ON MECHANICAL TREMULATION, VIBRATION IN THE BODY
By Emanuel Swedenborg (1719)
This work is now in the public domain, as far as I am aware.
Foreword by Dr. Leon James
This little known work by my favorite psychologist provides us with a fuller understanding of how the body is structurally (or mechanically) interconnected, along with his theory of the functional benefits of this mechanical or "tremulatory" connectivity. To my view as a behavioral psychologist and scientist, Swedenborg's observations constitute a new and signficant advance in psychosomatic theory by describing the organic mechanism of sensorimotor life. This work advances our knowledge of the following behavioral and health related topics:
| NATURAL / PHYSICAL | SPIRITUAL / MENTAL |
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| Charity 191. When
the mind has been continually upon the stretch, at its work, it aspires to rest; and when
it rests it descends into the body, and seeks there its pleasures, correspondent to its
mental operations, which the mind chooses, according to its interior state in the viscera
of the body. The interior things of the body derive their pleasures chiefly from the
senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, delights which are in fact drawn from
outward things, but yet insinuate themselves into the single parts of the body, which are
called members and viscera. From hence and from no other source have they their delights
and pleasures. The single fibers, and single tissues of fibers, the single capillary
vessels, and thence the common vessels, and so all the viscera in common, derive their own
delights; which a man then perceives, not singly but universally, as one common sensation.
But just as is the mind within them, from the head, such are the delights, pure or impure,
spiritual or natural, heavenly or infernal. For within, in every sensation of the body, is
the love of his will, with its affections; and the understanding makes him to perceive
their delights. For the love of the will, with its affections, constitutes the life of every sensation; and the perception thence of the understanding produces the sensation. Hence come all delights and pleasures. For the body is a connected work, and one form. Sensation communicates itself, like a force applied to a chain with its single links; and as a form which has been wrought together from uninterrupted links. E. Swedenborg, Charity:191 |