t he was in reality a man set apart by God and granted
the rare favor of insight into that unknown world to which all of us
must some day go?

The true explanation, it seems to me, can be had only when we view
Swedenborg in the light of the marvelous discoveries made during the
last few years in the field of abnormal psychology. Beginning in France,
and continuing more recently in the United States and other countries,
investigations have been set on foot resulting in the solution of many
human problems not unlike the riddle of Swedenborg, and occasionally far
more complicated than that presented in his case. All these solutions,
in the last analysis, rest on the basic discovery that human personality
is by no means the single indivisible entity it is commonly supposed to
be, but is instead singularly unstable and singularly complex. It has
been found that under some unusual stimulus--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 dissociation, of
personality, giving rise it may be to hysteria, it may be to
hallucinations, it may even be to a complete disappearance of the
original personality and its replacement by a new personality,
sometimes of radically different characteristics.[F]

It has also been found, by another group of investigators working
principally in England, that side by side with the original, the waking,
personality of every-day life, there coexists a hidden personality
possessing faculties far transcending those enjoyed by the waking
personality, but as a rule coming into play only at moments of crisis,
though by some favored mortals invocable more frequently. To this hidden
personality, as distinguished from the secondary personality of
dissociation, 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 transference that have puzzled
mankind from time immemorial.

Now, arguing by analogy from the cases scattered through the writings of
Janet, Sidis, Prince, Myers, Gurney, and many others whose works the
reader may consult for himself in any good public library, it is my
belief that in Swedenborg we have a preeminent illustration both of
dissociation and of subliminal action, and that it is therefore equally
unnecessary to stigmatize him as insane or to adopt the spiritistic
hypothesis in explan