Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic/Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
Dissecting Rooms Abroad
WILLIAM PENN, at the age of about twelve, is said to have had an experience in which an ecstasy that seemed to him of another world left unforgettable traces that ultimately shaped his life.1
Perhaps something similar happened to Swedenborg, but he never published his intimate experiences, whether of sacred or profane love. There are, however, his later references to the insensible breathing he said be practiced "purposely" in childhood, when at prayer, and he seems to stress that this brought about a kind of rapt state.
Some such experience may have been at the root of the desire to be rid of his ego, a desire which never left Swedenborg entirely. It can of course be explained in as many ways as there are points of view about existence. Was it for "God," or was it for "escape"? No laboratory method can prove the correctness of either explanation. Some great force there must be, innate or acquired, to make a man choose to travel the narrow road—the "razor's edge" of the Hindu mystics—which seems to be the only way to the complete abandonment of self and absorption in the complete fullness called God by some and Nirvana by others.
It seems less likely that Swedenborg sought God because he did not marry than that he did not marry because he had a need to seek God. With his analytic intelligence it was precisely that need which drove him from his father's egoistic piety and tawdry miracle-mongering, making him so keen to welcome the universe of law which science opened up for him.
Swedenborg was well aware that he had parted from his father. Not only does he date the beginning of his spiritual enlightenment from 1710, the year in which he left his father's house to study science in England, but in 1748 he recorded a dream in which he says he told his father, who had appeared to him in the dream, that "a son need not recognize his father for father after he has become his own master." It was all right, he explained, to do so while the son was in the father's house, but when the son ". . . becomes his own master, so as to be able to guide himself from his own mind and know what to do, then the Lord is his father." 2
This seems to have been the only instance in which the Bishop had no reply to make, but then it was only a dream.
It was inevitable that commentators in later times would try to explain Swedenborg's quest for religion as a sort of penitence for having "left" his father's orthodoxy. Like absolutely everything else in human experience, the story can of course be forced into a Freudian formula. As William James has pointed out, it is a question in the last resort of whether the need for religious experience is always due to a neurosis or not. Were all the great mystics "compensating"? Who can tell, except the mystics, and they cannot, because all love is inexplicable to those who have not felt it.
If it is true that the mystic strain in Swedenborg was evident in his childhood, it is also true that it went underground during the years when he studied science, but he, no more than Pascal or Newton, ever repudiated religion for science. Until about 1733, however, he seems to have published nothing that indicates more than a decent deistic rationalism. With the important exception of the first chapter of the Principia (which was written last), it is hard to find any Biblical God in that work. Not that He was left out. Nature, Swedenborg said, was only another name for the motive forces issuing from the Infinite Being, "to be venerated by every philosopher."
It must be remembered that in the eighteenth century, though God might often be dismissed privately as nonexistent, it was not yet safe to do it too publicly. Voltaire himself put up a little chapel at Ferney to Him, on which, to be sure, the name of Voltaire was put in larger letters than the Deity's. And even in the nineteenth century Renan said that people who were unacquainted with modern Biblical research had no intellectual right to leave the church. In Swedenborg's time that kind of research was still to come.
A kind of Engineer-God was acknowledged in the Principia, seen as identical with the "Infinite." How that Infinite was going to produce the finite; how that Eternity was going to produce time, were questions which Swedenborg at first felt were answered by the conception of the Infinite releasing the energy of the "natural point." He says, "[The point] . . . is a kind of medium between the Infinite and the finite, for it is by mediation of this point that finite things exist from the Infinite." 3 In short, in the second chapter the nexus or connection between the Uncreated and the created was this purely mathematical point.
When he went abroad in 1733, he took with him the all-but-finished manuscript of his book. He corrected the manuscript of the Principia in three days, early in June of that year. And, whether then or before he left Stockholm, he made a summary of the book. It did not contain the first chapter of the printed version, the reason no doubt being that it had not yet been written.
When he wrote it, probably in Dresden in 1733, he now hinted that the "nexus" or connection between the Infinite and the finite is "the Infinite and Only Begotten" 4 (Jesus Christ).
