PHILOSOPHIES ANCIENT AND MODERN 
 
 SWEDENBORG
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 AND 
 
 THE 'SAPIENTIA ANGELICA' 
 
 By 
 
 FRANK SEWALL, M.A., D.D. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 DODGE PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 
 214-220 EAST 23RD STREET
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 i. YOUTH AND EABLY STUDIES: 16881720 . . 1 
 ii. COSMOGONY AND PHYSICS: 17211734 ... 6 
 iii. PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY : 17341745 . . 13 
 
 iv. THE TBANSITION : 17451772 . 30 
 
 a. The Change of Literary Style ... 36 
 
 b. The Seer 38 
 
 c. Swedenborg not a Medium . . .43 
 
 d. The Spiritual Diary . . '. .48 
 
 v. THE THEOLOGICAL WRITINGS : 1749 1772 . . 52 
 
 Classification of the Theological Works . . 59 
 The New Age 63 
 
 vi. PHILOSOPHY AND THE SAPIESTIA ANGELICA , 04 
 
 Swedenborg's Nvcum Organum .... 69 
 The Law of Correspondence .... 77 
 The Spirit nal History of the World . . .81 
 
 The Five Ages 83 
 
 V
 
 vi , CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 vii. THE DIVINE ALTEUJSM, OR LOVE THE FINAL 
 
 CAUSE OF CREATION 87 
 
 The Great Categories : Kingdoms and Degrees 101 
 
 vin. THE LAST DAYS AND DYING TESTIMONY . .105 
 
 ix. RELATIONS TO MODERN THOUGHT . . . .114 
 
 APPENDIX 
 BIOGRAPHIES 123 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 124 
 
 Theological . . -. . . . . . .125 
 
 Scientific and Philosophical .126 
 
 Collateral Treatises . . . .127
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 AND THE 'SAPIENTIA ANGELICA' 
 
 YOUTH AND EAELY STUDIES 
 16881720 
 
 OP Dalecarlian ancestry, his grandfathers on 
 both sides being peasant mine-owners in Fahlun, 
 Sweden, Emanuel Swedenborg was born in 
 Stockholm on the twenty-ninth day of January, 
 1688. He was the second son of Jesper Swed- 
 berg, at that time an army chaplain, but later 
 made Dean and Professor of Theology at Upsala, 
 and thence promoted to be the Bishop of Skara 
 in "West Gothland, his episcopal charge em- 
 bracing also the Swedish settlements in America. 
 The family name was Isaacson, the name Swed- 
 berg being derived from ' Sweden,' the name 
 of their mining property in Fahlun, the title 
 Swedenborg being conferred with the rank of 
 nobility given to the family by Queen Ulrica 
 
 B I
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 Eleanor in 1719, when Emanuel took his seat 
 in the House of Nobles. 
 
 Entering the University of Upsala in 1699 at 
 the early age of eleven years, he pursued his 
 studies in the faculty of philosophy until his 
 twenty-first year, in 1709. His brother-in-law, 
 Eric Benzelius, the university librarian, a learned 
 scholar, afterwards appointed archbishop, en- 
 couraged the young student's zeal for mathe- 
 matics and the physical sciences, and offered to 
 supplement the somewhat reluctant and chary 
 provision of his father for further study by 
 aiding him to make a tour abroad. He was 
 eager to be released from study and paternal 
 control, and to gain touch with the real world, 
 which seemed impossible under the limited 
 resources and the cramped scholasticism of the 
 university, where the lively controversy was 
 still waging by the Cartesians for the introduc- 
 tion of modern methods. His bent for the 
 classics and his youthful love of verse are shown 
 in his graduation thesis on the Morals of Seneca, 
 and a number of festive odes and other poems 
 in Latin, some of which were published later 
 under the title of Ludus Heliconicus and Carmena 
 Borea. But his real aim was for a deeper and 
 wider knowledge of nature.
 
 YOUTH AND EARLY STUDIES 
 
 In the year 1710, with his brother-in-law's 
 assistance, he went abroad for a tour of five 
 years, embracing England, Holland, France and 
 Germany. He spent a year in London and 
 Oxford, making the acquaintance of Flamsteed 
 and Hailey, and, as he reports to his brother- 
 in-law, " studying Newton daily," with the re- 
 sult that he became more and more impatient 
 of the slow progress of his native country in 
 the mathematical and physical sciences. As 
 for himself he would " invent something new 
 every day " ; and he urgently recommends the 
 Upsala University to obtain a better salary for 
 the mathematical professor by cutting down, 
 if necessary, appropriations for the theological 
 and historical faculties. To make himself 
 master of mechanical appliances he took up 
 his lodgings successively with a watchmaker, 
 a cabinet-maker, an instrument-maker and a 
 grinder of lenses ; and a list of his own pro- 
 jected inventions at this time includes a flying- 
 machine, a submarine war-vessel, a quick-firing 
 gun, an air-pump and a mechanical piano- 
 player. 
 
 Returning to Sweden in 1715, he begins, 
 under the patronage of the young King 
 Charles XII., the publication, in the following 
 
 3
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 year, of a mathematical journal, the Dcedalus 
 Hyperboreu8 ; and in 1718 he published an 
 Algebra in ten books, it being the first work 
 on that branch of mathematics published in 
 the Swedish language ; and so backward were 
 his countrymen in this branch of science that 
 ' he feared he would find no one capable of 
 correcting the printer's proofs.' 
 
 Before leaving home he had enjoyed the 
 acquaintance and friendship of the distinguished 
 engineer Polhem ; and on his return, King 
 Charles XII., struck by the genius and ability 
 of the young inventor, called him to the 
 service of the Government as an assistant to 
 Polhem and as an extraordinary Assessor in 
 the College of Mines. Two years later, during 
 the attack on the Norwegian fortress of 
 Frederickshall, where the king met his death, 
 Swedenborg planned the successful transporta- 
 tion of the king's galleys overland for seventeen 
 miles from Stromstad to Iddefjord. His pub- 
 lished treatises on mathematics and the in- 
 dustrial arts at this time include such subjects 
 as the Manufacture of Tin Plate and its Use, the 
 Level of the Sea and the Tides of the Ancient 
 World and Information about Docks, Sluices and 
 Salt Works. While associated with Polhem in 
 
 4
 
 YOUTH AND EARLY STUDIES 
 
 his engineering undertakings and a frequent 
 and welcome visitor at his house, Swedenborg 
 fell in love with one of Polhem's daughters ; 
 but notwithstanding the favour with which the 
 match was regarded by both the father and 
 the king, his offer of marriage was rejected 
 and Swedenborg remained unmarried. His 
 position as Assessor at the Royal College of 
 Mines he held until the year 1747, when, at 
 his own request, he was retired on a pension 
 of half his salary.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 COSMOGONY AND PHYSICS 
 17211734 
 
