# Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic/Chapter 9

CHAPTER NINE
Anatomy of Mind and Body
THE Economy of the Animal Kingdom—never was there a title more misleading to the modern reader! Not one word in it means what it seems to say. Swedenborg wrote most of his works in Latin, and his English translators too slavishly followed it. "Animal" in this connection is derived from "anima," the Latin for soul. The title should be: The Organization (or Government) of the Soul's Kingdom—that is, the body.
The contents of the two volumes were a result of his researches on the blood, the heart, and the brain, plus two chapters on psychology, interwoven with his reflections on ethics and the relation of mind to body.
This is the work which Emerson eulogized: "By the sustained dignity of thinking," he said, it "is an honor to the human race." $^1$ That does not make it easy reading. As with the Principia, modern scientists with technical language will have to be called in if one wants to try to understand the true grandeur of Swedenborg in his first gigantic effort to understand the human body. And philosophers as well as religious teachers will have to be consulted if one wants to trace the convictions about the world and about God which Swedenborg had reached by the time he was forty-five. Neither is this easy reading. A man with his gifts and culture was not a mere simple devout recipient of emotional religion.
But the Economy is a bridge. Its colossal arches span most of the distance between the mining engineer and the mystic. The latter can be understood by those predisposed in his favor even if they do not try to understand Swedenborg's science and philosophy (and skip chapters nine and ten of this biography), but if they give up this effort they will certainly have to be content with a house that has no foundation.
From the modern point of view, did Swedenborg accomplish anything of real value to science with the Economy?
​The answer is Yes. But the answer tarried for a couple of hundred years, illustrating what Swedenborg sadly asks in the book itself: "What is truth? Will it be the work of ages to discover it, or of ages to recognize it when discovered?" $^2$
And he mentions that even the discovery by the illustrious Harvey of the circulation of the blood was for a long time disputed by many. "Still," he adds optimistically, "that fashion of judging of a work cannot be eternal which regulates the approbation of the reader not so much by the truth of the writer's sentiments as by the felicity of the language. The latter is an attainment easy and common among persons belonging to polite society; it is the former that presents the difficulty, which is to be surmounted only by intense mental labor." $^3$
Intense mental labor, however, is not enough in physiology. Swedenborg himself stresses that "with diligent study and intense application, I have investigated the anatomy of the body, principally the human . . ." $^4$
Was he nevertheless "an armchair philosopher, making easy lucky guesses"? A modern American physiologist, Dr. H. W. Haggard, asks this question and acquits him of such a charge.$^5$
"His [Swedenborg's] conclusions were based upon the best medical knowledge of his time; knowledge that he gained in the medical school, in the anatomy laboratory, and from the writings of every scientist of his time."
"It was he," so Dr. Haggard summarized Swedenborg's most important physiological discovery, "who first said that what we call the gray matter on the surface of the brain, the cerebral cortex, is the seat of the psychic functions—of consciousness, perception, sensations, thought. He showed the relation of the parts of the brain controlling the muscles of various parts of the body. He went further and said that gray matter in the center of the brain controlled many of the complicated but unthinking acts performed by the body. He was the first to show . . . that the surface of the brain is in connection through nerve fibers with every part of the body, even as he said with as remote an organ as the foot. And what makes it all the more astounding is the fact that he attributed the primary function of nervous control to little oval particles in the ​gray matter of the brain. It was a hundred years later that scientists were to prove experimentally that Swedenborg's conclusions from deductions were correct. They were to name the oval bodies cells or neurons. Not one but many men were to take their place as famous in the annals of science for proving what one man had said must be so.
"I do not mean," Dr. Haggard guarded himself, "that he wrote modern physiology with prophetic vision. He did not. He saw the correlation of facts better by far than any other man, but he could not in science go beyond the factual information of his time. Thus, one of his discoveries concerned the vessels that supply blood to the heart. He was the first, as far as I can find, who pointed out that the heart was nourished from the blood, but . . . he had the blood flowing the wrong way."
