Page:The Other Life.djvu/104

 sense. But the Book of Revelation is no revelation to us without a key to the interpretation of its symbols. The meaning of these symbols can only be given us through the agency of some human mind divinely empowered to teach them. This is the secret of Swedenborg's illumination.

The fact that ideas may be made objectively visible in the spiritual atmospheres, is an important element in the philosophy of dreaming, of hallucinations and of many curious mental phenomena. It is strikingly illustrated in some of the mesmeric or biological experiments. In what is called the mesmeric state, the external senses seem to be partially asleep or paralyzed, while the spiritual senses are partially opened. The operator can then make the subject see whatever he chooses; that is, he can project the visual images in his own mind by his mere will, so that the subject, sees them as external things. They can be made to see serpents, houses on fire, children drowning, and various terrible scenes,—and their intense excitement and involuntary gesticulations show unmistakably that they conceive them to be as real as this outer world is to our waking perceptions.

A rude system of drawing and painting arose from the attempt to imitate or repeat on parchment