# Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic/Chapter 16

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Automatic Writing
THE "thousands of stories" about Swedenborg's commerce with the other world that so astonished some of his acquaintances, such as Baron Tilas, did not start circulating till after about 1760, when Swedenborg was seventy-two. For the demonstration of his supernormal powers interested him very little. What is known about them is mainly through the testimony of his contemporaries. Although he was willing to confirm some of the stories, branding others as obvious nonsense, he always insisted that such things were unimportant in comparison with what he felt was his real mission.
One cannot help pausing to reflect what a misfortune it was for the science of psychical research, as well as for a lofty ethical view of religion, that Emanuel Swedenborg happened to become entangled with an unscientific method of interpreting the Bible. In spite of the chaotic character of his last "worldly" book, Of the Worship and Love of God, it has passages of brilliant clarity about the very physics of the body-mind relationship; passages stimulating and suggestive on ethics, psychology, and religion; passages of great beauty, half symbolism, half "real," in that they suggest he is merely veiling actual psychic experiences under the form of allegories. If any book was ever written under the direct pressure of "inspiration" this one was, and one thinks with regret of what might have been written once Swedenborg had calmed down and begun to sort out and relate his impressions. All that can be done now, and it is not little, is to try to sift those from as objective a point of view as possible, given that no one ever can be objective.
The man who returned from London to Stockholm in August, 1745, was careful to keep his "mission" to himself. He worked hard when he rejoined the Board of Mines, and he must have worked well, or the offer of promotion would not have come to him. One wonders if it would have come had the members of the Board known what was occupying their affable, cosmopolitan colleague ​nights and early mornings in the house set in a large garden which he bought soon after his return.
He lived on Södermalm, a rocky island, part of that water-gleaming tracery of sea and lake and inhabited cliffs that make up the silvery splendor of Stockholm. If he walked a short distance to the edge of the rocks he could see the grand panorama almost in its entirety, nor had he very far to walk or drive to get to the stately center of the town, passing along quays where shipping from all the world furled its sails, restless in the bright living waters, for Stockholm is no stagnant Venice.
It was the first home Swedenborg had had of his own, and it was to be a permanent one, to which he returned after his many journeys. Judging by the many times he praised the ideal marriage in which there was no domination of either partner by the other, but perfect abandonment of self, he must have hoped to settle into just such a home with that ideal wife. But he was now fifty-seven, and instead of the wife he settled into his house with his mission.
The great work on the brain was not to see light until the twentieth century. The third part of Of the Worship and Love of God was not published by him either. He deprecated it, feeling that now he had more important work in hand. He was cool and methodical, however, in laying the foundation of his new work. While he was still in London he began the first of his several gigantic indexes to Biblical passages. One ran to eight hundred passages. Swedenborg as early as when he was thirty-two wrote to Eric Benzelius that "my head does not well recall things from memory"; $^1$ and indeed he always scorned "memory-knowledge." His indexes were his memory, besides which he numbered almost every paragraph he ever wrote, so that he could refer and crossrefer. He already was familiar with Greek and now he refreshed his Hebrew. But even before he could depend on the latter he began to interpret the Bible by the aid of carefully compared Latin versions.
Was it his own, this tumultuous spate of words that runs into eight big volumes as now published? $^2$ He said that what he was writing here was not his own, not one least word of it. It was inspired.
No doubt he felt freer to write this in a house of his own, belted ​by a large garden. Having to work at odd hours and in odd states, it was of importance to him to be free from interruption and from street noises—heavy carriages on cobble stones—the cries of vendors.
In his new work, which he provisionally called a "spiritual exposition" of the Bible, there was a strand of the same Christian Neoplatonism as had preoccupied him for so long, bar the crisis period; and there was a beginning thread of "psychic" experiences; but the dominant strand was the Bible exegesis. It was that which he particularly felt was inspired.
A good many authors feel so about what they write, while they are in the fervor of composition, when thoughts rise up from the stores of the subconscious, almost seeming to come from an outside source. That is a common-sense interpretation of Swedenborg's large claim, and probably partly justified. On this view one could well say that, confronted by the vast gap between much of the Old Testament and what he knew to be true in science and ethics, he explained the gap by saying, in effect: These things that offend your reason and your heart are true (they had to be true, even literally, being the Bible) in so far that they do give us a history of the Jews, but this history was so contrived by the Almighty that their innermost truth is symbolic of spiritual matters and prophetic of the Messiah that is to come. They are moral and spiritual allegories, in every detail, as well as history.
