946. I talked with some spirits about the prospect that few will believe all these things can happen in the other world. People have no conception of life after death, except for a vague, general notion, which is no conception at all, and they harden themselves in this notion by the fact that they cannot see a soul or spirit with their eyes. Furthermore, although scholars affirm that the soul or spirit exists, they get bogged down in inventing technical terms that dim — no, extinguish — any understanding of the subject. 1 Because of this, and because they focus on themselves and worldly advantages and rarely on the common good or heaven, scholars have even less belief than sense-oriented people do.
The spirits I was talking to were amazed that humankind could be this way despite knowing that nature itself, in each of its kingdoms, provides so many varied wonders of which people are unaware. Take just the human inner ear, for example; a whole book could be filled with astounding and unheard-of facts about it, and everyone trusts those facts. But say anything about the spiritual world, which gives rise to each and every detail of nature's kingdoms, and hardly anyone believes it. The reason, as noted, is people's confirmed prejudice that the spiritual world is nothing because they do not see it.
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1. In Swedenborg's time the existence of the soul was in general not doubted, though there was much scholarly debate about its nature and qualities. For an overview of some aspects of this debate that Swedenborg at one time thought worth transcribing, see his Quotations on Various Philosophical and Theological Topics (Swedenborg 1976c), 10-27, 162-184, 187-203, 259-289, 346-377, 400-420. This notebook, left unpublished by him but known to have been written around 1741, contains quotations on the soul (among other topics) both from ancient sources (Plato [427-347 b.c.e.], Aristotle, Augustine, and Scripture) and from various scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: René Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri (1651-1725), Andreas Rydelius (1671-1738), Christian Wolff (1679-1754), and George Bernard Bilfinger (1693-1750). As Swedenborg observes here, these scholars' discussions of the topic are indeed highly technical in nature. [JSR]
