The Soul, or Rational Psychology

...experimental knowledge to which to apply it. This experimental knowledge is found in two areas original: "planes" of experience—the physical and the spiritual. Spiritual experience—the knowledge gained from things heard and seen in the spiritual world—was granted to Swedenborg by Divine permission. This provided the true, highest, and final field for applying those great sciences he had developed through years of intense study in the schools of nature. No one is more clear or emphatic than Swedenborg himself in defining the difference between a "doctrine" as a method and the actual knowledge to which that doctrine is applied.* We should not be surprised that when these doctrines (originally scientific formulas) were later filled with living knowledge—clothed in the facts of the spiritual world and the lives of its inhabitants—all his former knowledge seemed insignificant to him. Even the doctrines themselves, when illustrated only by nature, seemed like empty shadows. The senses whose phenomena were to be the field of exploration for the doctrines of Correspondence and Discrete Degrees were the senses of the spiritual body. Through this experience, the nature of the soul was truly learned in the spiritual world; it was never discovered by Swedenborg in this natural world, or by the deductions of logic alone. Once the soul was seen and known in its true nature there for the first time, the way it interacts original: "mode of intercourse" with the world of matter was detected at a glance by using his existing knowledge of Influx, Degrees, and Correspondence.

What, then, is the real gain achieved in the present work? The author virtually confesses in a remarkable statement in section 524 of this book that, even after all his laborious efforts, he has not attained a satisfactory knowledge of the essence of the soul itself, and that what he proposes is merely a series of guesses based on logic:

"But these things are among the secrets; they are nothing but conjectures. Who has seen these things? Reason alone suggests them. When we live as souls, we will perhaps laugh at ourselves for having guessed so childishly." original Latin: "Sed haec in secretis sunt ; non nisi quam conjecturae sunt ; quis haec vidit, ratio haec solum suadet. Quando animae vivimus, nos ipsos fortassis ridebimus, quod tam infantiliter divinaverimus."

But while the substance of the soul still remains a secret, its way of interacting with the body—particularly in the outward levels of its life—is presented here with incredible depth. He also explains the soul's manifestations in the conscious acts of the imagination, the intellect, and the will with a clarity that has rarely, if ever, been matched by psychological writers of any age. The physiological basis of psychology is presented here with the exactness of a mathematical proof. The subjects of Innate Ideas, Instinct, the Freedom of the Will, and the Higher and Lower Minds are all explained through an argument that is both logical and beautiful, making the study of these difficult themes a delight.

But even these features are of secondary importance when compared—

* See above (page viii), the quotations from the Economy of the Animal Kingdom, beginning with the words, "But even if it were granted," etc.