Castellio, whose work he knew, believed this, but it must be remembered that Swedenborg had read a great many other books, enough to have forgotten some of them. (It was not till he was fifty-six that he thought he was "forbidden" to read theological books.$^3$) As already stated, he knew Philo Judæus, who interpreted the Old Testament allegorically in the same way, minus the Messiah, Philo being a Jew. Swedenborg had read most of the Church fathers, among them Origen. In Origen's Alexandria of the third century enough of the skeptical spirit of Greece was still alive to make an educated Christian work hard at reinterpreting the Bible. Origen concluded—and he was not the first or the only one of that time to do so—that Scripture had three kinds of sense, one moral, one historical, and one spiritual,$^4$ corresponding fairly well to Swedenborg's divisions.
​Origen said that those who would insist on the letter alone were like the Philistines who filled up with earth the wells which the servants of Abraham digged; the spiritual interpreter was, like Isaac, to open up the wells.$^5$
Swedenborg used the same interpretation. And, according to Origen, Jacob did not wrestle with an angel, it was an evil spirit. Swedenborg said the same.$^6$ There were other similarities, and the principles of the "interpretation" were the same.
"On this method," it has been said of Origen, and could equally well be said of Swedenborg in this respect, "the sacred writings are regarded as an inexhaustible mine of philosophical and dogmatic wisdom; in reality the exegete reads his own ideas into any passage he chooses. The commentaries are of course intolerably diffuse and tedious; a great deal of them is now quite unreadable . . ." $^7$
Nothing could be truer! There probably never has been anything written so overpoweringly alien to normal interest as these Biblical commentaries by Swedenborg, nor anything more foreign to the results of modern Biblical research. Neither has anything served so much to conceal the true greatness of the man. No one who chances to meet him first in these earnest crossword puzzles can be blamed for turning quickly away.
For instance, in the verse referred to above, the "inner" meaning is said to be that by Abraham is to be understood the Messiah. And by the Philistines are to be understood the crew of the Devil who stopped up the fountains of the Divine Word, etc.$^8$ In some other places Abraham represents something else, not so flattering, and so on.
Of course Swedenborg did not sit down and copy Origen or anyone else, consciously. But it might be maintained that when he so desperately needed a new kind of understanding of the Bible, in order to retain "faith," up from his subconscious rose these interpretations, mingled with other elements from the same great creative realm—and, one might concede, perhaps reaching even into other "psychon-systems" of similar beliefs, now passed into the world subconscious.
Even so it is discouraging to try to puzzle out how a man who was capable of such clear, incisive thought, a worshiper of experimental science, could so uncritically accept these symbolisms. Only ​a few years before, he had noted that ideas contained in words are "confused images which are disclosed as to their quality by nearer approach, by sedulous examination and by touch; meanwhile they are vague conjectures, vain and empty." $^9$
How could he now commit his life to such unexamined emptiness!
Some great novelist said that the most important things to examine in one's manuscripts are the transitions. They must be rightly understood and fully expressed.
Luckily Swedenborg left us the document of his transition period in the first draft of his first series of Bible commentaries, The Word Explained, as it came to be called. He wrote these notes so soon after he began having his other-world experiences that he had not yet arranged, trimmed, or dressed them up to suit his theories; he had not yet fully rationalized them. They contain the key to the puzzle.
He took most of what he wrote of Bible commentary as divine revelation, and therefore to be believed uncritically, because it came to him in a very special way, at least much of it; in a way nothing seems to have come to him before.
This began as far back as the winter of 1745, after he had settled into the quiet of his garden home.$^{10}$ There something happened to him so startling that its influence can almost be compared to that of his Delft vision. It brought the same sense of utter conviction, the same sense of an external force.
His hand moved of itself!
And it wrote things which, he said, were "arcana"—secrets never known to anyone before, some of them almost repellent to him, yet at least others fitted into the whole background of his thoughts as it had formed itself for years. Twice convincing—to him.
There can be no doubt that it was through so-called "automatic" writing that Swedenborg obtained the bulk of his Bible commentaries, and much that to us seems inconsistent with his real self.
Automatic writing,$^{11}$ it has been explained (see p. 198) is one of the forms in which alleged spirit communication comes to those individuals who are known as sensitives or mediums, capable of such dissociation.
