ng around a corner
to disembodied spirits. The people with credulity plus, however, always
close our mouths with this, "If it isn't spirits, what in the world is
it?" And we, crestfallen and abashed, are forced to say, "We do not
know."

The absolute worthlessness of spiritual communication comes in when we
are told by the medium, caught in a contradiction, that spirits are
awful liars. On this point all mediums agree: many disembodied spirits
are much given to untruth, and the man who is a liar here will be a liar
there.

Swedenborg was so annoyed with this disposition on the part of spirits
to prevaricate that he says, "I usually conduct my affairs regardless of
their advice." When a spirit came to him and said, "I am the shade of
Aristotle," Swedenborg challenged him, and the spirit acknowledged he
was only Jimmy Smith. This is delightfully naive and surely reveals the
man's sanity: he was deceived by neither living nor dead: he accepted or
rejected communications as they appealed to his reason: he kept his
literature and his hallucinations separate from his business, and never
did a thing which did not gibe with his reason. In this way he lived to
be eighty, earnest, yet composed, serene, steering safely clear from
Bedlam, by making his commonsense the court of last appeal.

Emerson says that the critic who will render the greatest gift to modern
civilization is the one who will show us how to fuse the characters of
Shakespeare and Swedenborg. One stands for intellect, the other for
spirituality. We need both, but we tire of too much goodness, virtue
palls on us, and if we hear only psalms sung, we will long for the clink
of glasses and the brave choruses of unrestrained good-fellowship. A
slap on the back may give you a thrill of delight that the touch of holy
water on your forehead can not lend.

Shakespeare hasn't much regard for concrete truth; Swedenborg is devoted
to nothing else. Shakespeare moves jauntily, airily, easily, with
careless indifference; Swedenborg lives earnestly, seriously, awfully.
Shakespeare thinks that truth is only a point of view, a local issue, a
matter of geography; Swedenborg considers it an exact science, with
boundaries fixed and cornerstones immovable, and the business of his
life was to map the domain.

If you would know the man Shakespeare, you will find him usually in cap
and bells. Jaques, Costard, Trinculo, Mercutio, are confessions, for
into the mouths of these he puts h