brothers, as if they had been known to him from infancy." 19 This is due to "similitude of soul," and the society is so likeminded that it seems like "a composite person."
Many of Swedenborg's observations concerning the nature of "societies" bear a resemblance to the modern "field" theory of psychic phenomena, as presented by Professor Gardner Murphy.20 It is not a contradiction of Whately Carington's law of the association of ideas applied to telepathy, but, as has been said, it stresses another aspect: the "interpersonal" nature of the phenomena. In other words, better results have been obtained in experimental work if two or three persons are working together. Gardner Murphy makes it part of his hypothesis that "such interpersonal powers are much richer and more complex than any possessed by the individual when isolated from his fellows."
They make a "field . . . a distribution of energy in time and space . . . a unitary, structural whole."
(This might be said to be a part of that great underlying field of deep-level psychic activities which has been supposed to be the common subconscious of mankind.)
Human beings may, as Gardner Murphy has suggested, be mere aspects of that interpersonal field, not so separate as our physical uniqueness implies, and, if psychic activity does continue after death, Gardner Murphy supposes that it would be knit still more closely into the "complex structural whole of which it is an aspect," without therefore necessarily giving up conscious individuality.
It would still be a weak or a vigorous part of the whole. And that whole might include both the quick and the dead. "If," Professor Murphy continues, "on independent grounds there is reason to believe that the discarnate exist and are capable of contact with the living, there is no theoretical difficulty involved in their participating jointly with the living in an interpersonal field."
With hundreds of examples drawn from what he called "experience," Swedenborg maintains practically the same theory. But he calls the "interpersonal psychic field" a "society."
In the spirit world especially, Swedenborg saw the "society" as of such importance that he ascribed the state of confusion of the