This might have been a bit of window-dressing for so rationalistic a book as the Principia, but for the fact that in 1734, probably in Leipzig, he elaborated this hint into a short, fervent book, Of the Infinite . . . in which he maintains that the nexus is not "mathematical" at all. Reason can only discover that there is a nexus, not its real nature. Using some dubious teleological sleight-of-words, he tries to hang on to his rational thesis that the "point" is the beginning of the finite world, and yet that the nexus between that world and the Infinite is Christ who is both God and man. It is not convincing even to himself, and he takes refuge in the authority of the Bible.
Why has the deist become a theist?
In the course of his argument he seems to feel that he has some explaining to do, and he suggests that he has met someone or some "other minds," which have come to the same result as he has, but who have gone further, superadding "new results, of which I knew nothing yet which are nowise at variance with mine," so that, as he says, he is bound to believe them.5 So it is from these other minds, it would seem, that he has found an agreement between revelation and reasoning.
The clue to their identity may lie in the new word "nexus," which was a favorite term of the Protestant mystics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for Jesus Christ.6 Jacob Boehme, for instance, said that Christ united eternity and time, God and man.
Swedenborg did an enormous amount of reading in Leipzig and Dresden, and he may have come across the works of Boehmists or those of the disciples of similar mystics, such as the Schwenkfeldians. No one can read Rufus Jones's work on the Protestant mystics7 without seeing the startling likeness between many of Swedenborg's ideas and theirs. And as their ideas stemmed from the Plotinian Christianity of the Areopagite and others, and as Swedenborg had come across the same thoughts when he was in England, in the works of the Cambridge Platonists, familiar echoes must have awakened in his soul had he come across the books of the Protestant mystics in the great book markets of Germany.
But there is greater pressure behind Of the Infinite than that of intellectual discoveries. Those would not have sufficed to throw a Swedenborg out of his orbit. A stronger passion than that for knowledge would be needed here, and there are signs of it.
He says that in man who is entirely finite, entirely of this world, even as to his soul, there is still a capacity for receiving what is divine, and it lies in this, "that man can acknowledge and does acknowledge God . . ." But—note well—he says that through this faith man has the further privilege of being aware "in love, or delight resulting from love, of a peculiar connection with the Infinite." 8
It sounds as though Swedenborg had at some time found in passionate human love that inkling of the divine which other lovers and mystics have found. Indeed he was later to elevate "marriage love," including physical love, to be both an outcome and a symbol of the divine.
He concludes in Of the Infinite that the true divinity in man is an acknowledgment of the existence of God "and a sense of delight in the love of God." 9
That sense of delight, which has nothing to do with theology and everything to do with religion, is the dynamism that makes mystics. From the time when Swedenborg had experienced it, though it may have been only a glimpse, his course was changed.
But not his conscience as a scientist. He had not given up science, his one sure grip on a slippery universe. The second half of the book Of the Infinite he called Of the Mechanism of the Intercourse between the Soul and the Body, because Swedenborg saw the belief in God as linked to belief in a soul, and it was clear to him that unless he could show how the soul influenced the body he could not prove that man had a soul.
He decided to investigate. He wrote: "Only from a knowledge of the soul and of the mechanism of the body can we deduce that there is a God and a creator, but the contrary is the case if we postulate the soul as something most unknowable and secret and something far removed from sense; this is the nearest road to atheism . . ." It must not be "regarded as an object of supreme ignorance and as operating by absolutely unknown laws." 10
If he stressed the "mechanism" of the soul, this was because the blessed word connoted being subject to law. Descartes had made soul a kind of Cinderella outside the palace of matter; Swedenborg wanted to see if he couldn't invite her in and make her the queen, but a constitutional monarch, subject to the same "mechanical" laws as matter.
But, through his study of physics, Swedenborg had come to see that "matter" need not be material. A magnetic field, for instance, could not be either kicked or handled, and yet it had extension, it could be measured. Why not the soul?
