if one may use terms suggested by Professor Gardner Murphy,2 with whom Swedenborg certainly would have agreed that "the mind-body problem" (which is the problem of psychical research) "need no longer be stated in terms of two irreconcilable elements, physical and mental. Rather it may be a problem of two types of psychical functioning, one defined by the spatial and temporal orders, the other lying beyond them."

"Life in successive order," Swedenborg called it in this book, and he sketched his view of the psychophysical so that one could make a diagram of it.

The origin of life was the Godhead, imagined and "seen" by Swedenborg as by other mystics in the guise of a "sun" that radiated love, wisdom, life, "soul." "Soul" created "mind" and "body." "Mind" had "two lives, one of will and one of understanding." In the mind, will was usually more powerful than the understanding, yet, Swedenborg said, "man is man in that his will is under obedience to his understanding, but a beast is a beast, because its desires impel it to do whatever it does."

The drama of man, for Swedenborg, therefore took place in the mind, as he had long ago stated in The Economy of the Animal Kingdom. If men could "restrain the lusts of their will by means of the understanding," not by blindly accepting authority in moral matters, then they could receive the "influx" of divine love into their wills and the influx of divine wisdom into their understanding, via the soul, which, being "a superior spiritual substance," could receive the divine influx directly. The human mind, being open to bodily influence as well, was of an "inferior spiritual substance" and it could also receive influx, both good and bad, through