But for his arguments he used his cherished "analytic way," building up from physiology (he referred to his studies of the embryo and the soul as formative force) 19 through the psycho-physiology of sensation to the "spirituality," one might say, of what it really is that sensates, and by what means, and—for him now most important of all—to what end.
No series of conquests were ever planned with such zest as the intellectual campaigns that Swedenborg promised in this draft of The Five Senses. Among the volumes planned to complete the Animal Kingdom were the ones on reproduction, on the nerves, on psychology specifically; he had drafts ready of these. Of course he meant to finish the drafts he had on the brain; in fact he was adding to his studies of the brain while he was in London in 1744, one of the additions being the localization of the motor centers of the cortex.20
He prepared and published part of the work on the senses as Part III of the Animal Kingdom, but the rest of that "noble procession" (as he had thought it symbolized in a dream) remained either in manuscript or never even reached paper, not at least in scientific form. He never tried to publish even the important brain discoveries.
Had Swedenborg given up the attempt to try to find "the mechanism of the intercourse of the soul and the body" by means of "experience, geometry and reason"?
He had not. Everything he had written went to show that he felt he had essentially solved the problem, but in the draft of The Five Senses he did say to himself, as it were, that as he had written it he felt his theories could not be comprehended by others, and he himself noted that certain points were still obscure to him. But he meant to go on, for the general picture was clear to him. The soul, the life force, had created for itself an instrument in the material body. The rational mind was a kind of sixth sense or chief instrument of the soul, the latter alone having the power to see "the beauty, order and truth of the rose," 21 while for the botanical details the rational mind ofliciated, instructed by the senses.
Physically the soul was "the principle of active life in the body." Psychologically it organized the ideas the mind had acquired from
