Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic/Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Swedenborg's Clairvoyance
IN Swedenborg's work on the nervous system (The Fibre) there is evidence that he had not neglected the study of abnormal mental states. While he was writing this book, in 1741, he had a chance to apply his knowledge, since he was given charge of a case that came before the Board of Mines. It was that of Duseen, a copyist clerk, accused of drunkenness and violence. Many witnesses testified that Duseen was good, but weakminded. Many others swore he was the worst of drunkards. Swedenborg with remarkable breadth of mind for his time saw that he had to find out, as he told his fellow Assessors, whether the man was weakminded because of intoxication, or intoxicated because of being weakminded. He decided for the latter, after having most ably sifted all the evidence. But he urged caution in dismissing him, bad servant of the State though he was. "His negligence comes from his sickness, and such a course would put him in a miserable condition as to both body and soul." Duseen was allowed to retire on a pension.1
Two years later Swedenborg was going through his religious crisis, but in spite of the deep emotions that almost swept him away from his faith in rationality, he did study his own case, as is evident in the dream diary of 1743—44. He interpreted his dreams not according to their manifest content (or what they seemed superficially to mean) but as symbolic of the ambitions that were preoccupying him so intensely—his scientific work and his longing to be a wholly "spiritual" man, to be regenerated.2
He noticed a real split in his personality and very much wondered at it. "It was strange that I could be of two minds, quite separate at the same time . . . I did not know whither to flee, for I bore it within me." The two minds, the "double thoughts," as he literally called them, he saw of course as the carnal man striving with the spiritual man, but there was more than symbolism in it for him. He noted that he felt the "inner man" as "another than myself," and that he seemed to speak to himself as if to another.3
During this period he also noted that he had unusual physical symptoms, such as sleeping for ten or twelve hours at a stretch, and unaccountable sweats and tremblings. He practiced, as we have seen, self-invented breathing exercises (of a yogic kind) involving holding his breath, as a help toward "controlling" his thoughts. Whether because of such practices or not, he experienced "a swoon such as I had in Amsterdam six or seven years ago." 4
He was aware that most of his strange experiences seemed to come after he had just awaked in the morning, but one whole night, "I was neither asleep nor awake, but in a strange coma; I was aware of all my dreams; I kept control of my thoughts, which made me sweat now and then; I cannot describe that kind of sleep, through which my double thoughts were separated or were torn asunder." 5
It is evident that he distinguished between this conscious but trancelike state, characterized by inner strife, and his other states of mystic ecstasy, in which he felt as if he might be wholly dissolved in "the real joy of life." 6 Those he associated with "the only blissful Christ spirit." But at the end of the so-called dream diary he notes that he had discovered there are spirits of all kinds, and this is the first mention he makes of "spirits." These other spirits, he says, "take the form of our desires [amores]," which would make it seem as if he were trying to picture one set of his "double thoughts" as a kind of infernal crew symbolizing temptations. It must be remembered that Swedenborg to a high degree thought in images. Even in his strictly physiological works he is always illustrating his point with some very concrete simile as previously cited—"the grate-work" of the ribs, "the pipes, ovens and little bladders" of the body, etc. Everything was always like something else, something visual and specific.
But through this period he does not seem to have had, or at least recorded, more than one real auditory hallucination—one, that is, as coming from outside of himself. This occurred on an occasion just before he went to sleep. He says he was thinking hard about his current work (it was The Worship and Love of God) when "it was said to me 'shut your mouth, or I'll hit you!' " He says he was frightened. But he drew the conclusion he shouldn't work so late at night.7
Such threats from an ebullient sub-psychon-system, either trying to become more or resenting becoming less, are not uncommon in periods of spiritual adjustment.
Ever since childhood Swedenborg had tended to disregard his introspective life, enthralled as he was by experimental science. Busy as science kept him, he may also have kept down his emotional life, or not given it enough practice, while at the same time he yearned for the release of feeling that abandonment of self which he described as the real essence of love.
In the language of Dr. Jung, it could be said that Swedenborg was an introvert type who flung himself into an extrovert career. But his real bent kept pulling him toward psychological and religious interests, culminating in the religious crisis when the introvert philosopher conquered the extrovert scientist in a battle that took the form of spiritual versus worldly ambition.
What was subjective and what was objective was certainly not so subtly disentangled in Swedenborg's day as it is now. At that time it was not strange that he should have been "aware" of, or have "seen," as dark forces outside of himself, the things in himself with which he was struggling.
