dynamic," "psychokinetic," but making its most spectacular reappearance in psychoanalysis, where an aspect of it sometimes even dismisses itself as an "escape mechanism."
Swedenborg was only twenty-six when, in 1714, he noted down his intention to "find a method by which the wills and affections of men's minds can be conjectured by means of analysis."
He became an object of analysis himself, especially when a diary of his dreams at a certain period was found. Some modern psychoanalysts interpreted him, trying to account for the change in him from experimental scientist to the man who believed the experiments concluded in favor of the soul's existence. Freudians called his case one of an inverted Œdipus complex, and Jungians opted for a split personality.
But William James says of similar charges against those of great imagination: "In the natural sciences and industrial arts it never occurs to anyone to try to refute opinions by showing up their author's neurotic constitution. Opinions here are invariably tested by logic and experiment, no matter what may be their author's neurological type. It should be no otherwise with religious opinions." 6
James goes on to say that such opinions must be tested by experience in relation to our moral needs and to the rest of what we hold as true. By such tests Swedenborg in his later phase has as great treasure to bestow as many of those millionaires of the spirit we call mystics, even if one reads him strictly from an ethical point of view. And, apart from an interest in distinctions between good and evil—not an unnecessary interest at the present time, one would think—Swedenborg in his life and works can, if one takes a little trouble to understand him, open travel horizons for us far exceeding all others for beauty and strangeness.
F. W. H. Myers, the great pioneer in the tremulous science of psychical research, has said that "it was to Swedenborg first that the unseen world appeared before all things as a realm of law; a region not of mere emotional vagueness or stagnancy of adoration but of definite progress, according to the laws of cause and effect, resulting from structural laws of spiritual existence and intercourse." 7
Swedenborg's God is the God of a scientist. He is the essence not