 IN 1721 Swedenborg commenced his second tour 
 on the Continent, and published in Amsterdam 
 his Studies in Chemistry, a Prodromus, or fore- 
 cast of his Principia, wherein he attempts to 
 reduce the phenomena of nature to a geo- 
 metrical system. He published his Observations 
 and Discoveries respecting Iron and Fire ; A New 
 Method of finding Longitudes by Lunar Observa- 
 tions^ and other works pertaining to mechanics. 
 In Leipzig appeared, in 1772, his Miscellaneous 
 Observations connected with the Physical 
 Sciences, and twelve years later, also at Leipzig, 
 under the munificent patronage of Ludwig 
 Rudolph, Duke of Brunswick, the stately folios 
 of the Opera Ph'ilosophica et Mineralia, contain- 
 ing, for their first part, the Prindpia Rerutn 
 Naturalium, or New Attempts toward the Philo- 
 sophical Explanation of the Elementary World. 
 The Principia, after an introductory chapter 
 6
 
 COSMOGONY AND PHYSICS 
 
 on ' The Means Conducive to a True Philosophy,' 
 presents in Part I. ' A Philosophical Argument 
 concerning the " First Simple " from which 
 the world with its natural things originated ; 
 that is, concerning the First Natural Point 
 and its Existence from the Infinite.' Thus he 
 begins his argument : * There is a first entity 
 produced from the Infinite, for the finite cannot 
 exist per se, therefore it must exist by means 
 of that which can produce what is finite, and 
 which is infinite per se. Therefore, composite 
 things derive their origin from simples from 
 the Infinite, and the Infinite from itself, which 
 is also the cause of itself and of all things. 
 The simple is the first entity existing by 
 motion from the Infinite, and thus in regard 
 to existence it is a medium between the 
 Infinite and the finite. For it is by the media- 
 tion of this point, or most simple entity, that 
 finite things exist from the Infinite. This point 
 is immediately produced from the Infinite, and 
 its origin is purely a motion in the universal 
 Infinite which is pure and total motion, and 
 cannot be conceived of geometrically.' Later, 
 he defines this origin of the point, and so of the 
 created universe, as a ' conatus of motion in the 
 Infinite.' 'In this [effort towards motion] lies 
 
 7
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 concentrated all that quality which, is capable 
 of bringing into act finite things, together with 
 all their modes and contingencies, and even of 
 producing the world itself (Principia, 22). 
 
 The argument discusses the First Finite and 
 its origin from Points ; the Second Finite and 
 its origin from the Simple Finite, and so on 
 to the Active of the First Finite, its motion, 
 figure, state, etc., showing that this Active is one 
 with and constitutes the sun of our system, and 
 that in like manner it forms the first elementary 
 particles. Further on are described the First 
 and most Universal Element ; the Actives of the 
 Second and Third Finite ; the Third Finite, 
 or Substantial ; the Magnetic, or Second Element 
 of the "World, its motion, figure, attributes and 
 modes ; and finally the existence of the Sun and 
 the formation of the Solar Vortex. Part II. 
 treats of the Causes and Mechanism of the 
 Magnetic Forces : the influence of the Magnet 
 upon Iron, the Disjunctive and Repulsive Forces 
 etc., etc., and the Declination of the Magnet. 
 Part III. treats of the Starry Heaven as com- 
 pared with the Magnetic Sphere, of the Diversity 
 of Worlds, of the Fourth Finite, the Universal 
 Solar and Planetary Chaos, and its separation 
 into Planets and Satellites, the Ether, or Third 
 
 8
 
 COSMOGONY AND PHYSICS 
 
 Element of the "World, the Fifth Finite, the Air, or 
 Fourth Element of our System, of Fire, of Water, 
 of the Purely Material Finite, of Vapour, of the 
 Vortex surrounding the Earth, of the Paradise 
 formed upon our Earth, and of the First Man. 
 
 This vast work of the Principia marks the 
 advance of Swedenborg's mind from the scientific 
 to the philosophic plane; it deals with what is 
 imponderable and invisible, and what can only 
 be apprehended by the imagination ; and yet the 
 whole realm of elementary being, thus regarded, 
 is treated with rigid geometrical and mathe- 
 matical precision and logic. Swedenborg calls 
 his work ' philosophical ' ; but by philosophy he 
 here means 'the knowledge of the mechanism 
 of our world, or of whatever in the world is 
 subject to the laws of geometry, or which it is 
 possible to unfold to view by experience assisted 
 by geometry and reason ' (Principia, ch. i). The 
 successive steps in the evolution, through the 
 procession of Simples, Finites and Actives, of 
 a visible universe, follow in rational order from 
 the assumed vortical motion of the First Simple 
 to the stability and order of our solar system, 
 the relation and movement of star-groups and 
 an explanation of the Milky Way. 
 
 As in the Chemistry (1721) we find a science 
 
 9
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 of the invisibles such as Tyndall has later 
 contended for, treating of bodies in their 
 elementary forms and relations, so in the 
 Principia is given a complete theory of Evolu- 
 tion, embracing Motions and Forms, the nature 
 and functions of the successive Auras, the laws 
 of Vibratory Currents and the Magnetic Force. 
 
 The importance of Swedenborg's contributions 
 to physical science, not only in theories antici- 
 pating modern discoveries, but in principles of 
 permanent value in the pursuance of research, 
 is beginning to receive extraordinary acknow- 
 ledgment. 
 
 Of the doctrines of the first forms of matter, 
 in the early work on Chemistry, published in 
 1721, Van't Hoff, in his introduction to the 
 Arrangement of Atoms in Space, translated by 
 Eiloart, says that they embody the germs of the 
 modern science of Crystallography or Stereo- 
 Chemistry. Of Swedenborg's early geological 
 treatises, Professor A. C. Nathorst, of the Royal 
 Swedish Academy, says : ' Swedenborg's contri- 
 butions in the field of geology are of such 
 importance and scope that alone they would 
 have been sufficient to have secured him a 
 respected scientific name : still, these works are 
 but the minor portion of his whole scientific, 
 
 IQ
 
 COSMOGONY AND PHYSICS 
 
 activity, which in many respects was far ahead 
 of the times. For he was also a mathematician, 
 astronomer, cosmologist, physicist, mechanic, 
 chemist, anatomist, and physiologist. "What 
 Anders Retzius said concerning the Regnum 
 'Animale, that it was a ' wonder-book ' in which are 
 found ' ideas belonging to the most recent times, 
 a compass, induction and tendency which can 
 only be compared to that of Aristotle,' seems, 
 after the experience now attained, to be capable 
 of application to the whole of his scientific ac- 
 tivity (Introduction to the Geologica et Epistolce). 
 