This, in modern terms, is called projecting a dissociated fragment of yourself. Jung calls it an integral part of the mechanism of the unconscious, and says it stands wholly outside the conscious will.8
In Jungian psychology the battle in Swedenborg would not necessarily be ascribed to unbalanced sexuality or to unbalanced desire for power, as it would with Freud or Adler. Jung recognizes other "drives"; he recognizes, in his own words, "before and above all that which belongs to man alone—the spiritual and religious need inborn in the psyche." 9
Turning from Swedenborg the mystic, however, back to the Swedenborg whose consciousness was being "torn asunder," he was certainly "dissociated," or, in Mr. Carington's terms, a subsystem of his general psychon-system was leading a dark life of its own, or perhaps several of them were doing so. Does this prove that he was capable of extrasensory perception—of getting impressions, later discovered to have been true, without the aid of the senses?
Certainly not.
"Dissociation," or a split personality, does not need to mean that its owner will dream true dreams, receive correct objective information from "apparitions," etc.-—-far from it. As Gardner Murphy has pointed out,10 before the latter kind of dissociation can take place, there is usually a deep need for paranormal contact in the individual. And this deep need may even be the cause of the cleavage.
Swedenborg had noted this. He wrote in The Fibre that what we should now call hallucinations (he called it "fanatical imagination") were apt to come from "a most intense application and ardor of the mind . . . especially in the case of those who ardently desire to contemplate the state of the soul after the fate of the body . . ." 11
Whether he was writing here with himself in mind or not, there can be little doubt but that he had deep need for paranormal contact.
Did it result in his obtaining it, in the sense of his having "veridical hallucinations," and thus procuring information apparently unobtainable by ordinary sensory means?
The three chief stories on which his reputation for clairvoyance rests are his having perceived a fire in Stockholm while he was in Gothenburg three hundred miles away; his having guessed a secret known only to the Queen of Sweden and her dead brother, and his having obtained knowledge of the whereabouts of a lost receipt, its location being "known" only to the dead Dutch ambassador Marteville.
That he himself admitted the truth of these stories has been recorded by a number of witnesses, and since there is overwhelming testimony to Swedenborg's own truthfulness, the case might be considered closed if it were not also a fact that even the most truthful can be self-deceived.
To analyze the evidence for Swedenborg's "psychic" experiences after two hundred years is not so diflicult, however, as it might seem—if we make the present come to the aid of the past. Through modern experimental methods, as has been mentioned, strong evidence exists in favor of the reality of telepathy. But what about the so-called "spontaneous" cases, where, for instance, a person has a "vision" of a distant event, later proved to have occurred in the way and at the time the percipient was aware of it?
A questionnaire regarding the frequency of veridical hallucinations of this kind was sent out by the English Society for Psychical Research. The results were statistically analyzed and showed that for a certain number of people the chance expectation of such a coincidence would be 1, whereas the census showed 24. As the questionnaire dealt only with impressions of the death of a distant person and the attendant circumstances, when there had been no reason to apprehend a fatality, the results could be dealt with statistically.12
In such a case as that of the Stockholm fire perceived by Swedenborg, the modern research officer of a Society for Psychical Research would have wanted to get the testimony of all concerned as soon as possible after the event. Failing that, he would want the testimony of a trustworthy person who had gone to interview the persons present at Swedenborg's description of the fire, if he could not himself get it through interview or letters. He would of course also inquire about other ways in which the news could have come to Gothenburg and about the normal frequency of fires in Stockholm, etc. In short, he must be a specialist in incredulity, and, indeed, he usually is.
Modern cases of telepathy and/or clairvoyance similar to the case of the Stockholm fire have passed unscathed through the fire of such searching inquiries, so that by analogy and in view of Swedenborg's truthfulness, one might—with a little goodwill—consider true the stories which go to show his clairvoyance.
That is not necessary, however.
In the cases of the Stockholm fire and the Queen's secret and the lost receipt a contemporary research officer did get on the job, and though it was not till some eight or nine years later, the fact that his name was Immanuel Kant should have some weight.
Kant put his information in a letter to a friend13 who had asked him about Swedenborg's alleged psychic gifts, excusing himself for his delay in so doing, but he had wished first to inform himself thoroughly. He then reminded her that no one had ever perceived in him "an inclination to the marvellous, or a weakness tending to credulity." So it was with him, he continued, till he heard from a friend and student of his that the latter had been present when a letter was read by an Austrian ambassador from a Mecklenburg ambassador who had been with the Queen of Sweden when Swedenborg told her the secret.
This impressed Kant. "For it can scarcely be believed that one ambassador should communicate to another for public use a piece of information, which related to the Queen of the court where he resided, and which he himself together with a distinguished company had the opportunity of witnessing, if it were not true."