Yet, "The indisputable truth is that Swedenborg had the intellectual insight that has been granted only to a few men. His was an intellect of synthesis."
Dr. Haggard said these things in an address on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of Swedenborg, in 1938, but before then other medical scientists of the twentieth century had come to appreciate their lay brother of the eighteenth. (Undoubtedly the prolonged lack of professional attention to Swedenborg's physiological discoveries was at least partly due to their having been made by a lay-man.)
The first was a Viennese, Dr. Max Neuburger, a medical historian. In a congress of scientists and physicians at Hamburg, 1901, he declared his profound astonishment at Swedenborg's discoveries in the physiology of the brain, thus giving the Swedes themselves a shove toward looking him up, since he was not much of a prophet in his own country and many of his scientific writings remained unpublished.$^6$
Amends were made by the Swedish Professor Gustaf Retzius, who frankly confessed that his attention had been called to the subject by reason of Dr. Neuburger's assertions. Speaking to an international congress of anatomists at Heidelberg, 1903,$^7$ he also deplored that he had not known of these works on the brain and the nervous system when he, together with Key, wrote a historical ​account. Retzius then gave Swedenborg full credit for his discoveries, one of which, later to be called the "foramen of Key and Retzius," Swedenborg had already deduced. Of course Retzius emphasized the great discovery, that of the seat of the psychical functions in the cortex, and the localization of the motor functions, as well as the fact that Swedenborg brought "sure proof to show that the motion of the brain not only exists and constantly presents itself in living conditions, but is also synchronous and closely connectcd with the motion of the lungs, the respiratory motion."
After praising other discoveries, Professor Retzius asked: "How was all this possible?" He answered, "Swedenborg was not only a learned anatomist and a sharp-sighted observer, but also in many respects an unprejudiced, acute and deep anatomical thinker."
In 1910, at a meeting of the anatomy section of the British Medical Association, the professor of anatomy at Upsala, Sweden, Martin Ramström, read a paper, published in the British Medical Journal,$^8$ in which he underscored Swedenborg's brain discoveries. Not only had he shown the function of the brain cortex in governing muscular action, but he had relegated automatic and habitual movements to the gray substance of the medulla oblongata and the spinal cord as secondary motor centers.
Ramström emphasized, moreover, that Swedenborg in the Economy had decidedly opposed the current "pre-formation" theory of the embryo.
To bring the chorus up to date, when the full text of the hitherto unpublished parts of Swedenborg's Cerebrum was published in the United States in 1939, scientific reviewers of our own day also greatly wondered. While they deprecated the mistakes (mainly due to lack of knowledge of facts which Swedenborg couldn't have known), one of them $^9$ was sincerely puzzled as to how Swedenborg nevertheless had found out something "worthy of a Nobel prize" without the necessary modern microscope. It had to do with the nature of the coat with which the arteries enter the capillary ramifications. Swedenborg himself said that "this is a matter cannot be explored by the senses." "From various signs," however, he said, he found it possible to conclude something, correctly.$^{10}$
Another modern medical reviewer of the Cerebrum says, "Here ​as in his other works, he anticipates much that was unknown until relatively lately . . . there are still to be found ideas in this book which a neuroanatomist might find not unsuggestive." $^{11}$
The modern reviewers of course dissociate themselves from Swedenborg's speculations on the nature of the soul's interaction with the body. But as it was to lay a foundation for such speculations that Swedenborg wrote these books, it is not irrelevant to take a look at the kind of house he built on the foundation. The speculations are not out of date. In Swedenborg's own time Stahl believed that the soul formed the body, and Hobbes believed the opposite. In the nineteenth century Vogt was to claim that the brain merely secretes ideas as the kidneys secrete urine, and in the twentieth century Hans Driesch was to assert that "in the modern solution of the mind-body problem everything that is new and important in psychology as well as biology is centered," while, nearly half a century later, Dr. Gardner Murphy asks: "Is it not indeed, somewhat of a paradox that in an era of huge progress in neurology, psychiatry, and psychology, almost nothing new and clarifying has taken shape regarding the mind-body problem?" $^{12}$
The Economy of the Animal Kingdom is primarily Swedenborg's attempt to answer a question put by himself: "We have hitherto been stating what the soul is, but, pray, what is the body?" $^{13}$
He dissociates himself from two unfortunately rather large sections of humanity—those "who stubbornly refuse to stir a step beyond visible phenomena," and those who "prefer to drown their ideas in the occult at the very outset."