 In the Royal Swedish Academy's edition of 
 Swedenborg's Scientific Works, containing his 
 contributions to cosmology, Svante Arrhenius 
 makes the following recognition : 
 
 ' If we briefly summarize the ideas which were 
 first given expression to by Swedenborg and 
 afterwards, although usually in a much mollified 
 form, consciously or unconsciously taken up by 
 other authors in cosmology, we find them to 
 be the following. 
 
 ' The planets of our solar system originate 
 from the solar matter: taken up by Buffon, 
 Kant, Laplace and others. 
 
 ' The earth and the other planets have 
 gradually removed themselves from the sun, 
 
 ii
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 and received a gradually lengthened time of 
 revolution : a view expressed by G. H. Darwin. 
 
 ' The earth's time of rotation, that is to say, 
 the day's length, has been greatly increased : a 
 view again expressed by G. H. Darwin. 
 
 ' The suns are arranged around a milky way : 
 taken up by Wright, Kant and Lambert. 
 
 ' There are still greater systems in which the 
 milky ways are arranged : taken up by Lambert ' 
 (Introduction to the Cosmologia ; vol. ii. of 
 edition mentioned above). 
 
 ' It cannot be disputed that the real germ 
 of the nebular hypothesis, namely, the idea that 
 the entire solar system has formed itself out 
 of a single chaotic mass which rolled itself at 
 first into a colossal sphere, and afterwards threw 
 off a ring, which through continuous rotation at 
 length broke into parts, these finally contracting 
 into balls, planets that this idea first found 
 utterance in Swedenborg. Kant's work on the 
 same subject appeared twenty-one years later, 
 and Laplace published his hypothesis sixty-two 
 years later.' See Article in Vierteljahrschrift 
 der Astronomischen Gesellschaft p. 8 : Leipzig, 
 1879; Swedenbwg and the Nebular Hypothesis^ 
 by Magnus Nyren, Ph.D., Astronomer at the 
 Observatory at Pulkowa, Russia. 
 
 12
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY 
 17341745 
 
 FROM the survey of the universe as a macrocosm, 
 subject to the laws of mechanics and geometry, 
 the author's studies now reach forth to the 
 Nature of the Infinite, its connection with the 
 finite, and the soul of man. He publishes, in 
 Dresden and Leipzig, in 1734, a Prodromus de 
 Infinite et Causa Finali Creationis (' Outlines 
 on the Infinite and the Final Cause of Creation, 
 and on the Mechanism of the Intercourse 
 between the Soul and the Body'). Here he 
 carries his mechanical and geometric method 
 over into the most subtle realm of research, 
 producing the outlines of a physiological psycho- 
 logy which may seem at first to assert an almost 
 ultra-materialistic view : yet he says to those 
 who complain of his reduction of all things to 
 mechanical law, 'It matters not if it be called 
 a mechanism, provided it is always an animated 
 mechanism.' For this term, ' an animated
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 mechanism' truly characterizes his entire view 
 of the world; a system shaped and dominated 
 by a Power and an anima above nature as a 
 body by its soul. 
 
 Of the seven years of travel which now 
 followed in Germany, France and Italy he has 
 left an interesting journal in his Itineraria, 
 showing the wide range of his observations 
 and interest, from the working of salt-mines 
 and blasting furnaces, the discipline of troops, 
 the merits of the various political constitutions 
 of countries visited, to the aesthetics and ethics 
 of religious ceremonials, the attractions of the 
 opera and the beauty of public buildings and 
 works of art. 
 
 What may be termed his philosophical period 
 closed with the production in London, 1740-45, 
 of the two great works The Economy of the 
 Animal Kingdom, considered Anatomically, 
 Physically, and Philosophically (CEconomia Regni 
 Animalis), and the Animal Kingdom (Regnum 
 Animate). 
 
 In these works he confesses that his search 
 is for nothing less than the soul itself. The 
 search follows, indeed, in orderly sequence, as 
 outlined in the Introduction to the Principia, 
 where he says : ' Under the empire of geometry, 
 
 14
 
 PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 and under the mechanical laws of motion, we 
 place the whole mineral, as well as the whole 
 vegetable kingdom, and indeed the animal, too, 
 with respect to mechanical organs, muscles, 
 fibres, and membranes, or with respect to its 
 anatomical, vegetative and organic relations; 
 but with respect to the soul and its various 
 faculties I do not think it possible that they 
 can be explained or comprehended by any laws 
 of motion known to us. Though the world is 
 mechanical, and composed of a series of finite 
 things which originate by means of the most 
 varied contingents, and, being such, may be 
 explored by means of experiment and pheno- 
 mena, it does not follow that all things in the 
 world are subject to the laws of geometry. 
 For there are innumerable things that are not 
 mechanical or even geometrical, such as the 
 Infinite and whatever is in the Infinite. We 
 may learn the mechanism of the organs of the 
 body, how they are moved by muscles, tendons, 
 fibres, and nerves; how the undulating air is 
 received by the membranes of the ear, and is 
 represented in the chamber of the brain by 
 means of sound ; how the ether exhibits a 
 modification of itself in the eye, and runs 
 through the tissues of the nerves till it meets 
 
 15
 
 SWEDENBOEG 
 
 the meninges of the brain. . . . We see every 
 emotion and mode of the soul exhibited 
 mechanically in the body. But, after all, what 
 that intelligence is in the soul which knows, 
 and is able to determine, to choose, to let one 
 thing pass out into act and not another, of 
 this we are obviously ignorant' (Principia, 
 ch. i.). 
 
 The knowledge of the soul is now to be his 
 quest. The Regnum Animate means to him the 
 soul's domain, the human body. Here he will 
 learn what the soul is, and the modes of its 
 abode in and control over, not the body alone, 
 but over all the forces of nature ; since ' in 
 man the world is concentrated, and in him, as 
 in a microcosm, the whole universe may be 
 contemplated from the beginning to the end.' 
 
 Of these two works, the Economia and the 
 Regnum Animate, only a portion was published 
 by the author. Of the unpublished portions, 
 the treatise on The Brain (De Cerebro) has been 
 in part translated from the photo-lithographed 
 MSS., and published in London": James Spiers, 
 1882. The complete work on The Soul, or 
 Rational Psychology (De Anima, etc.), has been 
 translated from the posthumous Latin edition 
 and published in New York, 1886. 
 
 16
 
 The author's desire to be guided by the 
 simple facts of nature unbiassed by prejudice, 
 or by the ambition to establish a theory, is 
 shown by his unwillingness to rely upon his own 
 experiments, and his availing himself of the 
 highest scientific authorities extant. It is only 
 fair, therefore, that the defects that have been 
 pointed out in some of his scientific data 
 should be attributed to the crudeness of scien* 
 tific knowledge in his day, rather than to the 
 general principles he was endeavouring to 
 illustrate. 
 
