Below is the OCR text representation for this newspapers page.

of his opinions—it seemed altogether likely his spiritualistic ideas would have gained no great measure of at tention, had it not been for a series of singular occurrences that took place between 1759 and 1762. He Knew About the Fire. •Toward the end of July in the first of these years, Swedenborg (whose fondness for travel ceased only with his death) arrived in Gottenburg homeward bound from England, and on the invitation of a friend decided to break his journey by spending a few days in that city. Two hours af ter his arrival, while attending a small reception given in his honor, he electrified the company by abrupt ly declaring that at that moment a dangerous fire had broken out at Stockholm, three hundred miles away, and was spreading rapidly. Becom ing excited, he rushed from the room, to re-enter with the news that the house of one of his friends was in ashes, and that his own house was threatened. Anxious moment passed, while he restlessly pased up and down, in and out. Then, with a cry of joy, he exclaimed, “Thank God, the tire is out, the third door from my house!” Like wild the tidings spread through Gottenburg, and the greatest commotion prevailed. Some were in clined to give credence to Sweden borg’s statements; more, who did not know the man, derided him as a sen sation monger. But all had to wait with what patience they could, for those were the days before steam en gine and telegraph. Forty-eight anx ious hours passed. Then letters were received confirming the philosopher's announcement, and, we are assured, showing that the fire had taken pre cisely the path described by him, and had stopped where he had indicated. No peace now for Swedenborg. His home at Stockholm, with its quaint gambrel roof, its summer houses, its neat flower-beds, its curious box trees, instantly became a Mecca for the in quisitive, burning to see the man who held converse with the dead and was instructed by the latter in many portentous secrets. Most of those who gained admission and through him sought to be put into touch with departed friends, received a courteous but firm refusal, accompanied by the explanation: “God having for wise and good purposes separated the world of spirits from ours, a commu nication is never granted without cogent reasons.” When, however, his visitors satisfied him that they were imbued with something more than cu ' riosity, he made an effort to meet their wishes, and occasionally with astonishing results. It was thus in the case of Madam Marteville, widow of the Dutch Am bassador to Sweden. In 1761, some months after her husband’s death, a goldsmith demanded from her pay ment for a silver service the Ambas sador had bought from him. Feeling sure that the bill had already been paid, she made search for the receipt, but could find none. The sum in volved was large, and she sought Swe denborg and asked him to hunt up her husband in the world of spirits and ascertain whether the debt had been settled. Three days later, when she was entertaining some friends, Swedenborg called, and in the most matter of fact way stated that he had had a conversation with Marteville, and had learned from him that the debt had been canceled seven months before his death, and that the receipt would be found in a bureau. “But 1 have searched all through it,” protested Madam Marteville. “Ah,” was Swedenborg’s rejoin der; “but it has a secret drawer of which you know nothing.” At once all present hurried to the bureau, and there, in the private com partment which he quickly located, lay the missing receipt. In similar fashion did Swedenborg relate to the Queen of Sweden, Louisa Ulrica, the substance of the last interview between her and her dead brother, the Crown Prince of Prussia, an interview which had been strictly private, and the subject of which, she a (firmed, was such that no third person could possibly have known what passed between them. Saw Peter Assassinated. More startling still was his decla ration to a merry company at Am sterdam that at that same hour, in far-away Russia, the Emperor Peter HI. was being foully done to death in prison. Once more time proved that the spirit-seer, as Swedenborg was now popularly known, had told tiie truth; A decade more, and again we meet him in London, his whole being, at eighty-four, animated with the same energy and enthusiasm that had led him to seek and attain in his earlier manhood such a vast store of knowl edge. And here, as Christmas drew near, he found lodging with two old friends, a wig maker and his wife. But ere Christmas dawned lie lay a helpless victim of that dread disease paralysis. Not a word, not a move ment, for full three weeks. Then, with returning consciousness, a call for pen and paper. He would, he muttered with thickened speech, send a note to inform a certain John Wesley, that the spirits had made known to him Wesley’s desire to meet him, and that he would be glad to receive a visit at any time. In re ply came word that the great evan gelist had indeed wished to make the great mystic’s acquaintance, and that after returning from a six months’ circuit he would give himself the pleasure of waiting upon Sweden borg. “Too late,” was Ihe aged philosopher’s comment, as the story goes—“too late; for on the 29th of March I shall be in the world »•< spirits never more to return.” March came and went, and with it went his soul on the day predicted, if prediction there was. They buried him in London, and there, in early season, out of his grave blossomed the religion that has preserved his name, his fame, his doctrines. To the dead Swedenborg succeeded the living Swedenborgianism. But what shall those of us who are not Swedenborgians think of the mas ter? Shall we accept at face value the story of his life as gathered from the documents left behind him. and as set forth here; and, accepting it, believe that he was in reality a man set apart by G >d and granted the rare favor of insight into that unknown world to which all of us must some day go? The True Explanation. The true explanation, it seems to me, can be had only when we view Swedenborg in the light of the mar velous discoveries made during the last few years in the field of abnor mal psychology. Beginning in Franco, WATSON’S WEEKLY JEFFERSONIAN. and continuing more recently in the United