"To these two classes our demonstration may not be acceptable," he declared. "For, in regard to the former, it asserts that the truth is to be sought far beyond the range of the eye; and, in regard to the latter, that in all the nature of things there is no such thing as an occult quality; in fact, that there is nothing but is either already the subject of demonstration or capable of becoming so." $^{14}$
Truth could be found by objective methods, he thought, but he did not claim to have found the truth in this book. He even feared that he might "have gone beyond the ordinary limits of inquiry, so that but few of my readers may be able distinctly to understand me. ​But thus far I have felt bound to venture, for I have resolved, cost what it may, to trace out the nature of the human soul." $^{15}$
At the outset he explained his method. It was to cite in full the greatest authorities in anatomy and medicine, and then to draw his own deductions. Here and there, he said, he had taken the liberty to throw in the results of his own experience, but this only sparingly. We know his reasons for this: first, that he felt his was a synthesizing gift, and second, that he feared the temptation of basing everything on a discovery of his own. He determined therefore to rely mainly on the researches of others.
That this was a real sacrifice is evident from the ardor with which he speaks of what he saw in his own explorations of the body. As engineer and chemist he was fitted to appreciate the "pipes, ovens and little bladders" of the body, and all its ingenious constructions that so "cooperated" with each other. Always an image-thinker, fond of concrete metaphors, he speaks of the "gratework of the ribs," or says of the "old blood" that "it is clad in black garments and hurried away to the tombs of the liver." $^{16}$
He so loves physiology that he writes of the organs as if they had conscious life of their own. "The hungry veins" will "eagerly snatch" at the gastric juices; certain nerves are like "a married pair, the intercostal doing the husband's office and the par vagum the wife's." He was especially fond of matrimonial similes; at times a wedding feast seems to be going on in the body's every nook and cranny.
This was one aspect of his being a man who had the great gift of wonder at the apparently commonplace. He himself warns us that "When a name which is given to any unknown quality becomes familiar to us, we are apt to think, after a frequent use of it, that we clearly understand . . . it." In such cases, he continues, one has only to ask, What is this? Whence is this? to be carried off "to things more unknown." $^{17}$
Hence when Swedenborg asked, "What is the body?" he followed that up by wondering how it comes to be a body. He studied the formation of the embryo of a chick, looking at it with his eyes, through the poor microscopes of the day, as well as through his rational mind, second to none in any day. He concluded (the ​conclusion, as Ramström had said, being one of his modern titles to fame) that no little doll chick existed in the germ and simply grew larger, but that there was in it "a certain formative substance or force which caused the various parts of the embryo to develop in an orderly fashion, one after the other." $^{18}$
"However obscure our idea may be, yet we shall clearly perceive by a little attention, that the stupendous machine of the animal body could by no means have come together without a positive directing force . . ." and that "such a directive or formative force is not without but within the chick or embryo." Furthermore, "it must exist within that substance that was first in the ovum and that has life or soul within it. Now, if we consult the anatomy of bodies, particularly those of early fœtuses or those that are still in the egg, we shall meet with a certain most fluid matter that from the first stamen by a wonderful determination successively projects, delineates and descries the entire image of the future body. Surely then we must grant that this directive force is seated in this fluid, and, if so, we must conclude from the infinite variety of particular effects that it involves a certain wonderful form in the whole and in all its parts, for if not mighty miracles of formation would result from mere chance." $^{19}$
He could not help concluding that "this substance or force represents to itself the state about to be formed, just as if it were a state already formed . . ." What had seemed "a miniature chaos" in the egg, "a blank, undigested mass, is now seen to involve the most perfect order and accurate discrimination." $^{20}$
What would be the effect, he asked, of "the very least irregularity"? "It would be as if an arrow or ball were shot at some distant mark with an error of only two or three minutes of a degree in the aim, in which case the farther the ball or arrow had to fly the farther it would be at last from the target." $^{21}$
Not less important was Swedenborg's conclusion that this formative force "is identical with that principle which repairs the dilapidations of the body, and when contingencies arise renovates and perfects the system." $^{22}$
He was loath to describe it in words, although of course he did, but groaning that all words must be inadequate. Words give rise to "a thousand sleights of language by means of which books are ​distended with those equivocal terms that produce such hot dissension in the schools." Again and again he longed (at considerable length) for the precision and concision of mathematical language, for symbols that would be applicable both to First Causes and to these physiological and psychological facts. Indeed, he promised to invent this "mathematical language of universals."