 Of Swedenborg's anatomical and physiologi- 
 cal discoveries, the distinguished anatomist, 
 Dr. Gustav Retzius thus gives his judgment in 
 his address at Heidelberg, in 1903, before the 
 Congress of Anatomists, over which body he was 
 presiding. 
 
 ' Emanuel Swedenborg was not only a great 
 expert in the knowledge of the brain according 
 to the standard of his time, but in fundamental 
 questions he was far in advance of his con- 
 temporaries. If we ask for the reason, we 
 can only find it in the fact that Swedenborg 
 was not only a learned anatomist and skilled 
 observer, but that he was a deep and critical 
 anatomical thinker. He stands out in the 
 c 17
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 history of craniology as a single, wonderful, 
 phenomenal spirit and ideal seeker of the truth, 
 who, step by step, grasped at ever higher 
 problems. One can understand more easily his 
 life and his work when one combines his 
 achievements in anatomy and physiology with 
 those in geology, mechanics, cosmogony, and 
 physics. With this as a background, his whole 
 aim becomes more manifest. He sought in all 
 to find the principle of the unity of the world 
 and of life. He believed that this fundamental 
 principle was to be found in motion, in the 
 tremulation of the finest particles. It was this 
 principle that led him ever farther on into an 
 almost universal research, and to an insight 
 into the nature and workings of creation that 
 was truly wonderful in his time. Led on by 
 this controlling view (of vibratory motion) he 
 arrived at knowledges and constructed theories 
 which only at the present day are beginning 
 to receive an appreciative recognition.' 
 
 The special localization of intellectual func- 
 tions in the brain, the coincident respiration of 
 brain and lungs, the vitality of the blood, and 
 the process by which sensation becomes con- 
 verted into imagination and idea by a series and 
 correspondence of the subtle tremulations in 
 
 18
 
 PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 the respective substances in which they occur, 
 are among the subjects treated with great clear- 
 ness and lucidity in these remarkable volumes. 
 
 The Animal Kingdom, than which title that of 
 the Soul-Kingdom would more accurately convey 
 the meaning of the original Regnum Animale, 
 included a great series, parts of which were 
 not published until after the author's death, 
 including two of the volumes on the Brain, 
 the volume on Generation, the Soul, or Rational 
 Psychology, and special treatises on the Senses, 
 the Fibre, etc. 
 
 The volumes published by Swedenborg treat 
 of the following subjects. In the Economy of 
 the Animal Kingdom : The Composition and 
 General Essence of the Blood, its Circulation, 
 the Formation of the Chick in the Egg, the 
 Circulation of the Blood in the Foetus, the 
 Motion of the Adult Heart, the Motion of the 
 Brain, its Animation coincident with the Respi- 
 ration of the Lungs, the Cortical Substance of 
 the Brain, and the Human Soul. In the Animal 
 Kingdom: The Tongue, Lips, Mouth, etc., the 
 Stomach and other Intestines; the Nose, Larynx, 
 etc.; the Lungs and Pleura; the Diaphragm; the 
 Skin and Sense of Touch, the Use of Touch and 
 the Sense of Taste. 
 
 '9
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 In all these researches the author was content 
 with nothing short of a definite knowledge of 
 the soul itself. ' Bending my course inward 
 continually, I shall open all doors that lead to 
 her/ he says, 'and by Divine permission contem- 
 plate the soul herself.' In the work on The Soul 
 we find a symmetrical and exhaustive treatise 
 on Physiological Psychology ranging in its 
 discussions from the Simple Fibre, the proper 
 animal essence that ' Form of Forms, celestial 
 and immortal by nature,' to the Senses, the 
 Intellect, the Mind in its three planes as Animus, 
 Mens, and Anima, and the Affections proper 
 to each ; the Pure Intellect ; and the Soul in 
 its Immortal State; concluding with a sublime 
 sociological forecast or conception of a Society 
 of immortal souls as the end of creation and the 
 realization of the City of God. 
 
 ' The end of creation, or the end on account 
 of which the world was created, could be no 
 other than the first and the last, or the most 
 universal of all ends, and that which is perpetu- 
 ally reigning in the created universe, which is 
 the complex of means conspiring to that end. 
 No other end of creation can be given than that 
 there may exist a universal society of souls, or 
 a heaven; that is, the kingdom of God. That 
 
 20
 
 PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 this was the end of creation may be proved 
 by innumerable arguments. For it would be 
 absurd to say that the world was created on 
 account of the earth and terrestrial societies, 
 and this miserable and perishable life ; since all 
 things on earth are for the sake of man, and all 
 things in man for the sake of his soul ; and the 
 soul cannot be for no end. If, then, it exists for 
 any end, it must be for a society in which God 
 is present; for His providence regards souls, 
 which are spiritual, and His works are adapted 
 to men and to their consociation.' 
 
 ' In order that a celestial society, or a society 
 of souls, may exist, it is necessary that there 
 be a most perfect form of government, namely, 
 souls distinct among themselves, and every 
 possible variety, which may be called harmonies, 
 between the souls; and so from such harmony 
 there will arise a consensus and accord which 
 shall produce that entire effect and end which 
 is always foreseen and provided. 
 
 ' That this end may be attained it is necessary 
 that man shall be allowed a free will. The 
 cause of variety of subjects arises solely from 
 free exercise and liberty of the will. Without 
 this there would be no intellect, no morality, no 
 virtue, no vice, no crime, no guilt, no affection 
 
 21
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 of the mind or change of state. This is the 
 reason why God has wished to preserve the 
 free human will strong and inviolate, even for 
 the doing of evil deeds ; so that we would 
 seem to be almost willing to deny a divine 
 Providence for the same reason that we would 
 affirm it.' 
 
 It is at the close of this work that 
 Swedenborg presents his forecast of the Uni- 
 versal Mathesis, or a Mathematical Philosophy 
 of Universals, which, based upon inductive 
 knowledge of the soul's reign in the body and 
 of certain a priori principles governing all of 
 the mind's operations, extends itself into a 
 realm of pure truth beyond science. 
 
 ' There is a Science of sciences, or a universal 
 science which contains all others in itself, and 
 parts of which can, as it were, be resolved 
 into these and those particular sciences. Such 
 a science is not acquired by learning, but it 
 is connate, especially in souls, which are pure 
 intelligences. The soul from this science con- 
 templates all things immediately as they are 
 in themselves, thus whether good or evil, and 
 according to their nature it asserts or is 
 averse. 
 