"My end, therefore," he said, speaking to unbelievers and probably also to a side of himself, "is to demonstrate to the best of my ability the nature and properties of the soul, and then to show from these endowments that it can never die without all nature being annihilated; and, such being my end, I do not see how anyone, unless indeed some singularly obtuse priestling, can disapprove of the undertaking." 11
But in the Of the Infinite, he said, he was not going to make any "positive declaration," for "experience and geometry alone have the right to be affirmative and positive, and when they become so, then and not till then, by the consent of the soul, the rationale is declared. The main end of these our labors will be to demonstrate the immortality of the soul to the very senses." 12
The soul being, according to him, "the last and subtlest part of the body," which he already had located provisionally in "the cortical substance of the cerebrum and partly also in the medullary" was therefore subject to "mechanical" laws, but he did foresee difficulties in explaining "imagination, perception, reason, memory and so on . . .," yet "why may not mechanical laws exist in a superlative fashion equal to these offices?" 13
It was not a new interest entirely, this interest of Swedenborg's in the mind-body relationship. Even before he left for Germany in 1733 he had written a little piece, The Motion of the Elements, in which he brooded on the means used by the soul to affect the body. And as early as in his twenty-ninth year he had written a study On Tremulations in which he showed a good acquaintance with anatomy. In Upsala, since Olaf Rudbeck's day, a little stealthy dissection had been done, which he probably had had a chance to see something of. At any rate, On Tremulations dealt with the means of sensation. He tried to prove that they were tremulations or vibrations carried through the liquids and solids of the body. Hearing, he said, might be possible even without the mechanism of the ear, if the tremulation were caught "by means of the sympathetic vibration of the teeth or the bones of the head." 14 (A modern hearing aid is based on this principle.)
Similarly he applied "mechanics" to telepathy (as we should now call it), saying: "It also frequently happens that a person falls into the thought of another person, that he perceives what another is doing or thinking, that is, his membrane [the word stood for nerves also] trembles from the tremulations of the other person's cerebral membranes, just as one string is affected by another if they are tuned in the same key." 15
It will be seen that, though he did not deny the reality of thought transference, he had a purely mechanical explanation ready. It came close to a "materialistic" explanation, which is perhaps why the Upsala College of Medicine lost the finished manuscript.
Yet it was not his intention to deny "soul" any more than he ever denied "God." But at no time did he imagine "soul" as a simple night-shirted replica of the earthly self, to be raised on Judgment Day. Few scholars did, even in his time.
It is significant that when Swedenborg came to Halle in March, 1734, he noted in his diary that Professor Hoffmann was still alive. Hoffmann, a great doctor, as well as his colleague Stahl,16 whose theories were taught at Upsala, believed the human organism to be a chemicomechanical affair, which the soul uses as long as it is usable. Hoffmann subdivided "soul." At the top there was an immortal or God-like part. In the middle there was consciousness which received sense impressions and passed them on to the upper house which translated them into ideas. At the bottom, half part of the soul and half of the body, were the "animal spirits," a kind of ethereal "fluid" which was thought to circulate in the nerves. They were what we should call the electrochemical nerve impulse, bringing the sensations to be perceived by consciousness.
These ideas were far from new. From Plotinus and further back they had been trickling through the Dark Ages and the Renaissance in various forms. Always the immaterial part of man was thought to consist of a part capable of contact with the Infinite or Deity, a lower part which took care of concrete reasoning, and a still lower which gave life to the tissues of the body. These theories were known to Swedenborg; yet he held them as mere "opinion" until he could figure out for himself how such soul elements could function in terms of matter and motion.
During the Leipzig stay, in 1734, he came across a book on psychology by Christian Wolff, which he annotated,17 his remarks showing how thoroughly gripped he was by his new program of study. Here it is as if one were inside the very furnace of Swedenborg's mind, his ideas sparkling in every direction. Wolff's prim little propositions are taken into it; they often, he says, agree with his own ideas, but he carries them much further, sees many more implications, and finally drops them altogether to fling himself into outlining a work which is to describe what he already thinks about the causes of perception, imagination, memory, dreams, and so on. With diagrams. And his "tremulation" theory.
