Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic/Chapter 11

by Signe Toksvig

 

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Strange Dreams and "Temptations"

THE well-set-up, rather plump Swedish scholar who lived in Amsterdam from about May, 1739, to about October, 1740, was anything but an idle dreamer, however. It is doubtful whether he gave himself much time to enjoy the golden, liquid shadows of Rembrandt's city. He was there chiefly because it was one of the few places where books could be published without censorship; because it was a place where he could consult the works of great anatomists, and—at least equally important for him—where he could read the books of those men who, like himself, had been driven to ask the eternal questions about body, soul, and God. Amsterdam had been the city of Spinoza.

The first part of The Economy of the Animal Kingdom was published in July, 1740, the second part was in print at the beginning of September and out in January, 1741. Swedenborg left Amsterdam in October, 1740, for Stockholm, but while he had been seeing his book through the press he had not confined himself to this. Besides writing a couple of minor works, he had revised and added to the manuscript of his great work on the brain; he had made many extracts from anatomical works; and he had probably begun to make the collection of extracts from philosophical authors which fill another volume of his manuscript.¹

Not all the extracts were strictly philosophical—he cites from Aristotle that "men solid of flesh are dull of intellect, while men soft of flesh are gifted." ² There seems to be a sigh of the sedentary here, but Swedenborg's appetite for work was as great as his powers of sight-seeing, and no man who was soft-fleshed in any feeble way could have done what he accomplished when he returned to Sweden.

He was back at his exacting job in the Board of Mines on November 3, 1740, and in almost constant attendance there throughout the next two or three years, except when he sat in parliament as a member of the House of Nobles, or when he went on commissions of inquiry for the Board.³

Meanwhile he was carrying on his studies and writings on psychology and physiology. He was not deterred by the fact that the learned world had received the first two volumes of The Economy with tepid interest and, so far as his theories of the soul were concerned, with some alarm about his "materialism." ⁴

He finished the manuscripts of The Fibre, which he had planned to be the third volume of The Economy—about four hundred pages of anatomical, physical, and philosophical thinking on the human nervous system; he sketched out several smaller transactions containing his more clarified views on the interaction of soul and body, and then, feeling he had been "too hasty" in rushing into print with The Economy, he began to compose a new gigantic work.

In his former published work he had dealt with the "government" (economy) of the soul's kingdom; that is, with the cortex of the brain, with the blood and the embryo, and with a doctrine of the soul. Now he meant to go through all the organs of the body and to take up again, with fuller knowledge, the question of body-soul relationships. This was to be his final map of the soul's kingdom. In seventeen parts.

No wonder that Eric Benzelius wrote to his son Charles, who was in Stockholm: "Visit your uncle Emanuel Swedenborg as often as possible, but at such hours as he may himself appoint; for he is not always at leisure, and is most economical with his time." ⁵

It would indeed hardly seem as if Swedenborg had any time to ponder on flashes of vision or strange dreams. But these come unbidden and make themselves at home. The hard-working mining expert, the physicist-philosopher, the anatomist, had for several years been conscious of a rill of secret life—perhaps the very spring of his present studies—at any rate a messenger from subliminal regions which was making itself more and more evident.

At least as early as his forty-fifth or forty-sixth year Swedenborg noted something peculiar about dreams. He annotated Wolff's Psychology with the remark that although dreams probably rose from some external stimulus, yet there were dreams which seemed as if they tended to some definite end, as if they were directed by the soul. A couple of years later, in 1736, he had begun making notes of his dreams (they were subsequently lost).

Then, while he was writing the Economy, and puzzling over the problem of how to keep the lower mind (animus) in order,⁶ he wrote that the rational mind could keep watch and wake while the body slept; and one gathers he felt he had solved something while dreaming, much as did the assyriologist who dreamed the correct interpretation of a difficult inscription.⁷ But, besides this, he said, the mind could in a measure stand away from the senses and thus receive a fuller light from the soul. By this statement he was probably referring to a different experience.