He resolved to investigate further, communicating again with his friend and persuading him to interview the Austrian ambassador once more on the subject, with the result that the event was again confirmed. "Professor Schlegel also had declared to him that it could by no means be doubted."
Kant wrote to Swedenborg himself, who promised to answer, but either he did not or the letter did not arrive. Kant did not give up, but when a friend of his was going to Stockholm he commissioned him to investigate these matters, especially, it would seem, the Stockholm fire. (The Queen would presumably not be easy to interview in those days.)
This friend was the English merchant Green, of whom Kant thought so highly that a biographer of the latter writes, "Kant discovered in Green a man possessed of much knowledge and of so clear an understanding that he often avowed to me that he never penned a sentence in his 'Critique of Pure Reason' without reading it to Green, and subjecting it to his unbiassed understanding unfettered to any system."
Green, according to Kant, not only saw Swedenborg, whom he found "a reasonable, polite and open-hearted man," and also a man of learning, but he "examined all, not only in Stockholm but also, about two months ago, in Gothenburg where he is well acquainted with the most respectable houses, and where he could obtain the most authentic and complete information, for, as only a very short time has elapsed since 1759 most of the inhabitants are still alive who were eye-witnesses of the occurrence."
The occurrence was the Stockholm fire, and the story given to Kant by Mr. Green is the fullest account extant of it.
Kant writes: "The following occurrence appears to me to have the greatest weight of proof, and to place the assertion respecting Swedenborg's extraordinary gift beyond all possibility of doubt. [In the year 1759 toward the end of July14] on Saturday at four o'clock, P.M. Swedenborg arrived at Gothenburg from England, when Mr. William Castel invited him to his house together with a party of fifteen persons. About six o'clock, Swedenborg went out, and returned to the company quite pale and alarmed. He said that a dangerous fire had just broken out in Stockholm, on Södermalm (where his house was), and that it was spreading very fast. [Stockholm had great fires in 1723, 1751, 1759, 1768, and 1769.15] He was restless and went out often. He said that the house of one of his friends, whom he named, was already in ashes, and that his own was in danger. At eight o'clock, after he had been out again, he joyfully exclaimed, 'Thank God! the fire is extinguished, the third door from my house.' This news occasioned great commotion throughout the whole city, but particularly amongst the company in which he was. It was announced to the Governor the same evening. On Sunday morning, Swedenborg was summoned to the Governor who questioned him concerning the disaster. Swedenborg described the fire precisely, how it had begun, and in what manner it had ceased, and how long it had continued. On the same day the news spread through the city, and as the Governor had thought it worthy of attention the consternation was considerably increased; because many were in trouble on account of their friends and property, which might have been involved in the disaster. On Monday evening a messenger arrived at Gothenburg, who was despatched by the Board of Trade during the time of the fire. In the letters brought by him the fire was described precisely in the manner stated by Swedenborg. On Tuesday morning the royal courier arrived at the Governor's, with the melancholy intelligence of the fire, of the loss which it had occasioned, and of the houses it had damaged and ruined, not in the least differing from that which Swedenborg had given at the very time when it happened, for the fire was extinguished at eight o'clock."
Another instance of Swedenborg's apparent gift of clairvoyance was told by the granddaughter of Mr. Bolander to Dr. Im. Tafel, the collector of the Swedenborg documents. The gist of it is as follows:
At a dinner given in his honor in Gothenburg about 1770, Swedenborg suddenly turned to Mr. Bolander and said to him sharply, "Sir, you had better go to your mills!" Mr. Bolander was the owner of large cloth mills, and although he disliked Swedenborg's tone he did leave the table and go to his mills. "On arriving there he found that a large piece of cloth had fallen down near the furnace and had commenced burning. If he had delayed but a little longer he would have found his property in ashes. After removing the danger Mr. Bolander returned to the company and expressed his thanks to Swedenborg, telling him what had happened. Swedenborg smiled, and said that he had seen the danger, and also that there was no time to be lost, wherefore he had addressed him thus abruptly." 16
Jung–Stilling, a German doctor who was acquainted with all the persons present at the scene of the following event, reports that one of them, a universally trusted man, told the company: "In 1762, on the very day when Emperor Peter III of Russia died, Swedenborg was present with me at a party in Amsterdam. In the middle of the conversation, his physiognomy became changed, and it was evident that his soul was no longer present in him, and that something was taking place within him. As soon as he recovered he was asked what had happened. At first he would not speak out, but after being repeatedly urged, he said, 'Now, at this very hour the Emperor Peter has died in prison,' explaining the nature of his death. 'Gentlemen, will you please to make a note of this day, in order that you may compare it with the announcement of his death which will appear in the newspapers.' The papers soon after announced the death of the Emperor which had taken place on the very same day." 17
The most likely theory of the above cases of "far-seeing" is that they were impressions gathered telepathically from some person present at the event (some moron may have been present as the cloth burned); a theory which the experimental work on the transmission of images goes to support. Mr. Whately Carington and Dr. Hettinger especially have done important work in this field.18
Why should the roll of burning cloth or the death by strangulation of Emperor Peter III have reached Swedenborg? We do not know, but an experiment conducted by Usher and Burt19 seems to indicate that events or images may "broadcast" themselves at large, and may be perceived by the appropriate kind of human apparatus. In this case A, who was several hundred miles away from B, had arranged that at 8:30 on a certain evening he was to try to "transmit" telepathically a certain drawing to B. The day before the experiment B (of course without telling A) told a friend, C, that she might take part in it, and try to guess what the drawing was.