 4 Unless the soul were furnished with such 
 
 22
 
 PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 a science it would naturally be unable to flow 
 into our thoughts and to infuse, as it were, 
 the power of understanding or of expressing 
 higher things : as also it would be unable to 
 adapt all its organic forms to the inmost and 
 secret laws of mechanics, physics, chemistry and 
 many other phenomena : therefore that such 
 a science exists there can be no doubt. 
 
 ' For there are truths a, priori, or propositions 
 which are at once acknowledged as true ; nor is 
 there any need of demonstration of them a 
 posteriori, nor of confirmation of them from 
 experience or by the senses. The truth itself 
 presents itself naked, and as it were declares 
 itself true. 
 
 ' The mind is often indignant that such truths 
 should have to be proved when they are above 
 all demonstration. For all harmonies and thus 
 all order naturally soothe and delight the organs 
 of our senses, while disharmony constrains and 
 wounds them. So it is with truths in which 
 there is, as it were, an intellectual order. 
 
 'Wherefore if we were not overburdened 
 with the fetters of science, with the turbulent 
 desires of the lower mind and similar hindrances, 
 we should be able to know truths purely ; since 
 a certain consent shines forth as something 
 
 23
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 harmonious and as from a sacred shrine, I 
 know not where.' 
 
 In these glimpses at the possible range of 
 knowledge of a pure soul ' not overburdened 
 with the fetters of science,' we seem to have 
 a foregleam of that higher system upon which 
 he was entering, when, through the gate 
 of that extraordinary experience which he de- 
 scribes as his illumination or intromission into 
 the spiritual world, he is admitted into the 
 conscious and simultaneous experience of the 
 two worlds of man's life, and into the sapientia 
 angelica. For we see here not only how the 
 visible universe is regarded as itself an extension 
 of the body or regnum of each soul, and the 
 tremulations proceeding from the sun being 
 by a continuous series of media and forms 
 conveyed to the senses and so subjected to 
 the soul's control, but beyond the physical 
 world there lies yet the ' shrine, I know not 
 where,' of higher essences and higher know- 
 ledges, which yet must have a place in a 
 science which is truly perfect and universal. 
 
 Throughout the whole philosophic period the 
 devout and worshipping spirit of a seeker 
 after not only the soul but God, its Author, is 
 everywhere manifest. ' No man/ he writes, 
 
 24
 
 PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 ' can be a complete and truly learned philosopher 
 without the utmost devotion to the Supreme 
 Being. True philosophy and contempt of God 
 are two opposites.' The conception of man in 
 his state of integrity as the true philosopher, 
 portrayed in the Introduction to the Principia, 
 will hardly find a rival in literature for great- 
 ness of theme couched in sublime simplicity of 
 language. 
 
 { When the most subtle active principle of 
 man, by the providence of God, clothed itself 
 with a body, and added, by degrees, parts 
 upon parts, all the motions in the most subtle 
 elements which were present would necessarily 
 move or affect that extremely yielding and 
 tender substance, and would gradually impress 
 themselves and their own mechanism upon 
 it. ... The man thus formed, in whom all the 
 parts were co-ordinated to receive the motions 
 of all the elements, and to convey them success- 
 fully when received through a contiguous 
 medium to the extremely subtle active principle, 
 must be deemed the most perfect and the first 
 of all men, being one in whom the connection 
 of ends and means was continuous. So perfect 
 a material and active being would by the senses 
 alone in a short time become possessed of all the 
 
 25
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 philosophy and experimental science natural to 
 him ; for whatever could present itself to his 
 senses would immediately flow, by connection 
 and contiguity, to his extremely subtle and 
 active first principle. . . . 
 
 ' I have said that, in his state of integrity, 
 man was master of a philosophy, or worldly 
 knowledge, and this too of himself, by virtue 
 of the perfect mechanism of his organization, 
 that is, by nature ; and thus being furnished 
 with such excellent senses, nothing could be 
 concealed from him, because he was formed 
 according to all the motions and operations of 
 the world and nature. I have said further, 
 that nothing could exist in the world, from the 
 regular connection of causes, which would not 
 instantly flow, as through a most clear and 
 pellucid medium, with a certain sensation, to 
 the mind; that is, that all the sensations of 
 each of his organs would penetrate to their 
 most subtle principle, without delay, confusion, 
 or obscurity. But when every modification in 
 the world, of whatsoever kind, had thus arrived 
 at its ultimate, or at his soul, it necessarily 
 follows that his knowledge and attainments 
 would stop there, and that he would regard 
 and venerate, with a most profound admiration, 
 
 26
 
 PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 those other and infinite things that exceeded 
 the bounds of his intelligence ; that is to say, 
 that most vast Infinite infinitely intelligent, 
 infinitely provident, which begins where man 
 and his finite faculties, intelligence and provi- 
 dence terminate : he would see that in this 
 Infinite all things have their being, and that 
 from it all things have their existence. . . . 
 
 ' We may therefore conclude, again, that the 
 wiser a man is, the greater are his veneration 
 for and love of the Deity. His delights wholly 
 terminate in the love of God a love which 
 exhausts and replenishes all sense of delight. 
 All the delights of the world, resulting from 
 its variety, are nothing unless the mind also 
 partakes of them; for no human delights can 
 be real without the participation of the soul, 
 since the more refined delights are lacking : 
 and the delights which the body and soul are 
 capable of enjoying together are not genuine 
 and true unless they have some further con- 
 nection, and terminate in the veneration and 
 love of God ; that is, unless they have reference 
 to this love and ultimate end, in a connection 
 with which the sense of delight most essentially 
 consists.' 
 
 It would be a grave misconception, but one 
 27
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 into which it would be easy to fall, at this 
 stage, to identify this knowledge declared by 
 Swedenborg as that to be enjoyed by ' those 
 souls which are pure intelligences' with the 
 immediate knowledge of the Gnostics, or of 
 the various schools of theosophy and occultism 
 which prevail in the world to-day. It is not 
 the exceptional individual in this world who is 
 to enjoy this supreme vision by means of some 
 process of self-discipline or self-abnegation: it 
 is rather the soul-principle in every individual 
 that at all times possesses the universal know- 
 ledge, as that of a queen in her realm, and 
 that makes the mind and the senses in their 
 respective lower planes to acquire a knowledge 
 of both the macrocosm and the microcosm of 
 the universe at large and of the smaller but 
 equally perfect universe of its own body. This 
 knowledge even includes many things that 
 never come to the individual's conscious in- 
 telligence, but remain in the secret and sacred 
 sanctuary of the subconscious, where only 
 the universal control of a divine guardian is 
 active. 
 
 From the mysticism, both of the Gnostics 
 of past ages and of the Orientalists of to-day, 
 Swedenborg must be entirely sundered, for it 
 
 28
 
 PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 is from an utterly different source, and by 
 another experience altogether, and one quite 
 unforeseen by himself, that he is to learn the 
 true nature of the soul and of her superior 
 knowledge. 
 