States, and other countries, investigations have been set on foot resulting in the solution of many hu man problems not unlike the riddle of Swedenborg, and occasionally far more complicated than that' present ed in his case. AU these solutions, in the last analysis, rest on the basic discovery' that human personality \s by no means the single indivisible en tity it is commonly supposed to be, but is instead singularly unstable and singularly complex. It has been found that under some unusual stimu lus —such as an injury, an illness, or the strain of an intense emotion— there may result a disintegration, or as it is technically termed, a disso ciation, of personality, giving rise, it may be, to hysteria, it may be to hal lucinations, it may even be to a com plete disappearance of the orig’nal personality and its replacement by a new personality, sometimes of radi cally different characteristics. It has also been found, by another group of investigators working prin cipally in England, that side by side with the original, the waking, per sonality of every day life, there co-exists a hidden personality possessing faculties far transcend ing those enjoyed by the waking personality, but as a rule coming in to play only at moment of crisis, though by some favored mortals in vocable more frequently. To this hid den personality, as distinguished from the secondary personality of dissoci ation, has been given the name of the subliminal self, and to its operation some attribute alike the productions of men of genius and the phenomena of clairvoyance and thought trans ference that have puzzled mankind from time immemorial. Now, arguing by analogy from the cases scattered through the writings of Janet, Sidis, Prince, Myers, Gur ney, and many others whose works the reader may consult for himself in any good public library, it is my be lief that in Sw’edenborg we have a pre-eminent illustration, both of dis sociation and of subliminal action, and that it is therefore equally un necessary to stigmatize him as insane or to adopt the spiritistic hypothesis in explanation of his utterances. The records show that, from his father he inherited a tendency to hallucina tions, checked for a time by the na ture of his studies, but fostered as these expanded into pursuit of the absolute and the infinite. They fur ther show that for a long time be fore the London visions he was in disturbed state of health, his nervous system unstrung, his whole being so unhinged that at times he suffered from attacks of what was probably hystero-epilepsy. Didn’t Lose His Personality. It seems altogether likely, then, that in London the process of disso ciation, after this period of gradual growth, suddenly leaped into activity. Thereafter his hallucinations, from being sporadic and vague, became ha bitual and definite, his hysterio-epi leptic attacks more frequent. But, happily for him, the dissociation never became complete. He was left in command of his original personality, his mental powers continued un abated; and he was still able to ad just himself to the environment of the world about him. But, it may be objected, how ex plain bis revelations in the matter of the fire at Stockholm, the missing re ceipt, the message to Queen Ulrica, and the death of Peter III? This brings us to the question of sublim inal action. Swedenborg himself, far in advance of his generation in this, as in much else, appears to have real ized that there was no need of invok ing spirit to account for such transac tions. “1 need not mention,” he once wrote, “the manifest sympa thies acknowledged to exist in this lower world, and which are too many to be recounted; so great being the sympathy and magnetism of man that communication often takes place be tween those who are miles apart.” Here, in language that admits of no misinterpretation, we see stated tlie doctrine of telepathy, which is only now beginning to find accept ance among scientific men, but which as I view it, has been amply demon strated by the experience of recent years and by the thousands of cases of spontaneous occurrence recorded in such publications as the “Proceed ings of the Society for Psychical Re search.” And if these experiments and spontaneous instances prove any thing, they show that telepathy is distinctively a faculty of the sublim inal self; and that a greater or less degree of dissociation is essential, not to the receipt, but to the objective realization, of telepathic messages. Thus, the entranced “medium” of modern days extracts from the depths of his sitter’s subconsciousness facts which the sitter has consciously for gotten, facts even of which he may never have been consciously aware, but which have been transmitted tele pathically to his subliminal self by the subliminal self of some third per son. So with Swedenborg. Admitting the authenticity of the aforemention ed anecdotes—none of which, it is as W ed by first-hand evidence —it is quite unnecessary to appeal to spirits as his purveyors of knowledge. In every instance telepathy—or clairvoyance, which is, after all, explicable itself only by telepathy—will suffice. In the Marteville affair, for example, it is not unreasonable to assume that be fore his death the Ambassador tele pathically told his devoted wife of t he existence of the secret drawer and its contents; if, indeed, she had not known and forgotten. It would thei be an exceedingly simple matter for the dissociated Swedenborg to acquire the desired information from the wife’s subconsciousness. Not that I would put Swedenborg on a par with the ordinary “medi um.” He was Unquestionably a man of gigantic intellect, and he was un questionably inspired, if by inspirt tion be understood the gift of com - bining subliminal with supraliminal powers to a degree granted to few of those whom the world counts trulv great. If his fanciful and fantastic pictures of life in heaven and heli and in our neighboring planets welled up from the depths of his inmew* mind, far more did the noble trull to which he gave expression. It is by these he should be judged; it is in these, not in his hallucinations nor in his telepathic exhibition, that lies tin secret of the commanding, if not al ways recognized, influence he has ex - ercised on the thought of posterity. A solitary figure? True; but a grand figure, even in his saddest moment of delusion. PAGE FIFTEEN