The evening of the experiment A dined in a restaurant, playing chess after dinner. Near him three men were talking loudly; they ate roast capon with bread sauce. The room had green hangings. Someone was playing a piano. At 8:25 A remembered he had to transmit the drawing and withdrew to concentrate on it at 8:30. It was a diagram.
But the impression received by the friend C (of whose participation A did not know) was "roast capon, bread sauce, three men, much talk, green hangings, somebody strumming." With it was a crisscross pattern resembling a chessboard. C, however, as is often the case, did not receive this impression at the conscious level, it came via automatic writing.
There are well-attested cases of "spontaneous" clairvoyance (if that is what it is) in the files of research societies, but, as the experimental work previously cited covers such phenomena fairly well, some other questions must be asked in regard to Swedenborg.
Was Swedenborg a "medium"? It seems clear that he was capable of extrasensory perception, but did he go into "trance," do automatic writing, and claim that in these states, or even in his normal state, he was able to transmit messages from the dead to living people?
The answer is that though he did not know the names of those dissociated states he did feel he experienced them and he did claim to have knowledge obtained from the deceased.
It is easy for us now to say: "Why did he not conduct proper experiments, have them properly recorded and controlled by trustworthy witnesses?" Why, in short, did he not behave as if he lived in the twentieth century and was a member of the Psychical Research Society in Tavistock Square, London, or at 40 East 34th St., New York!
The mental climate has to be considered. On the one hand were the few Voltairean intellectuals who would have greeted such experimenting as ridiculous. Few of them were as liberal as the eighteenth-century Danish playwright Ludvig Holberg (rightly called the Danish Molière), a most learned and acute man, who, being asked if he believed in "ghosts," said that although no doubt most of such stories were due to a superheated imagination he would not altogether deny them, chiefly because "many credible people testify that they have both heard and seen things which they by no means can explain naturally," and also, he said, because he himself together with another person once had an experience which completely convinced him of the reality of such experience.20
Such an attitude was rare, especially in a man like Holberg whose genius was entirely at the service of rationality. But, besides the rationalists who then kept their opinions more or less to themselves, there were the orthodox Christians, like Count Tessin, who thanked God that their "faith" was so strong they could not believe in Swedenborg's alleged intercourse with spirits. And then there was the semi-medieval mass of the people and the still-powerful church.
In Sweden right into the eighteenth century people were brought into court for witchcraft, if they showed "psychic" or even unusual mental powers, and sometimes condemned to death.21 Late in the seventeenth century, in Swedenborg's own lifetime, the witchcraft hysteria in the country took on terrific proportions, and while most of it was "superheated imagination" it was also mentioned at a trial that some of the "possessed" could describe things that were going on in a different part of the city of Stockholm at the same time. It was of course all ascribed to the Devil, and sentences of decapitation and burning at the stake were frequent.
It did not conduce to much public appraisal of clairvoyance or kinder abilities. Perhaps it was for this reason that hardly any of the testimonies to Swedenborg's psychic powers were put on paper until long after his death, a fact which has induced some scrupulous researchers to rule them out.
On this score, however, some testimonies cannot be ruled out—even if for some of the cases one must, as previously mentioned, fall back on Swedenborg's truthfulness, the analogy of modern cases, and experimental work. J. C. Cuno (see pp. 339–340) seems to have recorded his stories of Swedenborg's alleged clairvoyance at the time he heard them from him and approximately at the time that they occurred, but we have one contemporary recorder at least in that very Count Tessin who at first felt so skeptical.