In his notes on dreams one seems to detect a strong personal interest. For instance, he contests Wolff's assertion that if we are not able to recognize an idea reproduced by aid of the senses we can't do it by force of the imagination. That is not always true, Swedenborg says. "Thus in sleep I can frequently remember a thing, which when awake I have completely forgotten; as for instance Greek and Hebrew words, which I would never have known although I had read them."
Without a doubt several things about his own mind were puzzling him. He agrees with Wolff that "every dream is caused by a sensation," and yet "one may frequently notice that they tend to some definite end." He thinks that perhaps the soul "supplies many additional things and marvelously joins them together."
He has come to the hypothesis that the "soul," the highest rational faculty in man, is of the same "substance" as the second or "magnetic element" of the universe. An idea, he says, is a vibration in this most subtle "membrane" of the soul, and in the case of dreams, "something is wont to come from the soul which directs ideas to a definite end, as though they were directed by one of whose origin we are ignorant—a circumstance which often seems to us a matter of wonder."
He adds that unless the vibration-motion in the soul is strong enough, it cannot reach the senses, but if it is "considerable," then "a phantasy arises which spreads to the senses, with the result that "in wakeful moments we seem to see and hear this identical thing, exactly as in dreams." Not a bad description of a hallucination. He was aware of such things. "A man," he says, "has heard in his brain the singing of melodies, which otherwise he would have been entirely unaware of knowing."
In these notes he begins to sketch many of his later ideas. He is interested in Wolff's description of the symbolism of hieroglyphics.
He reiterates his belief in thought transference and in the communion of souls, "because there is an undulation between them." He begins to try to apply his theories of immaterial energy "substance" to the make-up of "angels and spirits," but for the common notion of "spirits" he has scorn. "When they can go no further into nature's work . . . our modern authors take refuge in spirits, where the ancients betook themselves to atoms . . . they have merely clothed the unknown with a new name." Men wrangle about anything we can't perceive with our eyes, "the unknowing disputing about the unknown."
Then with a truly magnificent outburst of confidence, he takes refuge in science: "If we had the microscopes, we might be able to see the entire structure both of the soul and the spirit."
He did not intend to be one of the unknowing disputing about the unknown. From the notes to Wolff it is clear he had already studied a great deal of anatomy from standard works on the subject. Impatiently he complains that it is so difficult during a voyage "because of business and pleasure" to make the necessary researches for this study. But he looks forward to the great work he is planning:
"Why should we not reach forward and establish that which surely our posterity will establish—that this body of ours is mechanical, that its organs are mechanical, that its senses are mechanical, the intellect, the reason, and the soul itself. In course of time the learned world will agree. [Nature is] alike in great and small. There is not another kind of reasoning, not another kind of nature; two kinds of nature are by no means possible."
Concerned as he now was about metaphysical and religious questions, such as the Infinite and its connection with the finite world, the nature of the soul and immortality, he was perfectly certain that the answers could not be reached with any satisfaction to his scientific conscience except by "experience, geometry and reason." For some time he had been meaning to turn this battery on the human body. The bulk of the notes on Wolff, as well as the second part of the Of the Infinite show that even before his return to Stockholm in July, 1734, he had made up his mind: he intended to delve for the traces of the soul in the finest recesses of the physical brain.
In his notes to Wolff's Psychology, he had regretted our unconsciousness of most of our make-up. "If the cerebellum were rightly joined to the cerebrum, and if there were a communication between their subtle membranes, then we would know all that took place in our body . . . If God had willed so to join the cerebellum and cerebrum, we would have been instructed in all things of our anatomy almost without a master."
Bar such a convenient arrangement between the seat of consciousness and what was then considered the center for involuntary physiological processes, Swedenborg went in search of the best masters of anatomy he could find when he left Stockholm for his long leave of absence in 1736, but he did not put a word of this into the diary he kept during his stay abroad.
With a few significant exceptions, this diary,18 like his previous travel diary, bristles with facts, mostly topical. Travel guides and statistics were not so conveniently published then as now, hence Swedenborg recorded these things for himself—like most diary-keepers not considering what people in the future would like to have had him write about.