 29
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE TRANSITION 
 17451772 
 
 HAD Swedenborg's labours ceased at this point, 
 the knowledge of the soul would have remained 
 where his illustrious predecessors in these in- 
 vestigations, from Plato down, had left it, and 
 where Kant, his contemporary, acknowledged 
 it must ever be left, so far as the power of 
 pure reason is concerned a sublime speculation 
 without the elements of certainty and reality. 
 Swedenborg's discussion of the nature of the 
 Pure Intellect would have, side by side with 
 Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, challenged 
 in friendly rivalry the admiration of the world, 
 and the resemblance which Kant admits that he 
 found between many of his principles and those 
 of Swedenborg would have resulted possibly in 
 the public's acceptance of Swedenborg's as the 
 safer, because more logical, guide in these trans- 
 cendental paths. 1 
 
 1 ' The system of Swedenborg is, unfortunately, very similar to 
 my own philosophy. It is not impossible that my rational views 
 
 30
 
 THE TRANSITION 
 
 For the abundant data recently brought to 
 light touching Kant's relation to Swedenborg, 
 including his direct allusions to Swedenborg 
 and the unmistakable borrowings from him, see 
 Kant's Lectures on Psychology in Carl du Prel's 
 Edition: Leipsic, 1889; P. von Lind's Karri's 
 Mystische Weltanschauung: Munich, 1892; Heinze's 
 Observations on the Lectures of 1790-91 on Rational 
 Psychology and on the Lectures on Metaphysics; in 
 the Abhandlungen der Sachsischen Oesellschaft der 
 Wissenscha/ten : Leipzig, 1894. For a full dis- 
 cussion of these see the Introduction to Kant's 
 Dreams of a Spirit Seer, translated by Emanuel 
 Goerwitz ; Swan Sonnenschein & Co. : London, 
 1900. 
 
 But the ' contemplation of the soul itself ' was 
 to come to Swedenborg in quite another way, 
 and his transition from the attitude of the 
 rigidly mechanical physicist and the speculative 
 philosopher to that of the illumined seer and 
 the exponent of a philosophy no longer human 
 only, but angelic constitutes an experience 
 unique in the annals of human thought. It 
 
 may be considered absurd because of that affinity. As to the 
 offensive comparison, I declare we must either suppose greater 
 intelligence and truth at the basis of Swedenborg's writings than 
 first impressions excite, or that it is a mere accident when he 
 coincides with my system ' ( Works : Leipsic, vol. iii. p. 95, 1838). 
 
 31
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 involves a self-renunciation, a quenching of the 
 loftiest ambitions of the unaided human intellect, 
 which is in itself tragical. The principle in his 
 philosophy of Discrete Degrees, viz. that the 
 order of influx is from within outward, from 
 centre to circumference, from the spiritual to 
 the natural, and not the reverse, was to claim 
 for its illustrious first martyr the author of 
 these sublime researches, who had boldly aspired 
 to open all doors and force an access to the soul 
 itself through the avenues of natural experi- 
 mental knowledge. Not, however, as in Kant, 
 was the quest to go for ever unrewarded and be 
 dogmatically proscribed. Swedenborg claims 
 that in himself a new kind of human, nay, even 
 experimental knowledge was granted to man- 
 kind. Religion and a knowledge of the soul, of 
 immortality and of a spiritual world of objective 
 substantiality were indeed to be enjoyed within 
 the ' bounds of practical reason,' but through 
 'things seen and heard,' by the extraordinary 
 opening of the spiritual senses of a man to 
 the experience of the unseen world of spirit 
 and all its realities, and to a rational under- 
 standing of the laws of that world. 
 
 It was in the year 1744, at the very time when 
 he was diligently pursuing his duties as Assessor 
 
 32
 
 THE TBANSITION 
 
 in the College of Mines, corresponding with 
 the Academies of Science at Paris, St. Peters- 
 burg and Stockholm, and contributing papers 
 on important civic and national questions in the 
 House of Nobles of the Swedish Parliament, 
 that he heard, as he declares, in the midst of 
 his most ambitious researches into the nature 
 of the human body and of the soul itself, the 
 voice of God bidding him to lay down all his 
 ambitious strivings in science, to close his great 
 books the Principia, the Animal Kingdom, and 
 the Soul, and to open one Book alone hence- 
 forth the Holy Scripture and seek there 
 what, by a special, divine illumination, should 
 be revealed to him as the Word of God in 
 its internal and spiritual sense. The voice was 
 reverently heard and obeyed. With awful 
 interior struggles of soul, in which worldly and 
 intellectual ambition fought with the impulse 
 to this higher calling, nights and days passed 
 in agony until at length, on an Easter Sunday 
 in April 1744, he goes to the Holy Supper and 
 hears the hymn, 'Jesus is my best of friends,' 
 and on returning it seems to him ' as if the 
 buds had opened and were green.' In the 
 restless night that followed there came a feeling 
 of holiest peace, 'as if he were in heaven ; 
 D 33
 
 and lie can only cry out " Holy, holy, holy, 
 Lord God of Hosts ! Praise and honour and 
 glory be to the Highest ! " Thenceforward he 
 said, ' I accepted the following creed : God's 
 will be done ! I am Thine and not mine. God 
 give His grace for this work, for it is not 
 mine ' ! (Doc. vol. ii. and pp. 164, 172). 
 
 Then comes the vaster journey, the greater 
 exploration in which, at the call of his Maker, 
 this spiritual Columbus explores the living 
 spheres of the other world, beholds the structure, 
 the laws, the life of heaven, the vast relation 
 of correspondence existing between the spiritual 
 and natural worlds, and the intimate and 
 momentous relation between our present life 
 and the future life for which it is shaping us, 
 for good or for bad, in the world to come. 
 