In Amsterdam, it may be remembered, when he came there in late August, 1736, he was shocked at the "spirit of gain" pervading the city, and in his diary he made a long entry about God and the Dutch. It was an unusually "interior" entry in that concrete and guidebook diary, but it happened that in Amsterdam he had had an unusual experience.

Together with what he remembered from his childhood of the effect of inhibited breathing, this was perhaps the very experience which led him to make a special study of the connection between the motion of the brain and the motion of the lungs, one of his titles to fame. While discussing the proofs of this in The Economy, he several times referred to the mind's power of cutting off the sense impressions when it desired to think intensely, especially the "olfactory impressions" ⁸ (no doubt canals smelled badly whether in Venice or in Amsterdam, and his sense of smell was keen).

He insisted that the mind's way of cutting off sense impressions was by breathing very quietly through the mouth, or in any case by breathing very shallowly. He spoke of the breast fearing "by any deep breath to disturb the quiet of the brain," and of its compressing itself and admitting only a small amount of air.

Reduction of the amount of air may help intense thinking; if it is carried too far, however, it may lead to something else. (Six or seven years later, Swedenborg wrote in a very diflerent kind of diary that "in the morning the same kind of faintness or weakness came over me as I had in Amsterdam, when I was beginning the Economy of the Animal Kingdom." He continued, "it came when I saw the light," and he thought it meant "as it meant then" that his mind was being put in order "as it happened then too since it give me penetration with the pen." ⁹)

Three weeks after his stay in Amsterdam, in 1736, he wrote (as previously cited) that when men of science who have the power of synthesizing "after a long course of reasoning make a discovery of the truth, straightway there is a certain cheering light, and joyful confirmatory brightness, that plays round the sphere of their mind; and a kind of mysterious radiation—I know not whence it proceeds—that darts through some sacred temple of the brain."

Clearly he had had, in Amsterdam, an impression of light which he considered mysteriously helpful, a light which was an "influx" from the soul. But at times he was not at all sure about the origin. Elsewhere he expresses how the soul cannot function if the ways of communication are not open, such as in the infant or the idiot, and "yet for all this we will not cease to pride ourselves above our fellow mortals, whenever we receive a few false rays by influx from the soul; and to judge of the souls of others by their bodies."

Had the joyful brightness become a few false rays? He had said that if the mind had once experienced the cheering light ("for no desire attaches to the unknown") it would be carried away wholly in pursuit of it, despising all merely corporeal pleasures; but still he might only have been a little flowery in describing intellectual satisfaction, and so the falseness might be intellectual disappointment.

However, soon after finishing The Economy, in February, 1740, he made a terse summary of his system, and at the end of this he wrote, italicizing the sentence: "These things are true, because I have the sign." ¹⁰

What sign? The "confirmatory brightness"?

We do not know. But a few years later, he wrote, ". . . a flame of divers sizes and with a diversity of color and splendor has often been seen by me. Thus while I was writing a certain little work hardly a day passed by for several months in which a flame was not seen by me as vividly as the flame of a household hearth; at the time this was a sign of approbation, and this happened before spirits began to speak with me viva voce." ¹¹

In another important reminiscent passage, he wonders that he had not realized before what was happening to him, because for many years, he says, such remarkable proofs existed. "Not only were there dreams for some years, informing me concerning the things that were being written, but there were also changes of states while I was writing: a certain extraordinary light in the things that were being written . . ." ¹²

There is no doubt that for a scientifically minded man, as he looked on himself, he was in an embarrassing situation with these "occult" experiences and in a state of painful bewilderment in regard to his sanity. In his work on The Fibre, written in 1741-42, he said some things about mental diseases in which may be seen veiled references to the suspicions that most likely beset him.

One form of mental disease he calls fanatic imagination (it clearly means a state of hallucination), and he says that it may be due, among other things, to a condition of the brain in which it is "rigid," and refuses to admit the testimony of the senses, "or else admits them by way of exasperants." It does not in this state, he says, dispel "strange and illy consociated ideas," but may absorb them and thereby "immensely augment the idea conceived . . ." ¹³

Various physical diseases may cause this, but also sicknesses of the emotional mind (animus), such as hope deceived, or sorrow, but even the rational mind may originate the evil, he says, if it has been too intensely applied, especially to the problem of life after death.

