The ability of his interior memory to retain everything about people who had been known to Swedenborg caused him, he says, a certain amount of trouble. For some, though not all, of the spirits around him, had access to this memory and could fish out of it the details necessary to give a perfect impersonation of a man he had known, "as though it were his very self." He sometimes refused to believe in somebody's alleged identity, because "all things, even the minutest particulars, can be so counterfeited as to confirm the illusion." Only "the interior angels" could know the difference, and he warned "anyone with whom spirits converse that similar personations are most frequent in the world of spirits." 36
It disquieted him, this accessibility of his memory. "They are able to read the deeper things which are with me in my memory, whilst I am unaware of it . . ." 37
He saw the spirits, in other words, as having access to both the conscious and subconscious parts of his memory, insisting that they could speak from it "with variety." In fact he said that this was all which most of the spirits could speak from, his memory. But not as if they merely repeated what he thought; it was rather as if the topics in his mind were so many keys on a piano which they picked out into tunes of their own, according to their own character, or lack of it.
For, as Swedenborg often stressed, although the corporeal memory was usually in abeyance so that the spirits could not at will remember their experiences in the body, yet the result of those experiences remained—that is, their nature, disposition, personality.
"The two lives which remain after death," Swedenborg said, "are the lives of persuasion and of cupidity," 38 or—as we might say—of opinions and emotions. It was evident to him that though persuasion might subdue cupidity, yet it was usually the other way around, "for that which is loved perniciously is confirmed on many grounds, even until the man is persuaded."
Spirits were especially prone to the life of unbalanced opinions, being without the common-sense checks of the physical world; and Swedenborg often complains of their self-confidence and arrogance, no matter how mistaken they were. He says they did not know whether the things they picked from his memory were true or not, but believed them equally and often supposed them to be from
