they were in its own language, although he might be speaking another language.
Swedenborg had many arguments with spirits on this ticklish point, proving to them they were wrong "from this single fact that they speak to me in my vernacular as well as though born to it, although they were born thousands of years previously or in quite another region . . ." 5 Nor, except in a few cases, did they speak to him, he noted, in languages that he did not know. If they tried Latin or Greek, he pointed out ruthlessly that it was again a case of picking his memory, translating their idea-thought into his speech-thought.
He tried to show that man, being a spirit in a body, also possesses this universal language of spirits, though he is usually not aware of it. It has its origin in the interior memory—that all-recording reservoir—and the speech is "pictorial"; it is formed, he said, "from the visible objects in the world." 6 The pictorial ideas of the interior memory are the very origin of language, Swedenborg insisted, and when man wants to speak these ideas fall into the language he has acquired. Then, when spirits speak with a man, that picture-speech falls into the words of the man's language, just as his own "interior ideas fall into the speech of his words." 7
The light so to speak was the same, but the globes gave it different colors.
Among themselves, he said, the more developed spirits who knew what was what did not of course try to spell thought out into words, and Swedenborg despaired of expressing the rapidity of this mode of communication. The thought of man, he said, is infinitely quicker than his attempt to put it into speech or writing; the speech of spirits infinitely quicker than that of man; and the angels can think infinitely more quickly than spirits, seeing all the branching implications of an idea in all its complexity at one and the same time.
It is understandable that Swedenborg thought spirit "speech" a very rapid one as he considered that man's "interior memory" (or subconscious) was made up of clusters of associated ideas any one of which could be simultaneously presented in the other world in a visible form.