He recorded the story which first had drawn Kant's attention to Swedenborg's supposed powers, that of the Queen of Sweden's secret. Kant, it will be remembered, paid attention to it because it had been reported by an ambassador, and in his letter to his friend about Swedenborg he affirmed that through his own "special investigations" (through the Englishman Green) he had found out that the ambassador's account was correct.22
The story, only published in our own day, which Count Tessin put in his private diary involved Queen Louisa Ulrica of Sweden, sister of Frederick the Great of Prussia, and herself a woman of strong intelligence. (Kant said of her that she was "a princess whose great understanding and penetration ought to have made an attempt at imposition almost impossible") She herself said haughtily that she was "hard to fool," when someone hinted that she might have been fooled in this matter of Swedenborg.
Count Tessin wrote in his diary for November 18, 1761:23 "A remarkable report is being circulated which has caused me to ask Assessor Swedenborg himself about the connection of the matter. This is his own account: About three weeks ago he was engaged in a long conversation with their Majesties at the Palace, on which occasion he also requested gracious permission to present copies of his published books; during the conversation he related many things which are not particularly in place here except as confirming his system of angels and heavens, etc. Her Majesty ended by requesting him, in case he saw her brother, the Prince of Prussia, to tell her something from him.
"Three days ago, which was last Sunday, he again presented himself, and, after having delivered his various books, requested an audience with the Queen, and he then told Her Majesty something privately, which he was bound to keep secret from everyone else. The Queen thereupon turned pale and took a few steps backwards as if she were about to faint, but shortly afterward she exclaimed excitedly, 'That is something which no one else could have told except my brother!'
"The assessor expressed regrets at having gone so far, when he noticed Her Majesty's intense consternation.
"On his way out he met Councilor von Dalin in the antichamber and requested him to tell Her Majesty that he would follow up the matter still further, so that she would be comforted thereby.
" 'But I shall not venture to do so,' he added to me [Count Tessin] 'until after some ten or twelve days; for if I did it before it would have the same terrifying effect, and perhaps still more intensely upon Her Majesty's mind.'
"However remarkable this may appear," Tessin wrote, strictly for himself, "as well as other things which he said to me during an hour and a half, I nevertheless feel all the more safe in putting it down as Her Majesty's obvious consternation is unanimously testified to by all those who were in the room, and among others by Councilor Baron Carl Scheffer. [In another account, which Swedenborg gave to General Tuxen of the same affair (see p. 192) Tuxen asked if anyone else heard what the Queen said, and Swedenborg answered that at least the King and Baron Scheffer were near enough to hear her.]
"The Queen also tells it in very nearly the same way, adding that she was still in doubt as to what to believe, but that she has put Assessor Swedenborg to a new proof, if he managed in this she would be convinced he knew more than others.
"Perhaps this was what he referred to when mentioning his intention to say more in ten or twelve days.
"For all that we can see," was Tessin's conclusion, "this statement is so clear and confirmed by so many testimonials, that it must needs be regarded as reliable."
There is no record, apparently, of Swedenborg's having been a second time to see the Queen about this matter. However, when in later days she was asked whether it was true that he had told her something which no one knew except her and her dead brother, she either said that it was true, or else changed the subject.
After her death Count A. J. von Höpken wrote an account24 of the incident which explains the Queen's occasional reticence about it; he said that as the Queen had been carrying on a secret correspondence with her brother while Sweden and Prussia were at war she did not want to touch on these matters with everyone.
In Höpken's own words: "Swedenborg was one day at a Court reception. Her Majesty asked him about different things in the other life, and lastly whether he had seen or had talked with her brother, the Prince Royal of Prussia. He answered No. Her Majesty then requested him to ask for him and to give him her greeting, which Swedenborg promised to do. I doubt whether the Queen meant anything serious by it. At the next reception, Swedenborg again appeared at Court; and while the Queen was in the so-called white room, surrounded by her ladies of honor, he came boldly in and approached her Majesty, who no longer remembered the commission she had given him a week before. Swedenborg not only greeted her from her brother, but also gave her his apologies for not having answered her last letter; he also wished to do so now through Swedenborg, which he accordingly did. The Queen was greatly overcome, and said 'No one except God knows this secret.' "
There are other, and distorted, versions of this story, but it is corroborated by Major-General Tuxen,25 a Dane who came to know Swedenborg and himself asked him whether the story were true. Swedenborg said, "Tell me what you have heard and I will tell you what part is true." Tuxen told him the story as he had had it from Count Höpken's brother, agreeing in essentials with the Count's own narrative. Swedenborg affirmed its truth.
An interesting detail from Tuxen's testimony is that the Queen asked Swedenborg, "Can you, then, speak with every one deceased or only with certain persons?" Swedenborg answered, "I cannot converse with all, but with such as I have known in this world; with all royal and princely persons, with all renowned heroes, or great and learned men, whom I have known either personally or from their actions or writings; consequently of all of whom I could form an idea; for it may be supposed that a person whom I never knew or of whom I could form no idea I neither could nor would wish to speak with."