And he wondered at this "mass of miracles" of the body, quoting Grotius: "As well might we believe that stones and timbers come together by chance into the form of a house or that an accidental concourse of letters produce a poem."
Via the embryo, Swedenborg decided that "life is one distinct thing, and nature [inorganic matter] is another." $^{23}$ He went further: "Life is what regards ends," or purpose.$^{24}$
For centuries this was to be scornfully dismissed as "the old teleological argument." Matter, dead or living, was considered to be all the same. At the close of the nineteenth century, however, Professor Hans Driesch, the "Vitalist" biologist, was to prove that living tissues did behave in a manner unpredictable by the physics then current, but Swedenborg would doubtless have been even more pleased at the opinions expressed in our own day by Professor Erwin Schrödinger, one of the world's leading nuclear physicists.$^{25}$
Professor Schrödinger, with all the humility of the trespassing specialist, nevertheless approached his study of the unfolding embryo with the idea that anything which developed in so orderly a manner, so according to a seeming plan, must be a "many-atomic" structure, because, as all modern physicists know, the behavior of a few atoms cannot be predicted. "Only in the cooperation of an enormously large number of atoms do statistical laws begin to operate and control the behavior of these assemblées, with an accuracy increasing as the number of atoms involved increases. It is in that way that events acquire truly orderly features." $^{26}$
But the startling fact about the egg (and unicellular organisms) was this, that: "In biology we are faced with an entirely different situation. A single group of atoms [the chromosome fibers] existing only in one copy produces orderly events, marvellously tuned with each other and with the environment, according to most subtle laws." Professor Schrödinger adds: "The situation ​is unprecedented, it is unknown anywhere else except in living matter." $^{27}$
Professor Schrödinger returns by way of quantum mechanics to the validity of physics, modern nuclear physics, even for living matter, but, as he says himself, with one big new factor. Asserting that his body "functions as a pure mechanism, according to the laws of nature," he insists that he, his "I," is able to direct and foresee the motions of this mechanism, even if the effects are to be fateful, "in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them." $^{28}$
In his more youthful works, Swedenborg was fond of writing a triumphant Q.E.D. when he thought he had proved his point, and he would no doubt have attached that to the above. Eager as he always was to accord praise when he agreed with another scholar, he would also have declared that the "learned and illustrious" Schrödinger was entirely right in his "golden" treatise What is Life? Of course everything in created nature—so Swedenborg would have put it—is "mechanical" and subject to mechanical laws, and the difference between dead and living matter is that the living is purposefully governed by a soul.
Swedenborg's answer about "this earthy loan," the body, was: It is something which is fabricated by the soul for its own purposes. Once the body is made it has a certain reciprocal relationship with the soul, but the latter, besides being the manufacturer, is the maintainer and repairer of the body as long as the thing is repairable.
Many of those at whom he so often had jeered as "occult" had made the same answer, but with Swedenborg it was not quite such a short story. He took years and thousands of anatomical pages to tell it. Essentially, however, the plot began with his trying to track down and analyze something which in his time was called the "animal spirits" or "the spirituous fluid," or similar names.
