CHAPTER TWENTY—SEVEN
Balm in England
THE little paper which Swedenborg slipped into Cuno's hand by way of answer to the famous letter may not have seemed a reply to the Amsterdammer, but it was part of Swedenborg's final answer to the question he had put to himself many years before: "What is the mechanism of the intercourse between the soul and the body?" In a sense he had been discussing it all through the intervening years, and the booklet he had been writing was a summary of his conclusions.
It was probably written as a result of the inquiry of one Immanuel Kant, a professor in Königsberg, Prussia, who had sent Swedenborg a letter asking if the story of the Gothenburg clairvoyance were true. No direct reply was made, but Swedenborg sent word to Kant that he was going to write a book covering every point in Kant's inquiry.1
However, when Swedenborg came to write the little book, which he called The Intercourse between the Soul and the Body, he did not go into the details that, we might say, belong to psychical research; he became absorbed in the problems of philosophy. The book, he said, was to answer the question as to whether the body acts on the soul (physical influx) or the soul acts on the body (spiritual influx), or whether the two kinds of events, mental and physical, act together, as Leibnitz had declared they did, "by preestablished harmony," using his analogy of two clocks perfectly wound up to keep the same time.
Though Swedenborg wrote with clear brevity, the book was too short to be comprehensible to those unacquainted with his work in physics and physiology and his consequent theory of "degrees" of reality, meaning that the force which is "soul" at one level inflows or manifests itself as "mind" on the next, and as body on the next again, there being subject to "natural" or "physical" laws. It was, modernly speaking, "pan-psychism." The soul, Swedenborg said, clothed itself with an organic body "as with a garment," the
