CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
"What Is a Spirit?"
SWEDENBORG continued devoutly to take down, as it were, the scriptural explanations that came to him, but he could not help also turning his attention to the new powers of mind which he was discovering. His curiosity asserted itself. Not content to be a "hand," he seemed to become aware that he need not be tied to the secretarial duty; he could (as Mrs. Willett did) get up and look around. He could "see" more and more as well as hear; he could, and did, interview the inhabitants and argue with them. "I inquired" became a common phrase in his diary, which swelled enormously. And wholesome doubt returned. About a year after his talks with alleged Old Testament characters and a couple of Apostles he wrote that during the several weeks while he was in conversation with them he could believe no otherwise than that it was so, but afterwards, "being taught by experience," he said he could perceive they had been spirits pretending to be those persons, perhaps authorized as spokesmen for the authentic characters, perhaps not. He cautiously added (November 29, 1747), "These things came today into my thought, but whether the matter be so with them as stated I do not yet certainly know." 1
The names of Abraham, Moses, et al., slipped into the background though they remained part of the cast, and increasingly his acquaintance widened. Much more important for his sense of reality, so did his reacquaintance. He never was a man to put in names of actual persons (except toward the end of the diary a little), but he did note on a certain day that now he had talked to thirty people who had been known to him in life, and, a few months later, he added to the same entry that the number was now sixty.2
But before trying to follow Swedenborg in his extremely crowded and far more than merely double life, it might be well to consider