It was only supposed to be a "fluid" in the way that electricity then was called a fluid, something indicating its spatial though invisible nature. It was an attempt to give a name to the nerve impulse, as well as to the "X" that made the difference between dead and living matter.
This "spirituous fluid," Swedenborg said, must have something to flow in, its channels being the "fibres," or nerves. By his study ​of the motor impulses in the nerves, he arrived at the idea that these started in the "little spherules" [the neurons] in the cortex of the brain. These little spherules, also called by him with pet-name affection, "little hearts, little brains, little bosoms, most pure and sensitive little wombs," as well as "little factories," he saw as the places in the body where "the spirituous fluid" was perhaps not created but "elaborated" and sent out through the body, not only in the form of nerve impulses, but carried by the blood as that in the blood which was life-giving. He imagined this as a kind of special circulation which he called "the circle of life." $^{29}$
Then his synthesizing mind went to work. Having decided that the formation of the embryo was due to a formative force, he identified that with the spirituous fluid, here busy at its first and most important task of forming the body, according to a preconceived image or idea of what was wanted—or else how could organ follow organ in such an orderly and predetermined fashion?
He had, furthermore, found out experimentally that the "faculties" of "understanding, thinking, judging and willing" likewise resided in the "cortical substance," because if it were injured the mind didn't function, so that these faculties too, he concluded, were functions of the spirituous fluid.$^{30}$
From there it was an easy step to identify the "soul" with the spirituous fluid. He hesitated about terms. Should one not rather say that the spirituous fluid was the "organ of the soul" as the eye was the organ of sight?—"Yet it is no matter whether we call the above fluid itself the spirit or soul, or whether we confine those terms to its faculty of representing the universe to itself, and of having intuition of ends; for the one cannot be conceived, because it is impossible, without the other." $^{31}$
Whether Swedenborg called it soul, or spirituous fluid, or animal spirits, or something else, it was still "immaterial." How could it then interact with the demonstrably material cortical substance, "pure and sensitive" as the "little wombs" within it were? What, in his own words, was "the mechanism of the intercourse between the soul and the body"?
Here, where the anatomist failed, the physicist stepped in, even without benefit of quantum mechanics.
​To the question Is the soul then material? Swedenborg had another question: "Pray, what is matter?" $^{32}$
He had already written a book about this, his Principia. In it, quite in line with modern physics, he had "reduced" or advanced matter to force. As has been mentioned, he called the first, simplest and most "superior" aspect of force the "universal" aura (or elementary constituent). This, he said, was "immaterial," if materiality be defined as "extension endued with inertia," for inertia is "the source of gravity," and "neither gravity nor levity can be predicated of" this force.
"The first aura of the world is not matter in this sense, but on the contrary active force, the origin of gravity and levity in terrestrial bodies, which do not of themselves regard any common centre, unless there be an acting, causing, directing force." $^{33}$
It was Swedenborg's conclusion that "in regard to substance" the soul-stuff, or spirituous fluid, was part of this universal aura; therefore, unless you defined "matter," it was hard to say whether soul was material or not. Were sense perceptions material? They must be, coming from material things, and being "modifications" [waves and/or frequencies of air or ether]. Then what about ideas based on perceptions?
"I do not understand," he said, "in what way an immaterial modification is distinguished from a material modification, unless by degrees, in that the immaterial is higher, more universal, more perfect and more imperceptible. Is not every created thing in the world and nature a subject of extension, and may not everything as extended be called material?" $^{34}$
But, he added, since the soul substance was capable of receiving life, and life came directly from the uncreated Infinite, or God, the soul might also be called immaterial, and so "the materialist and the immaterialist may each abide in his own opinion." $^{35}$
Among the cacti of scholastic terms so often used by Swedenborg, the layman is likely to be discouraged. It is a help to know that scientists are discussing the same problems today in very much the same terms, some of them coming to the same conclusion—that where there is life there is immateriality.
