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