​From Swedenborg's own testimony it is clear that he was a medium, though far from an ordinary one, because he was an extraordinary man.
Of course he cannot be called an "automatist" just because he says that the words he writes are not his own; that they are inspired by the Lord, either directly or through various angels. That could be a manner of speaking. But he explicitly says of the ten pages which he has just written: "These words . . . were said to me verbally and almost enunciated, and this by infants who were then with me and who also spake by my mouth and moreover directed my very hand." $^{12}$ That is clear enough, yet there is much more supporting evidence.
In this form of automatic writing, he hears the words with his "inner ear," seeming to get either a few words or a sentence at a time from a dictation that appears to him to come from an external source (elsewhere he speaks of getting the text only "piecemeal"), but he passed into other, more advanced kinds of dissociation.
"Nay I have written entire pages, and the spirits did not dictate the words, but absolutely guided my hand, so that it was they who were doing the writing." $^{13}$
Here he apparently still knew what was being written as it came word for word on the paper, but, once in a while, not only "was the finger led to the writing by a superior force so that if it wished to write something else it could never do so," but it was done even without his knowing what he had written, "so that I did not know the series of things until after it had been written; but this was extremely rare, and was merely for the sake of information that revelations have been made in this way also." $^{14}$
This sounds as if he had been in that state of extreme dissociation from consciousness known as trance, but, as he says, it was very rare with him. Usually he seems to have remembered everything that took place, which trance mediums do not, any more than people who have been in deep hypnosis.
These notes of his have another characteristic of automatic scripts, their repetitiousness; and still another, which is the frequent reference to whether it be "permitted" $^{15}$ to reveal this or that. "I do not know if it be allowed to publish this," $^{16}$ and he also says he must "consult" before he can find out what something means.
​Consult whom?
In automatic writings the "writer" often announces himself to be a spirit, "controlling" the medium, or at least controlling the medium's hand. Swedenborg mentions that "infants" not only guided his hand but spoke through his mouth. Several modern mediums claim to have child "controls." This, if one likes, is the infantile form taken by the dissociated element of their personality, that subsystem of the psychon-system, which, according to Mr. Carington, one could imagine as forming a sort of stereotyped combination with elements from a discarnate psychon-system, viz., a "spirit."
But whatever tried to control Swedenborg did not stereotype in infant form. The messengers from his subconscious, or from the world-subconscious, took different forms in this transition period (indeed during the rest of his life), at first puzzling him considerably.
"These words," he notes in one place, "were written by my hand, and dictated by Isaac, the father of the Jews . . ." $^{17}$ Abraham too, he affirms, used his hand as an instrument, but "they were dictated of the Messiah himself through Abraham . . ."
In another place he wrote (and crossed out) "this was written by my hand as an instrument; indeed it was even said it was by Jacob himself, who is somewhat indignant that I should write such things concerning him." $^{18}$
What he had been writing was that Jacob was inferior to Esau, who "represented" (was symbolic of) the Messiah, but Jacob then "said" he was now in a better frame of mind, to which Swedenborg added, "whether this is true I cannot myself confirm, but I write what is said by him, because it is permitted him, or someone in his place, to insert these words." $^{19}$
In a marginal note to these paragraphs, which have been crossed off, he writes that they are by no means to be inserted here. Indicating the draft character of the notes, he also says that he does not know if they may be included for printing later on; this "cannot as yet be clear to me, I being merely an organ, as also is Jacob himself. If they proceed from the latter, such as he has been described, then a conclusion can be formed as to what faith is to be put in them." $^{20}$
​He early began to lose faith in the declared identity of the spirits, and it is evident that he was worried by their claim that they were doing the dictating. What then became of divine authority for it? He tried to retain this by saying that although he talked with these spirits "concerning these matters both before and after the writing . . . it was not allowed me to tell anything here of what was dictated to me orally by any one of them. When this was done, and it happened at times, the writing had to be obliterated [this may account for some of the crossed-out lines]; it being allowed to tell only such things as flowed in from God Messiah alone, both mediately through them, and also immediately—which yet was manifest to me." $^{21}$
He does not explain in what way it was manifest; indeed he often complains that meanings are yet obscure to him, nor does he always know whether the spirit is good or evil.