For instance, an eminent Swedish-American astronomer, Dr. ​Gustaf Strömberg, of the Mt. Wilson Observatory, grapples with exactly the same phenomena of life and matter (The Soul of the Universe).$^{36}$
Dr. Strömberg reminds us of the immateriality of the pilot wave that guides the electron in space and time, emphasizing that the particle aspect of nature is material and the wave aspect is immaterial. The atom consists of particles which are made units by an immaterial wave structure with certain time and space properties.
Dr. Strömberg could almost be used as a guide to Swedenborg. The Californian says, "There is another world than that of space and time." The two worlds, he continues, are not entirely separated; they interact at certain points. These points he also calls "sources," because through them certain forces enter our world from that other. Through some of the sources "electricity" enters our world; it is associated with wave systems identified with "material" particles.$^{37}$
But from other sources "living wave systems of different degrees of complexity" enter our world. These wave systems are "immaterial."
With confidence, for his biology was approved by Thomas Hunt Morgan, Dr. Strömberg says that such a "source" having caused a "living" but immaterial wave system, the latter is responsible for what happens in a living cell when its chromosomes divide. "The material elements follow the changes in the immaterial structure." $^{38}$
He traces the development of the embryo, showing where subordinate wave systems are as it were commissioned to take charge and "expand in a certain order and gradually become 'fixed' or 'materialized' " in the structure and function of the different organs. The signals of the organizing wave system, Dr. Strömberg says, can be thought of as traveling along definite structural channels, and, he italicizes, the channels often become observable as nerve fibers.$^{39}$
Swedenborg thought of the "formative force" as traveling along the nerve fibers after having created them."$^{40}$
In 1734, five or six years before he wrote his Economy, Swedenborg had asserted that both soul and body were subject to " ​mechanical" laws. "There are no two natures." Nature was one, with one set of laws.$^{41}$
Now, by spiritualizing matter it would seem as if he had satisfied himself, but he had not. He saw that there was still a problem in the "mechanism" by which the organic and the inorganic communicated. According to the Cartesian physics of his time, the chain of causation should be continuous, but that did not seem to be so. There was a jump by which dead matter became living, as there was between immaterial force and the material atom. Yet there was, there could be, only one nature.
Swedenborg stuck to that, but he abandoned continuity. Nature, he said, progressed by steps, or "by degrees." This hypothesis of his is so vital for an understanding of his whole future scheme of things that it becomes necessary once more to beg aid of modern science, and to compare its findings with Swedenborg's.
The way has been made easy by Arthur Koestler in the last essay of his The Yogi and the Commissar.$^{42}$ Modern scientists are not unaware that there is an unexplained "jump," be it ever so small, from the immaterial atom to the living cell and from it again to consciousness and to the higher mental states. Relying chiefly on the biologists Needham and Woodger, Koestler gives a summary of the significance of these "jumps."
He uses the simile of a staircase. On each tread the things or phenomena are of the same nature; what makes them seem to differ from the phenomena on the other treads is the way in which they associate, and "the new properties and values which emerge by this specific type of association." Each level depends on "the laws of the next higher level—laws which it cannot predict nor reduce" to its own level.
But, looking at the staircase from in front, only the vertical jumps between the treads are seen, and "everything becomes unexplained mystery." Koestler quotes Needham:
"What has not yet been done, however, is to elucidate the way in which each of the new great levels of organization has arisen . . . It must always be remembered that though we can chart out quite fully the laws existing at a given high organizational level, we can ​never hope to understand how they fit into the picture as a whole . . ." $^{43}$
This picture was precisely what Swedenborg had always been searching for, and his "degree" corresponds fairly closely to the modern "level of organization."
The formidable name of Swedenborg's theory, set forth in the Economy, was The Doctrine of Series and Degrees.$^{44}$ Without it, he warned the reader again and again, nothing in the whole universe could be properly understood.
It was, he said, that doctrine which nature "in acting has prescribed for herself," her way of "subordinating and coordinating" things. "Series are what successively and simultaneously comprise things subordinate and coordinate."