"But so long as the mind is still sane," he reassured himself, "such illusions can easily be dispelled . . ."

On the other hand, in writing about a state which he termed "ecstasy energumene," he regarded it as possible that, besides the half-dead condition of the partly drowned or partly suffocated, there was a state in which the soul voluntarily separated from the body. As proof he cited the case of persons "skilled in the art of magic" from the northern regions. (The Lapps in the north of Scandinavia have always had a reputation for shamanistic mediumism.)

Such persons, Swedenborg said, "are credited with being able to fall spontaneously into a kind of ecstasy in which they are deprived of the external senses and of all motion, and with being engaged meanwhile in the operations of the soul alone, in order that after resuscitation they may reveal thefts and declare desired secrets."

Physically, he noted, the circulation seems to have stopped in "persons subject to ecstasy," as well as the respiration, and he concluded that "for the leading of an ecstatic life a peculiar disposition is required." ¹⁴

Without at this stage exploring the modern theories that may cover Swedenborg's own experiences, it may be mentioned here that he had himself, unconsciously, stumbled on an old technique for inducing such a peculiar disposition. It was not lacking in significance that he marked the apparent cessation of breathing in the "ecstatic" subject.

Professor H. H. Price, of New College, Oxford, in his presidential address to the Society for Psychical Research (1937), declared one of their great difficulties to be that the investigator of psychic phenomena usually has to rely on hearsay. Not only is a technique wanted by which psychic phenomena can be repeated at will, but the investigator should be able to experience the phenomena himself. Professor Price then with all the diffidence in the world called attention to the fact that for a couple of thousand years certain Hindus have practiced a technique which may lead to psychic phenomena, though this is not the primary object—"yoga," or a conviction of union with God, being the primary object. Professor Price suggested that students might try this, but scientifically rather than religiously.

At least two modern investigators, one a Hindu and one an American, have studied yoga technique scientifically and reported their findings. Dr. K. T. Behanan (on a Sterling fellowship from Yale University) went to India to study the subject firsthand and to practice the exercises.¹⁵ Dr. Theos Bernard also went to India for these purposes.¹⁶

From both one gathers that besides intense concentration on a serious idea the ability to hold one's breath is of vital importance for reaching the condition in which phenomena may occur. Dr. Behanan says that the pause between inhalation and exhalation is "the main feature of all yogic varieties of breathing which are claimed to have spiritual value . . ." ¹⁷ He speaks of the different bright colors seen by him during these exercises and of his consciousness of a change in the level of respiration. It seemed to him that in this condition his respirations were very few and shallow. He noted a feeling of joy.

Dr. Bernard, who also investigated Thibetan techniques, laid more stress on the importance of holding the breath. The yogins were said to be able to hold it for about an hour, and he was told that unless he could keep it in for at least three minutes nothing of any significance would appear. He worked up to five minutes. In the second month he began to see lights and vivid colors, and finally a white light of great brilliance, which he was able to make appear at will by using the technique he had learned. An ecstatic condition of great joy sometimes ensued. Dr. Bernard quotes at length from the ancient yogic texts regarding the marvelous psychic phenomena which the accomplished yogin can produce at will. Seeing other worlds than ours, levitation, etc., are said to be the least of them. Incidentally he mentions one form of the exercises which involved mouth-breathing.

Swedenborg has left minute descriptions of the kind of mouthbreathing, shallow breathing, and "internal breathing" which he at first unconsciously and then consciously practiced when he was concentrating intensely on an intellectual problem, or, later, on a spiritual one. He came, he said, to be able to hold his breath almost entirely for "a little hour." ¹⁸

It is at least possible that his visions and feelings of lights, of colored flames, and of "joyful confirmatory brightness" went with the special kind of breathing which he was to develop even further with even more startling results.

Western mystics of all ages as well as Eastern yogins agree on the overwhelming sense of conviction which their experience of the "light" brings to them, and it has been mentioned that Swedenborg interpreted his light-visions as signs of approbation, while he was writing a work that probably was his new book the Animal Kingdom or the "Soul's Kingdom of the Body" (Regnum Animale).