In a more cautious passage, meant for publication as it were, he says, "For with me it has many times so happened that when I was writing my hand was directed by a superior power into the very words, and this even to the point of sensation . . . Wherefore I then said that those words were not written by me, but by someone outside me. Sometimes it was also granted me to know by what angel of God Messiah they were thus written." $^{22}$
Here, as early as 1746, the foundation was laid for the statement he stuck to in later life, that he never had instruction from anyone except from the Lord himself, or, as he sometimes put it, from the Lord in the Word—that is, through reading the Bible.
He was of course perfectly honest about this assertion, and yet it was a bit of a quibble. Since essentially he was a monist, believing that all creation was a manifestation of the One Life, that of God, naturally he felt he could say it was really God who spoke through these spirits that called themselves by various names—so long, that is, as they spoke things not too contradictory to his ideas of religion.
His idea of religion and of God was again the same in 1746 as it had been in the Economy of the Animal Kingdom and as it continued to his death, becoming more and more dominant and purified. "Love therefore is the very essence of man," he wrote in 1746, "for man is man from understanding, and the understanding is from love. That which is holy is love, for to love God above all ​things, and the neighbor as oneself is a holy thing, inasmuch as holiness then comes from God Messiah." $^{23}$
The gist of Swedenborg's belief then and later was that the essence of divine life, therefore of all life, was love. Men, whether in or out of the material body, were mere dead forms unless animated by love. They might appear alive if animated by selfishness, but they were in a state of spiritual death.
Such crystal statements are the heart of "Perennial Philosophy," and they appear fairly frequently in the automatic scripts of The Word Explained. When they do, it is as if Swedenborg himself were speaking, or at least those parts of his psychon-system of which he still had control. But much of the matter in the Notes is so strange, so unlike anything one knows of his background and way of thinking, that one is almost forced to fantastic speculations.
He had certainly long been occupied in studying the Bible, and as late as 1744 he had written A Hieroglyphic Key, and Correspondences and Representations, in which he foreshadowed an allegorical method of interpreting the Bible. In that it can be seen that he had already studied theories, such as Origen's, that claimed the Old Testament as essentially a prophecy of the New. But nowhere is there any trace of the curious sectarian ferocity dominant in much of the script "dictated" to Swedenborg.
Things foreign to him, dogmas he did not at all approve of, stick up like thistles, such as a very literal idea of the Trinity, of the Devil, of the Blood-Atonement, and, strangest of all, a violent barrage of anti-Judaic propaganda.
Swedenborg cannot be classed as an anti-Semite. One of his friends in Amsterdam has mentioned with a shade of reproach that Swedenborg went to the houses of all kinds of people, he even "associated with Jews and Portuguese." He was certainly not a "racist." According to him Africans were better liked in "heaven" than anybody else.
Yet here in these notes, or in long sections of them, it seems necessary to trample on and discredit the pillars of Judaism—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and more especially Moses, the chief pillar.$^{24}$ He is shown as a bad character entirely, and so are David and Solomon. The only exception is when these figures can be made to "represent" or symbolize something in the New Testament.
​It is as if one had been hurled back into the early centuries and were surrounded by zealous disputants belonging to the various Gentile Christian or Judaeo-Christian churches, all feeling it vitally important to shout down the Jewish religion. "God-Messiah," used almost exclusively in these scripts by Swedenborg, is a Judaeo-Christian term; so is God-Jehovah, also used by him. So is the emphasis on the atonement. It is as though Marcionites and Ebionites were going at it, hammer and tongs; glimpses of a Gnostic can be had, or a Manichean flits by. The seething unsettled theologies of the second century seem to swirl around us.$^{25}$
The style is different from Swedenborg's. The tone is extremely argumentative, at times addressing itself as if to a present Judaic adversary. "Give now some other interpretation!" In a part of which Swedenborg says specifically that it was written by his hand, not by his mind, the "speaker" rants against "the descendants of Jacob," calling them "backsliders from their benefactor, nay, their Savior . . . and now let each one of you say whatever he can." $^{26}$
Swedenborg did not like to write some of it. At times he even expressed his objection. When Jacob was declared to be the very serpent who was going to bruise the heel of "God Messiah," he dissented from "so sinister a meaning," and he added that "for myself it is abhorrent to say this, to write these words. Therefore they must be said by those who are permitted thus to bring them in." $^{27}$
There is nothing traceable in his previous writings or in what he is known to have read which would seem to account for this. At times one is tempted to use the license offered by Mr. Carington and imagine that Swedenborg's psychon-system, so long preoccupied with Biblical exegesis, had, by the power of association of ideas, attracted out of the world of discarnate psychon-systems little whirls, still stuck in the second century, but very lively, and carrying with them whole landscapes of ideas and large casts of persons. For at times Swedenborg seems to himself surrounded by Jews, but Jews seen inimically.
