CHAPTER NINE
Anatomy of Mind and Body
THE Economy of the Animal Kingdom—never was there a title more misleading to the modern reader! Not one word in it means what it seems to say. Swedenborg wrote most of his works in Latin, and his English translators too slavishly followed it. "Animal" in this connection is derived from "anima," the Latin for soul. The title should be: The Organization (or Government) of the Soul's Kingdom—that is, the body.
The contents of the two volumes were a result of his researches on the blood, the heart, and the brain, plus two chapters on psychology, interwoven with his reflections on ethics and the relation of mind to body.
This is the work which Emerson eulogized: "By the sustained dignity of thinking," he said, it "is an honor to the human race." 1 That does not make it easy reading. As with the Principia, modern scientists with technical language will have to be called in if one wants to try to understand the true grandeur of Swedenborg in his first gigantic effort to understand the human body. And philosophers as well as religious teachers will have to be consulted if one wants to trace the convictions about the world and about God which Swedenborg had reached by the time he was forty-five. Neither is this easy reading. A man with his gifts and culture was not a mere simple devout recipient of emotional religion.
But the Economy is a bridge. Its colossal arches span most of the distance between the mining engineer and the mystic. The latter can be understood by those predisposed in his favor even if they do not try to understand Swedenborg's science and philosophy (and skip chapters nine and ten of this biography), but if they give up this effort they will certainly have to be content with a house that has no foundation.
From the modern point of view, did Swedenborg accomplish anything of real value to science with the Economy?