His journeys took him over the ground dreamed of by all dwellers in the dark winters of the poor, limited North. On July 10, 1736, he left Stockholm, going through Copenhagen, Hamburg, Amsterdam and Brussels to Paris, where he arrived September 3. There he remained for a year and a half, leaving on March 12, 1738, for Italy. Dangerously "swimming in snow" over Mont Cenis (or Mont Sini, as he had it, spelling most foreign names by ear) he arrived in Turin and went over Milan and Padua to Venice. He stayed there nearly four months. From Florence, to which he gave a fortnight, he went to Rome, arriving September 25, 1738. He was in Rome nearly five months. He left Italy from Genoa on March 17, 1739, returning to Paris and then going to Amsterdam, where he finished and saw through the press the work for the sake of which the journeys had been undertaken.
At the beginning of each new set of impressions the diary could compete with any guidebook; later on it dwindled and sank under the crowding experiences, yet it is a valuable document through which to look at Swedenborg.
While there was still an engineer in him who noted the new dock being built in Copenhagen and most of the military fortifications he saw en route, he was not much concerned now with manufactures or even with mining. He was not a worldly man certainly but a man of the great world, and one of the most tirelessly sight-seeing, extrovert type. Though he had been out of his country before, he had never before had time or money enough. Now he saw everything along his way—museums, churches, castles, parks, libraries. He grumbled again at the lack of "new books." Except for Bibles, old codexes did not interest him, nor "old-fashioned" architecture either, except when it was old enough, such as the classic.
His energy was fantastic. One day in Paris gives a sample: "I went through Luxembourg and the rue d'Enfer to the Observatory, then to the Porte St. Jacques, past the Capucin monastery, past the Val de Grace, then along the rue St. Jacques to the Porte St. Martin, where we had entered on arriving in Paris; I went along the rampart and looked, from a distance, at the Hopital de St. Louis, where there are said to be ten thousand beds, mostly on account of the plague; then I went to the rue du Temple and looked at the old ruins of the Temple; I also saw the chapel and the garden of the Hotel de grand Prieur, which is rather fine; saw also the Church of St. Elizabeth right across from it; on my way back I went into the church of St. Jacques de la Boucherie, and thus home." He was impressed himself; he reckoned he had walked a whole Swedish mile (six and a half English) as well as doing his sight-seeing.
Probably for the reason that he always called on and was cordially received by the Swedish envoys wherever he was, he was given chances to see things not always accessible to the ordinary tourist. In any case, he managed to be on the spot for the picturesque. He was present in Paris at the opening of the Parliament in the Palais de Justice, and admired the altar, the pontifical bishop, the many lighted candles, the beautiful music, and the "gentlemen in their red cloaks." Nor did he miss much in Italy. He was there, in Venice, when the senators, also in red cloaks, "went out to meet their ambassador and salutes were fired, balls were held and fireworks illuminated the canals." He was there too on Ascension Day when the Doge celebrated the marriage of Venice to the sea. "I joined them and saw how the sea was consecrated." Perhaps he was on the state ship Bucentaur itself. He noticed the masks so commonly worn in that city of intrigues. And, little as he gives of his personal life, there is a hint that he was not without entertainment and companionship in the note: "Every Saturday there was music in the convent of Incurabile e Pieta; lodged at the Ponte Rialto together with H. Firencrantz"—a Swedish name.
In Bologna he saw the city's annual feast, quite a feast. First they played at storming a fortress; "after that there was thrown to the people a great quantity of chickens, pigeons, geese, turkeys, and after that sheep, and then, by Cardinal Spinola and two others, peacocks, coins and lastly purses."
In Livorno he visited a slave-galley and attended a reception with glorious fireworks, for the Grand Duke. While in Genoa he saw "the Doge who always wears red including his shoes," and he saw the Genoan nobles voting—"they are all in black with little mantles; flat noses and faces."