Approbation of what? Naturally he took it to be of the system which he had worked out concerning the interrelationship of soul and body. And so he stressed more and more the mastership of the soul, the way in which vessels and organs ministered to its purposes, although those could be foiled and spoiled by selfish instincts in the mind and the animus. But he still solemnly invoked experiment as the only way in which truth could be found. He admitted that faith was better, but he said he was writing his book for those who had to go the way of reason, "who never believe anything but what they can receive with the intellect . . ." ¹⁹

His own intellect had not suffered. Some of his keenest deductions were in his work on the brain, which was meant to be a part of the Animal Kingdom. He believed firmly that he was on the right track for finding the soul, because the body was its image "if not exactly, yet quite sufficiently . . . Thus by the body we are instructed respecting the soul, by the soul respecting the body; and by both respecting the truth of the whole." ²⁰

If he had been, as he said, "too hasty" in publishing the result of his findings after only investigating the blood and the brain, he now meant to make up for that by really going into the body's every detail.

Yet Swedenborg was not really happy. He should have been. He had an official position which gave him work that interested him, and in his physiological studies he had outside interests so great that they were really inside. Most important of all for him, he was convinced he had found the right religious philosophy. He was satisfied with the way he had fitted together the pieces of physical and spiritual information he had labored to acquire. In fact he had the comprehensive hypothesis every scientist craves, and it seemed to him to provide all the answers, bar slight details.

Still, it is known from a diary he began to keep in 1743 ²¹ that he was far from happy. He had indeed formulated his religious beliefs, but he was now confronted by the struggle to live up to them. He was not mildly dejected now and then as every thinking human being must be at the gap between knowing and doing; it was more than that. Swedenborg was suffering. He suffered in proportion to the joy he had experienced when he perceived "the light"—an experience which, all mystics testify, makes a hypersensitive scrutiny of their own shortcomings inevitable, so that after the first glad recognition of feeling "saved" a period of dark doubt occurs.

Probably Swedenborg suffered equally at the thought that the very light he clung to might be a will-o'-the-wisp, might even be insanity. It is not likely that he had anyone to whom he could talk freely on such matters. Eric Benzelius was away in Linköbing. Furthermore, Benzelius, being now a bishop, was presumably a believer, and believers would merely wonder why Swedenborg had to drag in his reason to be satisfied. As for the skeptics, they would have wondered why he needed to believe. Both groups would have distrusted and rejected his visions and his "informative" dreams, either as from the Devil or as insanity.

Unlike Socrates, Swedenborg was too modern a man to listen peacefully to his "inner voice." He had to find out what kind of voice it was, what kind of dreams those were in which he foresaw things that later happened. As early as about 1741, he had made a list of quotations mainly from Aristotle and Plato concerning presages of the future in dreams.²² There were no psychic researchers about with tabulated results of mechanically regulated experiments of precognition. It must have comforted the worried Swedenborg that Plato, although relegating the art of divining to madness, nevertheless thought it behooved a man of prudence to pay attention to signs that come in visions or in dreams.

Swedenborg did not doubt that there was a divine light which could flow into the soul from God and from the soul into the mind, but he was not sure about the receptacle. Putting his anguish into scholastic sawdust, he had written, "We cannot say with what power, according to what laws, and in what manner, the subject reflects, infracts, diminishes and intercepts these rays, opposes to them its own mists and beclouds itself; how again when these mists are dispersed it emerges into the light; how it warms with zeal; and, on the other hand, how it cools from want of it . . ." ²³

He knew right well that he cooled from want of it and that he felt dangerously lost in the mists. Then it was, no doubt, that he applied his test for insanity, the test he had formulated when he wrote in The Fibre about mental diseases.

He began by saying meaningfully, "There is hardly a mortal who is not in his own way insane. He alone is sane and acts wisely who worships God, thrice best and greatest, and by faith aspires to eternal bliss; and the wisest is he who regards not even this bliss except as a consequence, but the glory of the deity as the principal thing."

