Signe Toksvig

“ The origin of life was the Godhead, imagined and "seen" by Swedenborg as by other mystics in the guise of a "sun" that radiated love, wisdom, life, "soul." "Soul" created "mind" and "body." "Mind" had "two lives, one of will and one of understanding." In the mind, will was usually more powerful than the understanding, yet, Swedenborg said, "man is man in that his will is under obedience to his understanding, but a beast is a beast, because its desires impel it to do whatever it does." ”

“ When Adam was puzzled by the same questions as Swedenborg, then "Wisdom," a daughter of his soul, answered them just as if she had read his books. And she used some pretty similes. When he wondered if it were really true that man is governed by his "loves" or desires, and in that sense has little or no free will, his "Wisdom" asked him if he had not noticed the ringdove violently beating the air with his wings. ”

“ By such tests Swedenborg in his later phase has as great treasure to bestow as many of those millionaires of the spirit we call mystics, even if one reads him strictly from an ethical point of view. And, apart from an interest in distinctions between good and evil—not an unnecessary interest at the present time, one would think—Swedenborg in his life and works can, if one takes a little trouble to understand him, open travel horizons for us far exceeding all others for beauty and strangeness. ”

“ Should one not rather say that the spirituous fluid was the "organ of the soul" as the eye was the organ of sight?—"Yet it is no matter whether we call the above fluid itself the spirit or soul, or whether we confine those terms to its faculty of representing the universe to itself, and of having intuition of ends; for the one cannot be conceived, because it is impossible, without the other." 31
Whether Swedenborg called it soul, or spirituous fluid, or animal spirits, or something else, it was still "immaterial." ”

“ He said, in 1740, to the Swedish Academy of Science that "some of the learned of the present day seemed to have agreed to let thought rest, and to make experiments to appeal to the senses; yet they did so with the hope and intent that some day experience would be connected with theory; for experience deprived of an insight into the nature of things is knowledge without learning, and a foundation without a building to rest on it." ”

“ Three weeks after his stay in Amsterdam, in 1736, he wrote (as previously cited) that when men of science who have the power of synthesizing "after a long course of reasoning make a discovery of the truth, straightway there is a certain cheering light, and joyful confirmatory brightness, that plays round the sphere of their mind; and a kind of mysterious radiation—I know not whence it proceeds—that darts through some sacred temple of the brain."
Clearly he had had, in Amsterdam, an impression of light which he considered mysteriously helpful, a light which was an "influx" from the soul. ”

“ In Swedenborg's life there had been an overwhelming example of a man, perhaps self-deceived, whose loud trumpetings about his own piety, humility, and unselfishness were in reality blasts from as theatrical an ego as ever posed in a pulpit—his father, Bishop Swedberg. ”

“ Here it is as if one were inside the very furnace of Swedenborg's mind, his ideas sparkling in every direction. Wolff's prim little propositions are taken into it; they often, he says, agree with his own ideas, but he carries them much further, sees many more implications, and finally drops them altogether to fling himself into outlining a work which is to describe what he already thinks about the causes of perception, imagination, memory, dreams, and so on. ”

“ Good spirits and angels came to his rescue, and by means of this suggestibility of his new form, they gave him "whatever he was prompted to wish and long for in his thoughts," "for they can give whatever is desired, inasmuch as such things can be represented, and thus can be made to appear to the person altogether as if he possessed them in the world," for, Swedenborg said subtly, "the possession of goods in the world is nothing else than imaginary, and when the imagination enjoys them to the full and has them in its eye, then it possesses them as in the world, and is delighted with them." ”

“ I had no need to do more than think about a person with the idea of his qualities and at the same time of his position, dignity and other circumstances, without any idea of his face, body, and of such things as a man is described by in human speech—still less his name—and they at once discerned and knew who it was, and of what quality he was in my thought. ”

“ It was "when man recedes from wandering lust and devotes himself to one to whose soul he unites his own soul." When that love found its physical expression in the union of bodies, he called it "conjugial love," and if there were a union of bodies without spiritual union, even if it were "licit" as in marriage, he called it "adultery," in his vivid symbolism, raising the former to be the very pillar of heaven and making the latter the essence of hell.
Some time, somewhere, Emanuel had had experience of union with a kindred spirit, perhaps it was with the girl who sang for him in England. ”