He conscientiously recorded statues and paintings, but art was for him, as for most of his century, at its best in lifelike and literal representation. Like all Northerners he was overcome by the splendor of marble in buildings and statues, and when, later in Holland, he had a chance to have an inlaid marble table made, with a comb, a pack of cards and a fan represented on it, he sent it home, causing much trouble for his family with the Swedish customs.
The arts which really moved Swedenborg, however, were music and the theater.
The Italy he knew was deeply sundered and corrupt, and France was on its way down a slippery slope, but the stately glitter of the Grand Monarque was still over Paris, its facades and colonnades laid out on a royal scale, the city framed by rounding hills that were green and windmill-crowned. Paris, to use the diary's favorite and almost only adjective, was "magnifique," but what the man of the world most admired in it was the theater. Swedenborg went often to the Comédie, and said, "It seems now brought to the greatest height it ever can reach." He was enthusiastic about the singing and dancing at the Opera, and had his favorites whose names he tried in vain to spell, but later when he saw in the Verona opera house how the Italians could sing and dance, he admitted that "in those respects, the French Opera seems but child's play."
His father, the late Bishop, had left no doubt as to how he felt about the theater; for him it was Satan's own workshop and going to it almost as great a sin as sabbath-breaking or the wearing of wigs that might be made of "whore-hair." Had he seen his son Emanuel attending the Comédie, undoubtedly in a well-curled wig, with a sword by his side, and wearing an embroidered coat with lace collar and cuffs, his words would have been pungent.
Emanuel was not being untrue to his convictions. He might be living in Paris at its most decadent, or in Venice when it had become Europe's illicit pleasure ground, but he did not condemn pleasure as such. On this he was to give an opinion many years later, after his travels had been extended to still another world. "I have met with many in the spiritual world," he wrote, "who in the natural world had lived like others, clothing themselves splendidly, faring sumptuously, trafficking for gain like others, attending dramatic performances, jesting about love affairs as if from lust, and other like things, and yet with some the angels accounted these as evils of sin, and with others accounted them not as evils; and these they declared innocent, but those guilty." 19 The difference, as he said it was explained to him, was all in the intention.
Within the man of the world, one might say, was the scientist-philosopher. About him the 1736—39 diary tells little except for its eloquent blankness for over a year in Paris and for almost the whole time in Venice, while he was studying and writing; yet there is a glimpse on October 4, 1736, when he notes that he walked in the Thyllerie:
"Next to the Thyllerie, on the other side of the river is the Hotel de la Duchesse, which is magnifique; there is a pleasant promenade, and I speculated on the form of the particles in the atmosphere."
One can see him in the golden haze of a Paris autumn day, near the gleaming Seine, wandering with an abstracted air among the animated French, Swedenborg the philosopher, there and yet not there—already, so to speak, "in the spiritual world."
There was in him too a man who looked at things more and more from a spiritual or ethical point of view. Like most Protestant Northerners, he had at first been charmed and impressed by the lavishness of gold and silver in Catholic churches as well as by the sensuous service. In the Brussels cathedral, among multitudes of burning silver lamps, he heard mass, reflecting that the main thing about it seemed to be the leading of thought to religion by exterior means, "for it is arranged with so much courtseying, bowing and kneeling devotion which charms the eye," while "beautiful music both instrumental and vocal fills the ear," and "there are fragrant spices for the nose." He allowed, benevolently, that human beings were usually led to reflect by way of the senses, but when he arrived in northern France he saw another side of the picture.
Driving through small towns he saw "magnifique convents, poor and wretched people." "In general, the convents, churches and monks are the richest and own most of the land, the monks are fat, puffed up and flourishing, a fine army might be recruited from them without their being missed; most of them take it easy and try to get more and more under control; they give nothing to the poor except words and blessings, yet they are always wanting everything from the poor for nothing, of what use are these Capucin monks? Others again are slim, lean and supple, prefer walking to driving or riding, are sociable, like good living, are witty, etc."
A little later he collected some figures about the Church in France. "In France there are 14,777 convents, three or four hundred thousand religious. They possess 9,000 palaces or manors, 1,356 abbeys, 567 abbesses, 13,000 priors, 15,000 chaplains, 140,000 parishes, 18 archbishops, 112 bishops . . . 16 heads of orders . . ."