In Mr. Whately Carington's terminology, Swedenborg needed an association or "K" idea in order to get in touch with the psychon-system, if such survived, of the deceased.
However, since the Queen herself knew about her secret correspondence with her brother, there is no way of proving that Swedenborg on the "producer" level of his personality had not got hold of the secret from the Queen's mind and dressed it up for his conscious mind as a communication from her brother.
But there is a story involving a secret which seems not to have been known to any living person, the story of the Marteville receipt.
Green's account to Kant of the case of the lost receipt was as follows: ". . . the widow of the Dutch ambassador in Stockholm, some time after the death of her husband was called upon by Croon, a goldsmith, to pay for a silver service which her husband had purchased from him. The widow was convinced her late husband had been much too precise and orderly not to have paid this debt, yet she was unable to find the receipt. In her sorrow, and because the amount was considerable, she requested Mr. Swedenborg to call at her house. After apologizing to him for troubling him, she said, that, if as all people say he possessed the extraordinary gift of conversing with the souls of the departed he would perhaps have the kindness to ask her husband how it was about the silver service. Swedenborg did not at all object to comply with her request. Three days afterwards the said lady had company at her house for coffee. Swedenborg called and in his cool way informed her that he had conversed with her husband. The debt had been paid seven months before his decease, and the receipt was in a bureau upstairs. The lady replied that the bureau had been quite cleared out, and that the receipt was not found among all the papers. Swedenborg said that her husband had described to him how after pulling out the left-hand drawer a board would appear which required to be drawn out, when a secret compartment would be disclosed containing his private Dutch correspondence as well as the receipt. Upon hearing this description the whole company arose and accompanied the lady into the room upstairs. The bureau was opened; they did as they were directed; the compartment was found, of which no one had ever known before; and to the great astonishment of all, the papers were discovered there, in accordance with his description." 26
In other versions of the same story Swedenborg is said to have had his conversation with the departed ambassador in a dream, during which he was told of the whereabouts of the receipt. Since a similar modern case is on record, it seems relevant to tell it here.
This is the Chaffin will case,27 in which a will, unknown to any living person, was discovered through the seeming agency of the testator in a dream. The apparent facts in this case were convincing enough to the Superior Court of Davie County, North Carolina, to admit the new will to probate in December, 1925, canceling the will previously admitted to probate.
As investigated both by the Court and by a lawyer deputizing for the Psychical Research Society, the facts seemed to be that Mr. James L. Chaffin made a will in 1905 leaving his farm to the third of his four sons, Marshall Chaffin. In 1921 he died, Marshall inheriting the property. The widow and three other sons did not protest as they knew of no valid reason for doing so.
In June, 1925, the second son dreamed several times that his father appeared to him wearing a certain overcoat which the son knew and, pointing to a pocket in it, said that his will was there. The overcoat was at last found, and sewn into the lining was not the will but a slip of paper in Mr. Chaffin's handwriting saying, "Read the 27th chapter of Genesis in my daddie's old Bible."
This Bible was in the house of Mr. Chaffin's widow, but the second son got two neighbors to go with him before he undertook the search for it. At last it was found, and, according to the sworn statements of the five witnesses present on the occasion, the will was found in the twenty-seventh chapter of Genesis—a will dated 1919. It was unattested, but as ten people swore to its being in the testator's handwriting it was legal in North Carolina. In it Mr. Chaffin willed his property to all four children. The beneficiaries under the first will were prepared to contest the second until they saw it and were perfectly convinced of its genuineness.
In another modern case where knowledge was obtained that seemingly could only have been gained from a "discarnate" mind, an Englishwoman, Mrs. Dawson Smith,28 had a "sitting" with the well-known English medium Mrs. Leonard. Her son, killed in 1920, purportedly communicated to his mother that she must search a certain place of the box-room for an old purse with a tiny paper in it, a counterfoil. He stressed its importance without saying why. She found it; it was the counterfoil of a money order. This was in 1921. In 1924 she had a letter from "The Enemy Debt Clearing Office" which demanded payment of a sum of money said to be owing by her son to a Hamburg firm, a debt said to have been incurred in July, 1914, before the war.
Mrs. Dawson Smith knew that her boy had paid it, but the Hamburg people insisted they had not received the money. She then remembered her boy's "message," looked at the old counterfoil, "and found it the identical paper needed to prove the account had been paid." The Government acknowledged that she was right. The existence of the counterfoil, and the correspondence with the Enemy Debt Clearing Office were verified by two members of the Society for Psychical Research, Sir Oliver Lodge and Mrs. Henry Sidgwick.