Before these scripts he had a high opinion of David and Solomon, for instance. In 1744 he wrote that the psalms of David and Solomon "contain veriest wisdom in simple form" and that he doubted whether all of Seneca contained as much wisdom as a single one of those psalms.$^{28}$
​Now Solomon was shown to him (as he was supposed to be after death) "that he had no knowledge of spiritual things." $^{29}$ And doubt was thrown on David's financial statistics, if not his probity. The Bible said that David had collected a hundred thousand talents of gold for the temple, but the script said "this everyone is apt to doubt who knows the value of a single talent of gold." Not a fifth nor a tenth part of it could have been expended on the temple, so the "speaker" asserted.$^{30}$
This furor theologicus does not resemble Swedenborg. Much more like him was the other stream of discourse, the one on man as matter molded by spirit, and on love and wisdom, truth and good. Different from putting Moses in the dock were little tranquil sayings such as, "the sole object of understanding is truth; not however for the sake of truth, but in order that from truth it may see what is good." $^{31}$
One might almost imagine that some calm Neoplatonist took turns with the hair-shirt monk in using the "instrument" of Emanuel Swedenborg's hand.
Now in automatic scripts the handwriting is likely not only to vary from the subject's normal writing, but also to vary in accordance with the different "spirits" who claim they are moving the hand or dictating the topics.
Obviously it occurred to the writer of this book that one did not have to be a handwriting expert to detect differences in Swedenborg's manuscript between the pages allegedly dictated by spirits and the ones in which he seemed to be his normal self. Therefore when she was in Stockholm, tracing other Swedenborgiana, she applied for permission to study Swedenborg's original manuscripts, most of which are in the custody of the Library of the Royal Academy of Sciences, among them the manuscript of The Word Explained, the work just discussed.$^{32}$ Permission was granted by the kind Librarian, and it was an odd sensation to sit down with these firsthand records before one, brown ink on the good heavy paper of those days, to inquire whether the pages in which Swedenborg claimed to be guided by the controversialists, seemingly from the second century, should be markedly different from his normal hand.
​Such proved to be the case. A good deal of the furor theologicus script is in an angular, slashing, obscure style, rather typical of certain automatic scripts.
Illustration A. (The Original is 7″ wide.)
Contrast the above with a sample of Swedenborg's best normal writing, from a page of the manuscript of a book on the mind-body relationship, written throughout in the same rounded, harmonious way.$^{33}$ It was written about four or five years previous to The Word Explained, but the same kind of writing can be found in his personal letters even many years later, and even in other pages of The Word Explained,$^{34}$ those in which Swedenborg asserts that he is being told these things by heavenly beings, the ideas however, being very close to his own Neoplatonic sentiments.
Illustration B. (The Original is 6½″ wide.)
The Librarian having generously given permission for several photostats to be made from the manuscripts, it seemed interesting ​to the writer to find out if a professional handwriting expert would detect any significant difference in the pages from which the samples are here given. Accordingly she marked one A and the other B, and submitted them to an expert, merely asking for an opinion on the enclosed specimens, naturally giving no information as to what or whose they were, nor even who was sending them.
The eXpert,$^{35}$ an Oxford B.Sc., and an associate member of the British Psychological Society, discovered such marked differences that she reported they were by different writers of opposite character. The author of the script which has been characterized here as "automatic" (Illustration A) was said to be the type of man "who is liable to project his own inner problem into the outer world, and fight it out visibly," also the type "who may agitate with great intolerance for the cause of tolerance, or with great ruthlessness for the cause of kindness and love. His humbleness is deep-seated, but the impatience of his temperament makes him act as a fanatic." Quite suitable for the furor theologicus!
The writer of the script here called "normal" (Illustration B) was said to be the kind of man who "seeks to give expression to his visionary and intuitive experiences. He tries to be precise and rational for he wishes to bring into harmony rational thinking and irrational feeling." The expert further mentioned this man's fine sensibility, remarkable integrity of character, tender soul and warm heart, and also "a certain inner vanity," which, "he shares with most of those who consciously and conscientiously strive after perfection."