 The change in Swedenborg's study from the 
 science of nature to that of the spiritual world 
 and of divine revelation is not without its 
 parallels in the case of his great contemporaries 
 Leibnitz and Newton, both of whom in their 
 later period devoted themselves to theology 
 and to the explanation of Scriptural prophecies. 
 The remarkable feature of Swedenborg's case 
 was that, while his spiritual quest involved the 
 abnegation of all pride of invention or of 
 
 34
 
 THE TRANSITION 
 
 creation, so that he ' was not permitted to be 
 taught even by any angel, but by the Lord alone 
 while reading the Word,' still, the substructure 
 of earthly science and philosophy by which he 
 had climbed thus far, instead of being set aside 
 as worthless, was found to be in its general form 
 the exact material setting of the interior spiritual 
 principles now to be revealed from above. That 
 which was submissively renounced is thus re- 
 stored tenfold, and in a glorified reality. The 
 splendid system of psychology and physiology, 
 and of the elementary world, is now found to 
 be part of a stupendous series of sciences 
 mutually corresponding and dependent, reaching 
 even to the now revealed true knowledge of 
 the soul, of the spiritual world, of heaven and 
 the divine nature itself. It is the apotheosis 
 of the human philosophy which had yielded 
 its self-life upon the cross of the world's con- 
 tempt. It was the beatification of the science 
 which had sought to be the handmaid of the 
 Lord, and which had uttered, in the final despair 
 of human searching for the real knowledge, ' be 
 it unto me according to Thy Word ! ' 
 
 There are features of this self-renunciation 
 of Swedenborg in the transition from his 
 philosophical to his theological labours that 
 
 35
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 have been but little appreciated by those who 
 have formed a hasty estimate of his personality 
 and his work. Of these the following may be 
 here mentioned. 
 
 a. THE CHANGE OF LITERARY STYLE 
 
 The classic elegance of his Latin style, which 
 has elicited in his philosophical works the ad- 
 miration of critics, and which in the mystic 
 prose poem, De Cultu et Amwe Dei, de Ortu 
 Primogeniti, et de Paradiso, 1 a work written just 
 at the transition period, reminds one of Dante 
 in its grave simplicity and beauty of diction, 
 now gives place to a mode of statement 
 absolutely without ornament, following closely 
 the English construction, as if with a view to 
 that English reading public which, according 
 to his own prophecy, was to be the central 
 vehicle of the distribution of his teachings to 
 the world. 
 
 Thus, by way of comparison in style, Dante 
 begins his great poem, the Divina Comedia, with 
 these words : 
 
 1 Londini : apud Kegan Paul, Trench et soc. (MDCCCLXX1II.) 
 36
 
 THE TRANSITION 
 
 Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita 
 Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura 
 Che la diritta via era smarrita. 
 
 In the midst of the journey of this life 
 I found myself in a dark forest 
 Where the straight way was lost. 
 
 Swedenborg begins thus his poem entitled, 
 Tfie Worship and Love of God : the Birth of our 
 Earth and of Paradise : 
 
 Cum solus quondam in Luco urbano cogitationum 
 turbas discutiendi gratio obambularem ac viderem 
 viduari foliis arbores : 
 
 Walking once alone in a pleasant grove and observ- 
 ing that the trees were shedding their foliage ... I 
 reflected ... on the vicissitudes of things. 
 
 Compare this with the bald simplicity and 
 the English phrasing of the following, from 
 the theological work De Ccelo et ^Inferno: 
 
 De Luce in Coelo 
 
 Lux Coeli non est naturalis sicut mundi, sed est 
 spiritualis ; est enim a Domino ut sole et sol est 
 Divinus Amor. Quod procedit a Domino ut Sole 
 in Coelis vocatur Divinum Verum est tamen in 
 essentia sua Divinum Bonum unitum Divino Vero : 
 inde Angelis Lux et Calor ; Ex Divino Vero eat 
 angelis Lux : et ex Divino Bono est illis Calor. 
 
 37
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 b. THE SEER 
 
 For nineteen years since the beginning of 
 those writings which claim to have been pro- 
 duced under supernatural illumination, the 
 works appear anonymously, and for a long 
 time their authorship is an entire secret. In 
 1768 the work on Gonjicgicd Love bears the title 
 Ab Emanele Swedenborgio, Sueco ; and on the 
 title-page of the great final summary Vera 
 Christiana Religio, continent Universam Thcolo- 
 giam Novce Ecclesice, published in 1771, appears 
 the author's name with the words added : Domini 
 Jesu Christi Servo, revealing the character in 
 which he would henceforth be known in rela- 
 tion to these writings, namely, as a messenger 
 of divine truths rather than as a leader in 
 speculation. Still another remarkable phase of 
 this laying down of a prior life of earthly 
 learning, and the taking up of a life and 
 learning given from above, was the entire ab- 
 sence therein of either the ascetic self-morti- 
 fication or of the ecstatic trance which we 
 associate in our minds with the oriental and 
 mediaeval ' illuminati.' Nothing of this kind 
 existed in Swedenborg's case. The life resumed 
 was not only a healthy and vigorous one, with 
 
 38
 
 THE TRANSITION 
 
 nothing suggestive of the visionary or fanatic, 
 but in this stage of his literary activity appear 
 the same logical order and clearness of reason- 
 ing, the same vastness and comprehensiveness 
 of method, the same firm grasp of particulars 
 under universal unities, which elicit our wonder 
 in the philosophical works. 
 
 The splendid intellectual instrument polished 
 for use by the discipline of the earlier period 
 now seemed to have found its true and worthy 
 field of application. In a subject-matter wholly 
 new, the art and the skill are the same as before. 
 The change of plane from material to spiritual 
 realities produces no flaw, no yielding in the 
 logic. The flippant assumption of lunacy and 
 madness at this period of his writing is con- 
 fronted with the majestic presence of a system 
 of theology and of spiritual philosophy so 
 perfect in its rational consistency, not only 
 with itself, but with the other realms of know- 
 ledge, that for this very cause some have been 
 led to call it ' too logical a system to be re- 
 vealed.' Utterly as the human philosopher 
 had subjected his rational faculties to the em- 
 ployment of the divine Master in communi- 
 cating to men through his understanding 
 the '"Wisdom of Angels,' it was not by the 
 
 39
 
 SWEDENBOKGl 
 
 sacrifice of reason but by its illumination and 
 inspiration from the Author of reason itself 
 that this new light was given. The man 
 who was ' daily in intercourse with angels,' 
 who was writing the 'Heavenly Secrets' of 
 the Holy Scripture, and Claimed to be wit- 
 nessing the awful scenes of a ' Last Judgment ' 
 in the World of Spirits preparatory to the 
 introduction of a new age of the world, so far 
 from being a dazed and dreamy mystic or a 
 recluse from society, as so many have ignorantly 
 assumed, was in the very years of such em- 
 ployment the warm personal and political friend 
 of the then Prime Minister of Sweden, Count 
 Andrew von Hopken, and was taking a very 
 active part in the deliberations of the Swedish 
 Diet. 
 
 Thus in the year 1760, in which he writes 
 his treatise on the ' Last Judgment,' and { On 
 the Spiritual World,' the year in which it 
 became first publicly known that he was the 
 author of Arcana Ccelestia, he presents to the 
 Diet the following papers : { Memorial in favour 
 of a return to the Pure Metallic Currency'; 
 ' Additional Considerations with respect to the 
 Course of Exchange ' ; ' Memorial to the King 
 against the Exportation of Copper ' ; ' Memorial 
 
 40
 
 THE TRANSITION 
 
 declining to become a member of the Private 
 Commission on Exchange.' 
 
