ch the sitter has consciously
forgotten, facts even of which he may never have been consciously aware,
but which have been transmitted telepathically to his subliminal self by
the subliminal self of some third person.[G]

So with Swedenborg. Admitting the authenticity of the afore-mentioned
anecdotes--none of which, it is as well to point out, reaches us
supported 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 before his death the Ambassador
telepathically told his devoted wife of the existence of the secret
drawer and its contents; if, indeed, she had not known and forgotten. It
would then be an exceedingly simple matter for the dissociated
Swedenborg to acquire the desired information from the wife's
subconsciousness. Nor does this reflect on his honesty. Doubtless he
believed, as he represented, that he had actually had a conversation
with the dead Marteville, and had learned from him the whereabouts of
the missing receipt. In the form his dissociation took he could no more
escape such a hallucination than can the twentieth-century medium avoid
the belief that he is a veritable intermediary between the visible and
the invisible world.

Not that I would put Swedenborg on a par with the ordinary medium. He
was unquestionably a man of gigantic intellect, and he was
unquestionably inspired, if by inspiration be understood the gift of
combining subliminal with supraliminal powers to a degree granted to few
of those whom the world counts truly great. If his fanciful and
fantastic pictures of life in heaven and hell and in our neighboring
planets welled up from the depths of his inmost mind, far more did the
noble truths 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
exhibitions, that lies the secret of the commanding, if not always
recognized, influence he has exercised on the thought of posterity. A
solitary figure? True: but a grand figure, even in his saddest moment of
delusion.

FOOTNOTES:

[E] The most complete enumeration of the writings of Swedenborg will be
found in the Rev. James Hyde's "A Bibliography of the Works of Emanuel
Swedenborg," published in 1906 by the Swedenborg Society of