Such cases, and there are a number of them, seem difficult to explain except in terms of survival of some sort. How do they look in terms of Mr. Carington's theories?
Telepathy has proved, Mr. Carington feels, that "psychons" (ideas, images, sensa) can act independently of the body. They are "real." That combination of them which we call a human mind is real. The question for him is chiefly this: if you believe that Jones survives death, "what part do you consider survives, and where?" 29
According to the association theory of telepathy and the psychon theory of mind, the answer is that Jones's mind survives, his mind being the psychons which have been organized in the course of his life, including those which have been brought to him by his sense organs, and those which he may have acquired by telepathic interaction with other minds. As to where Jones's mind survives, "that ceases to have any ordinary meaning, because psychons and psychon-systems are not spatially located in the physical sense; and there is no difficulty about continuity, because the psychons surviving immediately after death are identically the same as those which formed Jones's mind immediately before it."
A Swedish innkeeper in London who kept the inn King Charles XII asked Swedenborg what Charles the Twelfth was like in the other world. "No different from what he was in this," was Swedenborg's answer, and his stand was consistently that for some time after the death of the body the "spirit" remained the same kind of man.
Neither he nor Mr. Carington, however, believes that this condition can last. The psychon-system, getting no more fresh impressions via the physical body, might well disintegrate. You might, as Mr. Carington says, survive shipwreck on a desert island, but die of starvation after you got there.
According to Swedenborg, that would depend on whether your mind were a mere pattern of reactions to physical stimuli or whether you had developed your "understanding."
Mr. Carington can well imagine that certain psychons in a "surviving" psychon-system might, via the law of association of ideas, link up with certain psychons in a "medium." A "medium" may be said to be the kind of person whose psychon-system is more easily dissociated than that of a normal person, for one reason or another, perhaps because of a neurosis. A fairly permanent subsystem of psychons may be formed in such a person, may even develop into something resembling a separate personality, able to dissociate itself so completely from the normal personality that the latter becomes unconscious or goes into what is called "trance." In this condition, which closely resembles the deeper hypnotic sleep, the subsystem personality may take "control" of the body and speak as a separate personality, referring to the normal person as "she" or "the instrument" or the "subject" and to itself as a departed spirit who "controls" or uses the body for the purpose of communicating messages from the spirit world.
This phenomenon would belong to the province of psychiatry if it were not that the medium's "control" so often produces knowledge that cannot possibly have been known to the medium, sometimes not even to the sitter, and not even to any living person.
Mr. Carington therefore is willing to suppose that the "surviving" psychon-system of Jones, say, is able to associate part of itself with the medium's dissociated system, the result being a sort of Jones-plus-Medium which has some of the characteristics and knowledge we identify as his, and some others that puzzle us. The latter, usually rather vapid, may be elements from the medium's subconscious, or, not impossibly, also from Jones's subconscious.
A kind of composite personality would thus be formed, which might, Mr. Carington says, harden into a stereotyped pattern, and that might account for the "horrid banality" of so many "communications."
It is an error, however, which Mr. Carington certainly does not share, to suppose that all "spirit communications" are horribly banal. Like attracts like in the psychon kind of world, and if really intelligent "sitters," working with an honest medium (of whom there are some), try to get "in touch" with really intelligent and interested discarnate entities some remarkable results may be obtained.
At Duke University a female medium was isolated in a room and a person unknown to her was put in another. The medium went into "trance," and her "control" was asked to tell all "he" could about the unknown near-by person. "He" responded by telling about deceased relatives. The experimenter made a list of the alleged facts and had the sitter check them, true or false. He also tried the experiment of giving a list of facts communicated by the medium to a person for whom they were not intended. This was tried often enough to show that the number of chance hits thus obtained was far less than the hits obtained with the person for whom the communication was intended.30
Nevertheless, the wondrously elastic association theory of telepathy could account for such communications. But there are others in which it seems to snap, unless one is willing to include in the "common subconscious" the psychon-systems of those who are no longer in the material body, or whatever euphemism one prefers for "dead."
Those are the "cross-correspondence" cases.31 After certain leaders of the English Society for Psychical Research died, messages began to come to various sensitives, some of them thousands of miles apart. One was a trance medium in the United States, professional, but one who had never been caught in any fraud. (Incidentally, "fraud" may also be unconscious or subconscious. Given the theatrical abilities of the "producer" level of the personality, which is probably the one which becomes dissociated as a "control," an alleged communicator may be manufactured either in part or altogether.) The others in the cross-correspondences were private individuals, one in India, several in England. They practiced "automatic" writing. This is an important form of dissociation in which the sensitive, who may or may not be in trance, writes without consciously moving her own hand or at least without seeming to know where the words come from. Sometimes a word or two ahead is known, sometimes not till the word is written, then the writer promptly forgets it.