“ Swedenborg had stopped walking around life and viewing it mainly from the outside, yet he had not renounced reason, he felt he had given its exercise a divine object. Through his mystical experience he had been dragged like an iron filing into a celestial field, and from then on he was still concerned about truth, but even more about "wisdom"—the use of truth in the service of goodness. Our rational mind should enable us to choose the best, to know good from evil. "This is the work of science and wisdom. ”

“ When Publilius said that "Woman either hates or loves, she knows no middle way," Emanuel, while admitting that woman was a creature of extremes, maintained that so were her critics—"not a few of them prove it by their own manners."
The heart of all friendship, he said, was in the saying "Friendship is either between equals or makes them so," otherwise adulation crept in. "Friendship is always helpful, love can be injurious." Or, as Seneca had put it, "He who is a friend loves; he who loves is not always a friend." ”

“ The soul it is because of which, by which, and out of which, the visible corporeal kingdom principally exists; to the soul it is that we are to ascribe whatever excites our admiration and astonishment in the anatomy of the body; the body being constructed according to the image of the soul's nature, or according to the form of its operations. Thus did I seem to see, and yet not to see, the very object with the desire of knowing which I was never at rest. ”

“ Clumsily made as his new book was, with pedantic interpolations and gigantic footnotes like chunks of science heaved into mystic joy, it was the work of a sane mind, a mind that often flashed into brilliance as when he expressed in a paragraph things he had taken chapters for in other books, while at times there was poetic grandeur in it such as in Adam's and Eve's vision of creation. ”

“ It is as if at the word "spirit" such fears of superstition arise in modern man (because he is still so close to it) that all power of objective judgment departs from him, and the label that means "insane" to him is hunted out and affixed to the sinner who said "spirits."
It might be possible for us, instead of giving way to panic, to try to find out whether Swedenborg could not have believed in "spirits," given his background and experience, without having been "psychotic." ”

“ Writing with the awe that nearly made him a poet at times, Swedenborg said: "There [in the cerebrum] the soul resides, clad in the noblest garment of organization, and sits to meet the ideas emerging thither and receives them as guests. This high and noble place is the innermost sensorium, and it is the boundary at which the ascent of the life of the body ceases, and the boundary from which that of the soul, considered as a spiritual essence, begins." 22
Swedenborg did not think he had shirked "the laws of physics," however. ”

“ If the soul had left the physical envelope, it entered, according to Swedenborg, into a world where its states of mind and mood had vastly greater scope than merely throwing a cup of coffee on the floor if it were angry. ”

“ Some think that they who are in the faith should remove from themselves all the delights of life, and all the pleasures of the body; but this I can assert, that delights and pleasures have never been denied to me; for I have been permitted to enjoy not only the pleasures of the body and the senses, like those who live in the world, but I have also been permitted to enjoy such delights and felicities of life as I believe no persons in the whole world ever before enjoyed, which were greater and more exquisite than any person could imagine and believe. ”

“ But those who had been born to a sphere of high authority and who were also good soon strove to put it off.
As among men so among spirits there were spheres tranquil and pleasant, others disturbing and depressing. Each soul, so to speak, carried its own climate with it favorable or unfavorable to those near it. Worst of all Swedenborg found those spirits in the nearness of whose spheres it was almost impossible even for him to believe in the good and the true ”

“ He favored neither sex against the other; in that wonderful table of weights, so to speak, in which he assesses the gravity of various kinds of adulteries; he blames equally a "crafty wife" who inflames a man and a man who "by powerful enticements" leaves a woman no longer mistress of herself "by reason of the fire kindled in her will." 13
With his idea of adultery as self-regarding lust it was natural that he saw the place in hell for those who delight in adultery as also "the place for those who delight in cruelty . . . they think nothing can be more pleasant." ”

“ He wanted to prove by his science, and he felt he had done so, that man's body was governed by a "soul," because he thought this a necessary step in proving that there was a receptacle in man into which God could flow or with which He could unite Himself. Of course a consequence of believing in a soul was that he believed in its survival, but neither in 1742 nor in the summer of 1744 did Swedenborg touch on a description of the other world as a state with a great resemblance to this one—at least for a while. It was either heavenly felicity or else hellish damnation. ”