; and she became pale with
astonishment when every minute particular of her interview with her
brother was reported to her. Swedenborg was a sedate man, apparently
devoid of any wish to excite a sensation, engrossed in scientific
pursuits, and remarkable for the orderly habits of his mind. The
intelligent and enlightened German, Nicolai, in the later years of his
life, was accustomed to find himself in the midst of persons whom he
knew perfectly well, but who were invisible to others. He reasoned very
calmly about it, but arrived at no solution more satisfactory than the
old one of "optical illusion," which is certainly a very inadequate
explanation. Instances are recorded, and some of them apparently well
authenticated, of persons still living in this world, and unconscious of
disease, who have seen _themselves_ in a distinct visible form, without
the aid of a mirror. It would seem as if such experiences had not been
confined to any particular part of the world; for they have given birth
to a general superstition that such apparitions are a forerunner of
death,--or, in other words, of the complete separation of the spiritual
body from the natural body. A friend related to me the particulars of a
fainting-fit, during which her body remained senseless an unusually long
time. When she was restored to consciousness, she told her attendant
friends that she had been standing near the sofa all the time, watching
her own lifeless body, and seeing what they did to resuscitate it. In
proof thereof she correctly repeated to them all they had said and
done while her body remained insensible. Those present at the time
corroborated her statement, so far as her accurate knowledge of all
their words, looks, and proceedings was concerned.

The most numerous class of phenomena concerning the "spiritual body"
relate to its visible appearance to others at the moment of dissolution.
There is so much testimony on this subject, from widely separated
witnesses, that an unprejudiced mind, equally removed from superstition
and skepticism, inclines to believe that they must be manifestations of
some hidden law of our mysterious being. Plato says that everything in
this world is merely the material form of some model previously existing
in a higher world of ethereal spiritual forms; and Swedenborg's
beautiful doctrine of Correspondences is a reappearance of the same
idea. If their theory be true, may not the antecedent type of that
strange force