From this description of wisdom, it was clear, he said, what the degrees of insanity were, and the test of the insanity's "nature and intensity" could be found out by knowing "the ends the mind has in view and follows up." It was obvious to him that deranged minds might have noble ends in view, but the "follow-up" belonged to the sane. If the following up of the end carried away from wisdom, from the Deity, then it was toward insanity, he declared, but he added that this diametric opposition to the Deity was not what was commonly known in the world as insanity, "because it is universal and is believed to be truly human, and indeed of such nature that the world declares those to be insane who are not insane." ²⁴

Showing that he knew well enough what the accepted definition was, he said, "Medically speaking, an insane person is one who acts contrary to accepted propriety and the customs of society, or, still more, who obstinately defends his own opinion against acknowledged truths and the judgments of a sound mind, and pursues it to the contempt and derision of the vulgar, that is to say who, deranged and empty of mind, exposes himself to public sport." ²⁵

He gave himself a clean mental bill of health according to the world's definition. But—was he sound from God's point of view? He was sure he was following up a good end in trying to justify faith by reason, but could the mind ever present us with pure truth while it was entangled with the body? Could it ever be rid of the mistakes of the senses? ²⁶ So he asked at the beginning of the Animal Kingdom, and there too he stressed the purity the mind must possess, and the concern for only universal purposes, before it can receive the light of truth from above.

A humble man, Swedenborg was very doubtful about his own purity, and now he had reached a point where his own reasoning did not satisfy him. He had had a glimpse of what he thought of as divine approval, and he yearned for more, for enough so that he could put out of his head the suspicion that the blissful light had been the "weak fires" of the body or of the animus or even of the mind, pretending to be the light of life, as he wrote in the second part of the new book.²⁷

The book, the Animal Kingdom, had its two first parts nearly ready for the press, when Emanuel Swedenborg again applied to the Board of Mines for leave of absence to consult libraries abroad and publish his new work. He said he would have preferred to stay at home and attend to his little property and have pleasant times rather than go to so much trouble and expense by traveling "in these unquiet times," and this "with the probability of meeting in the end with more unfavorable than favorable judgments." Yet, he said, he wanted to produce something real in his lifetime, something which might be of use in the scientific world and to posterity, and which might even obtain some honor for his native country. He would as usual give up half his salary to a substitute, and he would even keep a journal to prove that his time wasn't being wasted! But that would not be necessary, for his own intention was to use all the diligence possible to finish his work, return to his country, and in "tranquillity and ease" continue his "larger work, the Regnum Minerale," and thus be "of actual use to the public at large . . ." ²⁸

On July 21 Assessor Swedenborg left Stockholm for Amsterdam, traveling in a leisurely fashion and doing some strenuous sight-seeing on the way. He arrived toward the end of August, 1743.

But the change of scene did not dispel the dark mists that from time to time enveloped him. Most characteristic of the period of strife that now began for him is a little incident which he noted in his intimate diary on April 7, 1744.

He said, evidently referring to something that took place in a dining room, either public or private, that "I heard a man at the table ask his neighbor the question whether any one could be melancholy who had more than enough of money. I smiled inwardly and would have answered, if it had been proper to do so in that company or if I had been asked, that a man who has more than enough of everything may not only be subject to melancholy but to a still deeper kind which is that of the mind and the soul or of the spirit which effects it; I wondered that he brought it up. I can bear witness to this so much the more since I by the grace of God have been granted an abundance of all that I need temporally; I could live well on my income alone and carry out what I have in mind and still have money left over; therefore I can bear witness that the sadness or melancholy which comes from lack of means is of a lower and a physical kind and in no way equal to the other." ²⁹

Why was he so melancholy? In his book The Fibre he wrote at length about the causes of melancholy, and, consulting Swedenborg on Swedenborg, one may find that the "spiritual cause," the "supreme cause," of melancholy is due to an "evil conscience," otherwise "temptations." Such a disease of the soul, he says, descending into the mind and then into the lower mind and from this into the blood, "perturbs, inverts and robs the whole animal organism." ³⁰

Now what did he mean by "temptations"?