Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/67

V ] love that was "the precious treasure of human life," and therefore Swedenborg excused or at least explained the lesser peril there was to the soul in taking a mistress. It was preferable of course to "reserve the fountain of manhood for a wife," he said, but as in so many countries a man had first to obtain a job and the means to support a family before he could marry, it might be better to live with a mistress than to live in soul-destroying promiscuity. "Pellicacy" (from pellex, a mistress) he termed this way out, but it was not to be taken with another man's wife nor with a virgin. However, a virgin might be taken as a mistress and a man "may indeed cohabit with her and thus initiate her into the friendship of love, but still with the constant intention, if she does not commit whoredom, that she shall be his wife."

Pellicacy, it was to be strictly understood, was a relationship in which the souls of the two kept apart, only conjoining the bodies, "while conjugial love unites the souls, and from the union of souls unites the sensuals of the body also, even so that the two become one flesh." If this kind of love were to develop in the liaison then, so Swedenborg held, "the man cannot by any right withdraw without a violation of conjugial union."

In the century of Casanova this put love on a lofty plane without leaving realism. There is no documentary proof that Swedenborg wrote from personal experience of either the lofty plane or the realism, but his detailed familiarity with both sides of the question, especially as it affected the conduct of the young, might seem to indicate that in some respects at least he had Emanuel Swedberg in mind.

At any rate, perhaps looking backward with the clear memory for things long past of the very old, he aflirmed in Coniugial Love that a youth's interest in sex begins at the time his voice changes and when he starts to think for himself, rearranging the stock on his mental shelves left there by "parents and masters." "Before he only thought from things carried in the memory, meditating upon them and obeying them; afterwards from reasoning upon them; and then, love leading, he disposes the things seated in his memory in a new order and conformably to this order begins his own life, and successively more and more thinks according to his own reason