The signs that were to lead to French revolutionary enthronement of Reason were already clear, but it was not altogether from economic considerations that Emanuel Swedenborg condemned the fat friars. He saw them as he was beginning to see monarchies, not only as hard on the poor, but as inimical to true religion.
He had noted that Their Swedish Majesties were very gracious when he took leave of them, but he had a very strong feeling against monarchy, and this he now recorded in a diary entry where the innermost Swedenborg for a moment revealed himself, the man who had within the last three or four years acquired an emotional conviction of God's existence, and who did not feel he had to prove either God's or the soul's existence "mechanically" while he was alone with his own thoughts.
The entry was from his three days' stay in Amsterdam in September, 1736, and it expressed the feelings of mingled horror and affection in which he held the Netherlands, a country he already knew well from former visits. Arrived in Amsterdam, he noted that "the whole city breathed of nothing but gain," and later on, after being in Rotterdam, he wrote that he could not understand why it had pleased Our Lord to bless such an uncouth and avaricious people with so splendid a country. (He always appreciated politeness. An uncivil ship's captain depressed him, and he noted in Belgium what a relief it was to meet civilized manners after the Dutch lack of them.)
But why, he pondered, had the Lord protected the Dutch for so long, and let their commerce flourish mightily so that riches from everywhere flowed into their hands?
"It seems to me that the chief reason is that the country is a Republic . . . in which the Lord seems to take greater pleasure than in countries governed by sovereigns . . ." In republics, he dryly wrote, "no one feels in duty bound to accord any human being honor or veneration, but think the lesser as well as the greater just as good as kings and emperors, as indeed is evident from the native bent and disposition of every one in Holland."
Why was this so pleasing to God? Swedenborg thought that if the worship of God flowed from each man's free will, then "fear or caution don't make them lose their courage or free, rational thoughts"; furthermore people who have been oppressed by sovereign power are bred in flatteries and falsities, that is, to speak and act differently from the way they think, then "they carry that into church services and extend their flattery to the Lord himself, which certainly must be most displeasing to him . . ."
Any sincere, simple Christian of a pietist or Quaker tinge might have referred thus personally to his God, but Swedenborg was neither; he did not even know what Quakerism was. After being in Copenhagen, where a dismal form of pietism was then in court favor, he noted that "people here are so infected with pietism or quakerismo that they think it pleasing to God to commit suicide."
Swedenborg's form of worship was more constructive—also much more difficult. He knew that. In 1738, after he had been studying physiology abroad for two years, he wrote:
"To complete the single science of the soul, all the sciences are required that the world has ever eliminated or developed." With less than all, the man who undertook this would founder. "The points which he requires, but of which unhappily he is ignorant, he must perforce obtain from himself or produce by the keenness of his own mind, that is to say, he must use his imagination to supply the place of real knowledge, and how prone to error the imagination is if left to her own guidance . . . is perfectly well known . . ." 20
He would not leave anything to imagination. "Whatever results we are now to arrive at in treating of the brain must be confirmed by all that depends upon that brain . . . the whole body, including all the viscera, organs, parts, solids, fluids, also by records of the body or of the animus [reasoning mind], and, furthermore, by the details of experimental chemistry and physics . . ." 21
No scholastic web would suffice Emanuel Swedenborg as proof of the soul's interaction with the body. He required demonstration, the kind you could point at with your finger. To find material for such proof was the object of his year and a half in Paris, at Dr. Petit's school of anatomy, where he studied under Winsløv, the Dane, who was probably the first to examine the organs of the body in the body, dissecting them under water.22 (Anatomists had hitherto taken the organs out.) For this he studied in Venice, where he wrote about the brain, near to Padua, where the brilliant Morgagni taught, much quoted by him. Italy had long been the foremost country for anatomy.23
Of these facts, however, Swedenborg's travel diary tells nothing. All that he conveys is that he went from Italy in March, 1739, by way of Paris to Amsterdam, where, "on the stroke of midnight," December, 1739, he finished the book known as The Economy of the Animal Kingdom.