weights at the other side—they seem to be incomprehensible and intangible. Not so the "infinitely varied amusements of human societies," or the pleasures of the body, or "the loves emanating from every man's self-hood," or necessary economic cares, "for to seek our bread with anxious solicitude and to withdraw the mind from the body are two opposites." 26 (He had found that out during the years it took him to reach independence.)
Set this, he insists, against the fact that we cannot feel or even be conscious always of what gives pleasure to the subtle body of the soul. Its "supereminent fibrils" which were "delineated by the first aura of the world" are within our nerves and vessels, but not in them,27 and hence their sensations cannot be perceived by our senses. We can only sense the soul through the imperfect material medium of the brain.
"Hence it follows that we are more capable of understanding what is true than of willing it, and that the liberty of acting, or the wife, is very easily divorced from the understanding, or the husband. And this separation in the marriage-bed of the mind is often more complete in the intelligent than in the simple-minded, for the former persuade themselves by various intellectual reasons to take the part of the lower senses and speciously cloak the merest vices under the garb of virtues." 28
Is it a bad thing then that the forces from below are so tangible and strong? No, Swedenborg says. "Victory is estimated according to the number and valor of the enemy . . ." He is thinking here in Neoplatonic terms. The reason for the soul's entanglement in matter is for the sake of experience gained in struggle, so that it may return ultimately to the Source bringing its share of "harmonic variety." The cause of what he calls "equilibration," or the mental weighing business, is that "nothing is acceptable or grateful that does not proceed from free choice—what is done from necessity has no merit." 29
And, though "high and divine things . . . do not come home to our mental consciousness at all by way of sensation," yet we can still be instructed by teachers, by sciences, "in some measure" by our power to reflect, "but principally from the Holy Scriptures." They provide "the code of rules for obtaining the end by the means." 30
