Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters

by H. Addington Bruce

It seems altogether likely, then, that in London the process of dissociation, after this period of gradual growth, suddenly leaped into activity. Thereafter his hallucinations, from being sporadic and vague, became habitual and definite, his hystero-epileptic 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 unabated; and he was still able to adjust himself to the environment of the world about him.

But, it may be objected, how explain his revelations in the matter of the fire at Stockholm, the missing receipt, the message to Queen Ulrica, and the death of Peter III.? This brings us to the question of subliminal action. Swedenborg himself, far in advance of his generation in this as in much else, appears to have realized that there was no need of invoking spirits to account for such transactions. "I need not mention," he once wrote, "the manifest sympathies 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 between those who are miles apart."

Here, in language that admits of no misinterpretation, we see stated the doctrine of telepathy, which is only now beginning to find acceptance among scientific men, but which, as I view it, has been amply demonstrated by the experiments of recent years and by the thousands of cases of spontaneous occurrence recorded in such publications as the "Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research." And if these experiments and spontaneous instances prove anything, they prove that telepathy is distinctively a faculty of the subliminal 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 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 London. Including books on Swedenborg, this bibliography contains no fewer than thirty-five hundred items. For a detailed account of Swedenborg's life the reader may consult Dr. R. L. Tafel's "Documents concerning the Life and Character of Swedenborg," or the biographies by William White, Benjamin Worcester, James J. G. Wilkinson, and Nathaniel Hobart. Of these, the White biography is the most critical.

[F] Illustrative cases will be cited in the discussion of "The Watseka Wonder" on a later page. For a detailed explanation of "dissociation" the reader is referred to Dr. Morton Prince's "The Dissociation of a Personality," or Dr. Boris Sidis's "Multiple Personality."

[G] This point is more fully discussed in my earlier book, "The Riddle of Personality."