A series, to put it simply, is the modern biologist's staircase. Swedenborg called it a ladder when he wasn't being pedantic. "The soul," he said, "does not flow into the actions of its body except by intermediates, nor by a continuous medium, but as it were by a ladder divided by steps." Also, "The intercourse between the soul and the body . . . (is) a kind of progression . . . according to natural order by a ladder divided into degrees." $^{45}$
These degrees, he said, were of two kinds. Later he was to call them degrees of height and degrees of breadth.$^{46}$ The degree of height is the modern "jump" in the staircase from one level of organization to another. The degree of breadth is the surface of the tread, the things of similar nature on the same level.
Swedenborg's degree of height (also called by him a "discrete" or a "determined" degree) was separate from the one above and below it. By "separate" Swedenborg meant separate, even as modern scientists mean it. "We cannot arrive," he said, "from a substance of an inferior degree to a substance of a superior degree, except by the division and as it were destruction of the unit of the inferior degree." $^{47}$
On the other hand, by the degree of breadth (also called by him a "continuous degree" or "degree of composition") Swedenborg said he meant "an aggregate of things coordinate"—as we should say the phenomena on the same tread of the staircase. They, he ​said, were related to each other as more or less of the same thing or quality, "beyond which you cannot proceed further and yet leave a unit or part of that degree." $^{48}$
He had, so he was now convinced, the principle of the mechanism by which an immaterial soul communicated with a material body. Unlike Needham, however, he ventured to say how degrees (levels of organization) had arisen. He said it happened by "influx." "Those things that are superior flow into those that are inferior, according to the order and suitably to the mode in which the substances are formed." $^{49}$
"The 'destiny' of a level," Koestler says, "is its dependence on the laws of the next higher level—laws which it cannot predict nor reduce," or, as Swedenborg never tired of remarking, it is "against order for the posterior to flow into the prior."
Swedenborg now had, in this "doctrine of series and degrees," a theory, a tool, a sort of universal jimmy, for solving the problems that stood between him and the picture of the whole he wanted to make, the system which he could not help making, any more than crystals can help crystallizing.
"The mind," he said, "never really acquiesces in any system respecting the commerce and harmony of mind and body which supposes the unknown and incomprehensible." $^{50}$
His excursion into physiology was for the purpose of reducing the unknown. For him, as well as for some modern physicists, it was a decisive experience to study embryology, but as Swedenborg had not the faintest fear of trespassing on specialist domains he took the evidence he had obtained and stretched it cosmically. He was convinced that an immaterial force built up the material body; he was convinced in the only way he could have been—scientifically, given his honesty and love of truth for its own sake. He now supposed that he was out of "the shade in which hypotheses dwell," and that the following propositions were true:
The material aspect of the world had been developed from immaterial forces. Living matter had also arisen from immaterial force, plus life, which came from life's source, or God. These changes from one form of phenomena to another did not take place "continuously," but by steps, or "degrees of height" (modern: ​"levels of organization" and "theory of emergency"). He supposed that the manner in which this took place was by something he termed "influx."
And "influx"?
Now the philosopher and mystic began to fill in the spaces left by the scientist. "All these opinions combine to form a perfect unity . . . when we acknowledge the omnipresence and universal influx of God in all created things according to the modified character and capacity of each." $^{51}$
Giving a name, however, to the creative force was as far as he intended to go. "To know the manner in which this life and wisdom flow in is infinitely above the sphere of the human mind, there is no analysis and no abstraction that can reach so high, for"—here the scientist supremely affirmed his faith—"whatever is in God, and what law God acts by, is God." $^{52}$
In the ninth century A.D., another spiritual giant wrote, "There are as many unveilings of God [Theophanies] as there are saintly souls."
John Scotus Erigena (John, the Irishman), in other words, saw that the idea of God must break differently through the prisms of different personalities. Swedenborg's personality and what had been happening in it must therefore again be considered, as well as the form of religion he had found he could confess without being untrue to his science.