realized "from what the great sorrow comes." 7 That, he felt, was the source of melancholy.
Self-love made him far more anxious than sex—love; indeed he had begun his diary by noting that he was no longer "so prone to the sex as I have been all my days," and that he "so quickly lost my inclination for women, which has been my chief passion." He noted too, at the same period, that his ambitiousness had declined. "I wondered that I no longer wanted to work for my own glory," and "I wondered that since I came to the Hague I had lost the push and self-centered love for my work."
He was in The Hague to see his new physiological work—the first and second parts of the Animal Kingdom (The "Soul's Kingdom") through the press; he was doing research; he was dining with his friends during the day; only his diary knew of his strange experiences during the night. As he says, "during all this I went to the same parties as before and no one could tell anything . . ."
About what? His diary mentions "wakeful ecstasies" and reveals that since about October, 1743, he had had preternaturally long sleep, often ten or eleven hours at a stretch. The "Kingdom of God" was first shown to him, he said later, "in the repose of sleep," and he described the joy-dissolved sensation with which he had had a vision of a ladder of angels and saints leading up to the Only Begotten Son of God.8
It is clear that in his increasing spiritual bewilderment, troubled by strange psychic phenomena, he had had a dream, so vivid that he felt it was "real." In this dream he had had a vision of Jesus Christ, carrying with it a sense of conviction almost equal to his need. That was in Amsterdam, 1743. He was then fifty-five.
For a man of Swedenborg's strong emotions and concrete mind the Indefinable Creator, the "Nameless Nothing" of the Neoplatonists, was not enough for his heart to cling to, satisfactory as the Supreme Infinite had been to his intellect. Once again as in 1733 or '34 when he wrote Of the Infinite he felt Christ mystically, but now it was as far more than the "Nexus" between Infinite and finite. It was as the infinitely compassionate figure of the God who had Himself been tempted, had suffered, had been crucified. The direct experience of this Christ had been greatly emphasized in
