# Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic/Chapter 1

EMANUEL SWEDENBORG
CHAPTER ONE
Why Swedenborg
A MEMBER of one of America's great endowed institutions for scientific research was congratulated on belonging to this modern sanctuary, where he could work, free of material worry, together with men interested in the same subject. He took the congratulations with a shade of reserve, explaining that he sometimes wished he were working at a university where he could drop into a faculty club and talk over his subject and theirs with men from entirely different fields, and learn their points of view. By contact even with astronomy, geology, engineering, philosophy, psychology, he felt that his section of his own field—that of physiology—could be more usefully related to the rest of the world.
Emanuel Swedenborg was such a faculty club all by himself. It is hard to enumerate all the branches of knowledge with which he made himself familiar, as familiar as the resources of a couple of hundred years ago allowed.
But such "scholars" were not uncommon in the centuries before experimental science demanded monogamous attention in each minute parcel of every field, and, except for museum curiosity, there would be no reason for reading about Swedenborg if he had been only such a gorgeous compendium of untested theories. He was, however, in the words of a modern Swedish historian of biology, "one of the richest and most fertile geniuses known to history." $^1$
In 1910, at the International Swedenborg Congress $^2$ in London, it took nearly a whole faculty club of professors to cover the various facets of Swedenborg's learning and to hail the value of his scientific work. Similarly, in 1938, at the 250th anniversary of his birth, tributes were paid to him by scientists in various fields.
These witnesses, most of whom deplored his later preoccupation ​with religion, claimed that Swedenborg foresaw even "the lines of development of science." Svante Arrhenius, Nobel Prize winner, vouched for his cosmology which surmised the nebular hypothesis and the existence of galactic universes. Anatomists said that Swedenborg was the first to localize the psychological functions of the brain in the cortex, and that he based this discovery not on vague theorizing, but on clinical and pathological observations, as well as on ingenious synthesis of material provided by others.
He had studied under some of the great anatomists of his day, and he says himself that he based much of his work on that of others. For this he gave a subtle reason: "I found, when intently occupied in exploring the secrets of the human body, that as soon as I discovered anything which had not been discovered before, I began—seduced probably by self-love—to grow blind to the most acute lucubrations of the researches of others, and to originate the whole series of inductive arguments from my particular discovery alone . . . Nay, when I tried to form principles from these discoveries, I thought I could detect much to confirm their truth in various other phenomena, although in reality they were fairly susceptible of no construction of the kind. I therefore laid aside my instruments, and, restraining my desire for making observations, determined rather to rely on the researches of others than to trust to my own." $^3$
Then he painted this picture of the true men of science:
"The fictitious depresses them, the obscure pains them; but they are exhilarated by the truth, and in the presence of everything that is clear they too are clear and serene. When, after a long course of reasoning, they make a discovery of the truth, straightway there is a certain cheering light and joyful confirmatory brightness that plays around the sphere of their mind; and a kind of mysterious radiation—I know not whence it proceeds—that darts through some sacred temple in the brain." $^4$
From time to time in this twentieth century a bold speculation throws this "confirmatory brightness" into our world. Then it often happens that something which had hitherto been merely another dark patch in Swedenborg's writings turns out to shine ​with the same brightness, such as the theory of matter as force, and the relativity of space and time.
It has been said that in the eighteenth century "men turned from the attempt to apprehend the whole by reason and began to study the part by experience." No one was more enthusiastic about the beauty of experimental science than Swedenborg. Incredibly energetic, he experimented with such apparatus as was available—and it is worth remembering that not better brains but better technical equipment has produced modern discoveries—but for all his belief in studying the part by experience he did not want to throw the right to generalize overboard.
He said, in 1740, to the Swedish Academy of Science that "some of the learned of the present day seemed to have agreed to let thought rest, and to make experiments to appeal to the senses; yet they did so with the hope and intent that some day experience would be connected with theory; for experience deprived of an insight into the nature of things is knowledge without learning, and a foundation without a building to rest on it." $^5$
It was for the object of gaining insight into the nature of things that Swedenborg dug into astronomy, physics, chemistry, physiology, and psychology, not for the dubious joy of being an encyclopedia. He acted on the belief that insight not based on experience would be the building without any foundation. So for nearly two thirds of his life he went on working at this, the meticulous digging and bricklaying of science, fact by fact; but what he cared most for, the real motive behind it all, was the building.
That building was to be his answer to the questions: What are we, Why are we, and What is to become of us? Or, as he put it, If there is such a thing as the soul, how is it connected with the body, and does it survive bodily death?
Not a new question, nor even a respectable one from the point of view of the kind of science which rules out problems that cannot be given laboratory answers. Moreover in this sphere "purpose" and "motive" are suspect words, and most rightly so, unless they can be phrased as working hypotheses.