Generally one finds out something about what is going on in one's subconscious, indeed some psycho-analysts32 use automatic writing as a method of investigation, but paranormal knowledge has also been obtained in this way. In the celebrated cross-correspondence cases, the automatic "scripts" were sent to the Secretary of the Society for Psychical Research, who, on comparing them, found that they contained evidences of classical scholarship, not at all comprehensible to the writers, but quite comprehensible as communications from the deceased F. W. H. Myers, who purported to be sending them. The references were not alike, nor were they telepathic echoes of each other. "Myers" in fact stated that he expressly guarded against that. But they were "parts of an integrated message," and, later on, when the classical scholar Dr. A. W. Verrall died, messages began to come of an even greater complexity, purporting to be the result of Dr. Verrall's coöperation with Professor Henry Butcher, also deceased. They came through one very remarkable automatist, known as Mrs. Willett (since for private reasons she did not want her identity known), but they contained material completely unknown to her, and, until the clue was given by the alleged communicators, no one else, scholars though they were, could put the puzzle together correctly.
Professor Gardner Murphy's brilliant résumés of the best arguments for and against survival can only be briefly touched on. His general conclusion is that in asking, "Does personality survive bodily death or not?" we are asking the wrong kind of question. In his paper on "Field Theory and Survival," 33 he points to the fact that "paranormal events appear to depend . . . on powers set free by the relations between persons: they are interpersonal." (While he has most enthusiastically greeted Mr. Carington's theories he prefers "interpersonal" to the term "associational" linkage, as of ideas.) The individual is "far indeed from the sharply defined and autonomous little capsule of energy which he is likely to imagine himself to be." He is a part of an "interpersonal psychic field," and "if, on independent grounds, there is reason to believe that the discarnate exist and are capable of contact with the living, there is no theoretical difficulty involved in their participating jointly with the living in an interpersonal psychical field."
Most modern psychical researchers believe that there is strong evidence for some form of survival but no actual proof. What would constitute proof? More complete evidence of the kind that suggests the people "on the other side" had thought up a test that could only have originated with them and not with anyone living here.
Professor Murphy's cautious verdict is: "There is some reason to believe that personality continues after death to be, as it is now, an aspect of an interpersonal reality, and to doubt whether it could survive as an encapsulated entity."
Previously he has called attention to the fact that from infancy to old age the "field properties" of personality change profoundly (the field theory being the treatment of a thing as a whole and not as the mere sum of its parts). Now, "with the change called death, there is every reason to believe that in so far as psychical operations continue, they [the personality characteristics] must, as aspects of larger fields, take on new qualities, new structural relationships," which yet would only be an extension of the interpersonal relationships in which they existed while in the flesh.34
There is no possible way of deciding now, Gardner Murphy says, how far such "surviving organized impressions" (or such discarnate psychon-systems) would resemble us.
There is no way of deciding this, and it is as yet hardly possible to speculate on such questions, without being put down as either fool or charlatan. It is as if so much fear still remained from the days when the church caused men of science to be burnt at the stake that license to speculate on conceivable other-wordly realms were only issued to poets. Many people of course are utterly unable to entertain hypotheses; they must either believe or not believe, but there is more in the avoidance of such topics than this. There is the primitive fear of letting the mind dwell on the thought of death. Or the equally primitive fear of ridicule.
For the unafraid, however, there is a vast realm of ideas necessarily connected with Swedenborg's beliefs regarding disembodied states. No intellect so mature as his, so well trained, with such an amount of scientific knowledge, has ever reported "from experience" what it was like to be "as a spirit among spirits, while still a man among men."
To the modern reader it may still remain a matter of speculation, but he has to note a good deal of similarity between these reports made by Swedenborg on "the new structural relationships" and the more recent findings of psychical research as to how these relationships ought to be if they were.
It is no use denying that any such modern reader is up against discouraging handicaps in studying Swedenborg for this purpose. If he follows him beyond 1745 he will be richly rewarded, but patience and understanding are needed. Time and again he will hold his head or wring his hands and ask: How could an extremely intelligent and scholarly man like Swedenborg mix up his subtle psychological observations with these fantastic interpretations of the Bible, and with ideas of the cosmos that seem to belong to the Kabbalah and other books which he used to disdain as "occult"?
No questions are more legitimate. Nor are they easily disposed of. Perhaps they never can be. But any approach to an answer must start with a consideration of what were the special reasons which led Swedenborg to believe he received his information from some source outside of himself, which he could not disregard, even though he knew with awful certainty what the "learned" would think of him.