However one may feel about judging psychology by means of handwriting (though the above is fairly striking in its insight, considering that the expert had no means of knowing who was in question) the fact remains that the two specimens were held to be so different as to be thought by different men.
These differences in style were not lost on Swedenborg himself. A couple of years later he noted in the diary he kept of his "psychic experiences" (as we should say), "That my style of writing is varied according to the spirit associated with me." He added, "This is evident to me from many things in past years as also from those of the present time that my style is varied and that from merely the style of the writing I could know how things cohere." $^{36}$
​This would explain, if nothing else did, the interesting fact that in the so-called Spiritual Diary, mainly kept during 1747 and 1748, he often has five or six entries for the same day, each of them dated and paragraphed separately. On examining the manuscript it is found that these entries often vary startlingly in the handwriting,$^{37}$ as they do in the topics. Swedenborg kept a travel diary in 1739,$^{38}$ often putting a week's entries on a single page in a hurried but normal style. Comparing this with a page of the Spiritual Diary, there are often far greater variations in style noticeable between the entries of a single day (or night) in it than there are in the entries for the days of a whole week in the travel diary.
One observes further that when the Spiritual Diary notes are in the same or similar violent "automatic" type of script as passages in The Word Explained, they are usually of the same character—attacks on the Jews, interpretation of the Old Testament in terms of the New, or else accounts of what might be called his "automatic" cast of characters—such as, among others, one "Mahomet" and a "Dragon."
A graphologist could live a long and thrilling life with Swedenborg's handwritings alone, but here let it be noted only that these different "styles" offer a good guide at least to knowing whether Swedenborg was in a normal or in a specially dissociated state of mind when he used them. The violent automatic is used in most of those strange accounts that have puzzled his readers—the visits to the realms of spirits of other planets, and the report of the Last Judgment.$^{39}$ There are other good reasons for believing that he was in trance or semitrance when he wrote these passages, but the handwriting is convincing, being about the same as in the passages which he says were written by "spirits" through his hand. (He says elsewhere that in regard to "visions" he was in the spirit when he saw them and returned into the body to write the account of them, presumably still exalted.$^{40}$)
To return to his first script, The Word Explained. Besides the Neoplatonism and the physiology that managed to creep in here and there, and the dominating Bible exegesis, there was yet another visible strand. He indicated its separateness from the rest by indenting the paragraphs. This seemed to be himself speaking as himself​—his own comments on what he was experiencing. Sometimes he voiced his bewilderment in shaky and half-entranced writing; sometimes he made remarks as if the observing scientist asserted himself again—not to doubt the reality of his new life in the other
From The Spiritual Diary. (Original 5$^1$⁄$_4$″ wide.)
world, but to study it and make an attempt at explaining the laws that governed phenomena there. It was these remarks that grew and grew, until in 1747, after he had left his job and gone to Holland, he put them into the separate journal, variously known as The Spiritual Diary or, his own word for it, Memorabilia.$^{41}$
​But even before then, while he was still at home, he wrote, "These words are written in the presence of Jews who are around me, nor do I doubt but that Abraham is also present." He said they were still intent on turning everything into "phantasies," meaning they threw doubt on the reality of his experiences.$^{42}$
The word "phantasy" (which he used for "hallucination") apparently bothered him. "Yet it is not in the least degree phantasy, but a continuous speech as of one man with another . . . and this now for fifteen months . . . that it is no phantasy can be clearly known by those in Sweden, with whom I have conversed in the meantime." $^{43}$
He had mentioned several times before that he was able to have inward conversation with spirits and to be with people in the flesh at the same time without the latter noticing anything.
But he finally looked to the future to prove that it had not been "phantasy." "It can also be evident from an historical account of my life, if opportunity be afforded for describing this." $^{44}$
Emanuel Swedenborg never tried to justify or explain himself by writing such an account, but perhaps he could not do more than he did do—put down his experiences as they came to him as honestly as he could, and venture on such explanations as he had available.
The year 1746 was long before the subconscious and extrasensory powers of the mind had been charted as much as they are now, little though that is, for it is still true what Swedenborg said early in his first script, wondering at the new vistas before him:
"There are marvellous things occurring in the human mind, so marvellous indeed that they cannot be expressed. In number they are infinitely more than all the things contained in the human body, in the three Kingdoms of Nature and in the universal world, visible and invisible. The sciences have drawn out only a few of them, and these are mere rivulets emanating from an ocean." $^{45}$