Worse than suspect, the "soul" has long been ruled out, though of late it has been creeping back quaintly as "psyche," even trying to recommune with the body in "psychosomatic," " ​psychodynamic," "psychokinetic," but making its most spectacular reappearance in psychoanalysis, where an aspect of it sometimes even dismisses itself as an "escape mechanism."
Swedenborg was only twenty-six when, in 1714, he noted down his intention to "find a method by which the wills and affections of men's minds can be conjectured by means of analysis."
He became an object of analysis himself, especially when a diary of his dreams at a certain period was found. Some modern psychoanalysts interpreted him, trying to account for the change in him from experimental scientist to the man who believed the experiments concluded in favor of the soul's existence. Freudians called his case one of an inverted Œdipus complex, and Jungians opted for a split personality.
But William James says of similar charges against those of great imagination: "In the natural sciences and industrial arts it never occurs to anyone to try to refute opinions by showing up their author's neurotic constitution. Opinions here are invariably tested by logic and experiment, no matter what may be their author's neurological type. It should be no otherwise with religious opinions." $^6$
James goes on to say that such opinions must be tested by experience in relation to our moral needs and to the rest of what we hold as true. By such tests Swedenborg in his later phase has as great treasure to bestow as many of those millionaires of the spirit we call mystics, even if one reads him strictly from an ethical point of view. And, apart from an interest in distinctions between good and evil—not an unnecessary interest at the present time, one would think—Swedenborg in his life and works can, if one takes a little trouble to understand him, open travel horizons for us far exceeding all others for beauty and strangeness.
F. W. H. Myers, the great pioneer in the tremulous science of psychical research, has said that "it was to Swedenborg first that the unseen world appeared before all things as a realm of law; a region not of mere emotional vagueness or stagnancy of adoration but of definite progress, according to the laws of cause and effect, resulting from structural laws of spiritual existence and intercourse." $^7$
Swedenborg's God is the God of a scientist. He is the essence not ​only of love but of wisdom, which is, or includes order. "God is Order," he has said. He knew nothing of Vedanta or Buddhist philosophy and Karma's inexorable law, but he stressed as fundamental that man is what he becomes through his deeds, and that those deeds trail their consequences with them, irrespective of "faith." In his insistence on intellectual order in spiritual things, he comes nearer to meeting a lack which people of the East have felt in Christian religions than any other Westerner. If the two aspects of humanity are to understand each other spiritually, it may be through the medium of a Swedenborg, brought up to date, as he would have wished to be, and winnowed of time-bound orthodoxies.
Look at him as you will—as a scientist, ethical teacher, religious philosopher, mystic, commuter to and from another world, bringing with him sober reports of talks with its inhabitants, as well as topographical descriptions, or as a poet who imagined that world so firmly that he believed in it—his life is surely what F. W. H. Myers said it was, "the strangest ever lived by mortal man."
There is, however, one red thread or green line in it which can be seen rather easily: the attempt to fit all he knew and all he experienced into a consistent world picture, one that should be based on law, physical and spiritual. Swedenborg's life is therefore also a kind of map, which shows the successes and failures of a man who refused to accept the prescribed solutions. He had pieces of his own which he wanted to fit in, even if he was not always aware that some of them might be fashioned out of his emotional needs rather than his scientific experience.
Three major factors had to be fitted together in whatever picture was to satisfy him. One was his scientific bent: to observe and to classify, to test theories by experience and then to systematize.
Another was the fact that though most men of his class and education were content to dismiss anything not securely of this world with a bit of lip-service, he could not do so. He felt he had to have religion in his world-picture, even including the Bible as divine revelation. This he managed by means of symbolic interpretation, thus, to his own satisfaction, fitting the Biblical and the scientific pieces together.
That he was able to do this was due to the third major factor of ​his experience, the nature of which was far from clear to him. In middle age he began to discover that most unusual events were taking place in his mind. Today people would call them either psychic or psychotic, according to their own bent, but he was convinced by the startling character of the events that they were inspired. For him, at any rate, they were the most important of his life.
He thought he knew the difference between what he called "phantasies" and objective perceptions; therefore the psychic part of his experience was real enough for him to make it a crucial part of his world-picture, so real that he used much the same methods to study and describe it as he had used in analyzing and classifying minerals and nerves. This helped neither probability nor readability, yet the result is still one which makes it a great adventure to try to fathom what went on in his mind.
Count A. J. von Höpken, the head of the Swedish Government, one of his shrewdest friends, said of Swedenborg's other-worldly books: "Few people have judiciously read his works, which everywhere sparkle with genius; if I meet with anything unusual or extraordinary and which might indicate a disordered understanding, I do not judge of it. We read Plato with admiration; but there is nothing to be read in his works which, if related by another person, might not be deemed extravagant, inconceivable and absurd." $^8$