Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/48

36 in private, stuck to two guides in public. One discoursed on materia medica as explained in a book written A.D. 78 by the Greek Dioscorides; the other interpreted the theories of "the illustrious Wedelius," "embracing briefly and perspicuously almost the whole art of medicine."

This proponent of Wedelius usually limited himself to the above brief statement in the catalogue, but in 1706 he seems to have been stung by some criticism for lack of novelty, since now he explains that he intends "by the goodness of God to continue with the method commenced in former years, and that he may be of service both to newly come tyros and also to his former auditors, he will not introduce anything unusual and novel as is customarily done to beguile the weariness of delicate and fastidious men, but will set forth the same interpretation of the Theories of Wedelius which he has heretofore found to be fruitful for his auditors."

Wedelius or Wedel had taught medicine at Jena about 1680. He does not seem to have been a very remarkable man. A pupil of his, however, the medical mystic G. E. Stahl,12 had made a stir in the world of learning. During Emanuel's time at Upsala, Stahl's metaphysics formed the topic of lectures "GOD willing" to be given by Professor Fabianus Törner.

Stahl had made valuable contributions to the sciences of chemistry and biology, but he had crashed into the current mechanistic conception of the human body by declaring that what held it together was the soul. If the soul didn't attend properly to the body, the body fell ill.

Törner was the professor selected for or by Emanuel to preside over his final university disputation or thesis or graduation exercises, so it is probable that he had listened to Törner on Stahl and on the Golden Verses of Pythagoras. Plato and Plotinus were known at Upsala. Along with dry Lutheran theology there was a current of mysticism in the community, but while the seeds may have been stored in the young man's mind they lay dormant there. He flung himself into the exact sciences, those to which everything human is alien, mathematics, physics, astronomy—the measurable, the law-submitting. That way lay freedom.

There is a painting of him,13 probably from about his eighteenth year, the year 1706 when he had wanted to preside over the debate