All things whatsoever that a man or spirit has known about a subject, he said, appear as if in the middle of a sphere and in the light, and the rest is around at a distance from the middle, in the shade. Those at the circumference of the subject, he said, are "like objects of sight . . . when the sight is strained to a certain object." 8
Then, as if searching for the useful word "telepathy," Swedenborg said that this common speech of spirits "is in every man whatsoever, and would become of the same character, if one man should enter into the thought of another with his own thought . . . thus he can bring forth more in a moment than by his words during half an hour."
It was so, he maintained, in the other world, one spirit entered into the thoughts and affections of another "and then knows what he had not known, just as if he knew it of himself." But there were exceptions since the "full communication" could only take place if the participants were "in like truths and in like affection from truths"; since all spirits were not equally endowed with receptivity; and since—mercifully, one would suppose—all one's ideas were not necessarily visible. A spirit could, Swedenborg said, "think in silence" when with other spirits of a similar quality.9
Many notes in Swedenborg's diaries are concerned with ways of communicating in the other world. These notes are not always consistent. It is not as if he had sat down and been "inspired" to write a systematic account that always fitted in with his own previous ideas. In this case, as in the case of most of his descriptions in that strange realm, it is more as if a traveler in a foreign country had listened to many of the inhabitants and put down some of what each had told him, contradictory though it might sometimes be, interpreting it in the light of his own preconceptions where he had no other light. Like Marco Polo, one might almost be tempted to say; a man whose observations were good enough, but whose interpretations were colored.
As he divided the denizens into spirits (of several kinds), spiritual angels, and celestial angels, so he distinguished between their ways of conveying thought. What spirits were able to say to man was only a small part of what they knew, "for it does not fall into the words, neither into the sensual ideas of the thought which is
