He had decided that the development of the embryo was determined by "a certain most fluid matter," which he also spoke of as "this substance or force." This was "the spirituous fluid" (or the "animal spirits") in which and by means of which the soul carried the pattern of a human being into materiality. It was "natural," or matter in its finest manifestation, that of force or energy; therefore it could create and govern the body; it was "spiritual" in that matter of this immaterial kind could be acted on by the still subtler energy of higher states of being or soul. It was the link between soul and body.
Swedenborg believed that when the outward material body died the "animal spirits" withdrew from it in the form of the human being which they had brought to it. This form served as the "organ of the soul," both in and out of the body.29 But with men who had not cultivated their intellectual or spiritual capacities, or who had not done it in the right way, the spirit-body was hardly more than a body; it was still "natural," still obsessed by its corporeal experience—only a psychon-system, as Carington would say, a mere assortment of sense impressions, held together by consciousness.
After Swedenborg's "sight was opened," he was rather careful not to commit himself too definitely, partly, he said, because it was not "for various reasons" given to know "of what quality are the forms of spirits," but mostly because "natural terms cannot suffice to express them . . ." 30
In any case, though their substance might be organized and still resemble a human body, the fact that this substance was now more obviously a kind of energy gave it a great many advantages and disadvantages from the material state. Swedenborg was industrious in recording his observations of these. The chief point noted by him, and indeed the key point for an understanding of everything he wrote on the subject, was what we now should call the almost fatal facility of telepathy.
Very early he discovered, he said, that "Thoughts are nothing but activities, and they become perceptible when the door is opened to heaven, this also has come clearly out in my own experience." 31
The chief trouble of the psychic organism in its new environment, according to Swedenborg, might be summed up in saying that it has to learn to tell the real from the unreal, imagination from