 In 1761, the year of Swedenborg's memor- 
 able announcement of the ' Queen's Secret,' 
 and of the discovery of the ' lost receipt ' for 
 Mme. de Marteville events which so aroused 
 the wonder of Kant when verified by him be- 
 yond the possibility of doubt (see Kant's letter 
 to Fraulein von Knobloch), Swedenborg pre- 
 sents to the Diet a ' Memorial on the Maintenance 
 of the Country and the Preservation of its 
 Freedom,' and conducts a political contest with 
 Councillor Nordencrantz in defence of the 
 Swedish Government. 1 
 
 Such is the normal character of a man living 
 in two worlds and performing conscientiously 
 his functions in both. 
 
 His self-renunciation was not that of the 
 monk or quietist : it was simply that of a man 
 whose understanding, trained in all the learning 
 
 1 Count Hb'pken, the Prime Minister of Sweden, who had 
 known Swedenborg intimately during the long period of the 
 twenty-seven years of his professed continuous experience of 
 open intercourse with the spiritual world, testifies that in the 
 year 1761, which was in the midst of Swedenborg's other-world 
 experiences, the ablest papers submitted to the Diet of Sweden 
 on matters of national finance were those of Swedenborg, sitting 
 as a member of the House of Nobles. 
 
 41
 
 SWEDENBORd 
 
 of earth, was willing to be employed in con- 
 veying a supernatural knowledge rather than in 
 presenting speculations of his own on things 
 that transcend the human senses. The crucial 
 test of the kind of intellectual self-renunciation 
 which Swedenborg attained -is one which few 
 of his contemporaries in the ranks of speculative 
 philosophy, and few of those who would fain be 
 his followers and admirers on the natural plane, 
 have been able to sustain. Kant was sufficiently 
 attracted by his claim of a specially illumined 
 reason to feel that he must remain either to 
 worship or to scoff. He chose the latter ; but in 
 doing so he had to divest the object of his mirth 
 of the garments of the seer and clothe him in 
 the mask of the harlequin a mask which the 
 sober reason of subsequent time has been less 
 and less willing to accept. In representing 
 Swedenborg as the arch medium of the spiritists 
 and writing under his name a treatise of 
 Spiritism, 1 Kant chooses to fight a man of straw, 
 rather than to assail principles of truth which, 
 as he is driven elsewhere to acknowledge, ' bear 
 a striking resemblance to his own.' The true 
 relation of Swedenborg to the Spiritism whether 
 of Kant or of the present time can best be seen 
 
 1 Kant's Traume eines Geittersehers. Reclam. Leipsic. 
 42
 
 THE TRANSITION 
 
 by the following statements from his own 
 writings. 
 
 C. SWEDENBORQ NOT A MEDIUM 
 
 ' It is believed by many that they may be 
 taught by the Lord by spirits speaking with 
 them ; but they do not know that this is fraught 
 with danger to their souls. As soon as spirits 
 begin to speak with man, they come out of 
 their spiritual state into the natural state of 
 man, they join themselves with the thoughts 
 of his affection, and from these they speak with 
 him. The Pythonists of old were such, and 
 also the Magi in Egypt and Babylon. Thus the 
 worship of God was turned into the worship 
 of demons, and the church perished. Therefore 
 such intercourse was forbidden the children 
 of Israel under penalty of death ' (Apocalypse 
 Explained, 1182). 
 
 While Swedenborg claims to have had intro- 
 mission into the spiritual world an experience 
 not to be confounded with the admission of 
 spirits from that world into this yet he disclaims 
 entirely any office of mediumship whereby 
 spirits spoke or acted through him, in communi- 
 cating truth from the other world. 
 
 ' I have had discourse with spirits and angels 
 43
 
 SWEDENBORa 
 
 now for several years, and no spirit has dared, 
 nor has any angel desired, to tell me anything, 
 much less to instruct me in regard to anything 
 of the "Word, or of doctrine from the "Word; 
 but the Lord alone has taught me' (Divine 
 Providence, 135). 
 
 'From the first day I have never received 
 anything of the doctrines from any angel, but 
 from the Lord alone while I was reading the 
 Word' (True Christian Religion, 779). 
 
 ' At this day, revelation is only made by 
 means of the Word' (Arcana Ccelestia, 10355). 
 
 Emerson, in a later day, enchanted the newly 
 awakened Puritan mind with beautiful glimpses 
 of spiritual verities and universal ideas directly 
 traceable to the influence of Swedenborg whom 
 as a natural philosopher he cannot too highly 
 extol; but the delights of intellectual creation 
 were too dear to Emerson to allow him to 
 accept the dictates of a direct revelation, and 
 his only resource is to treat lightly the spiritual 
 receptivity in another mind of which his own 
 nature was incapable. ' Sandy deserts ' he calls 
 now those honest and prosaic narrations and 
 definitions of spiritual phenomena which the 
 seer, for whom rhetoric has lost all value, deals 
 out with tiresome repetition ; forgetting that he 
 
 44
 
 THE TRANSITION 
 
 has unconsciously absorbed from this homely 
 and despised source the spiritual content of his 
 own ideality and ethics. It is this, clothed with 
 his own oracular brilliancy, that Emerson has 
 handed down as the chief heritage of what is 
 known as the New England Transcendentalism. 
 Its message, above all, is that of man's im- 
 mediate environment in a world whose sub- 
 stance is superior to matter, but related to it 
 as a man's soul to his body. To take from 
 Emerson Swedenborg's doctrine of Correspon- 
 dence would leave much of his writing dull and 
 dark. 1 
 
 It was during the years of transition (1743- 
 45) that Swedenborg wrote two works which 
 reveal unmistakably the trend his mind was 
 following, as anticipating a goal ahead whose 
 real significance he could not yet comprehend. 
 One of these is the Adversaria, a book of notes 
 upon the Old Testament for his own use, in 
 compiling which, and by a study of the original 
 texts, he acquired a minute knowledge of the 
 letter of the Scriptures, with some glimpses of 
 
 1 See Article, ' Swedenborg,' by Francis Hedge, Christian Ex- 
 aminer, November 1833 ; Article in New Jerusalem Magazine, 
 Boston, November 1893 ; Emerson's ' Essay on Poetry and Im- 
 agination ' in Letters and Social Aims. 
 
 45
 
 SWEDENBOBG 
 
 an historical-allegorical sense to form a kind of 
 basis of his later strictly spiritual interpretation. 
 The other transitional work was The Worship 
 and Love of God, treating of the Birth of the 
 Earth, Paradise and the Abode of Living 
 Creatures ; also of the Nativity, Infancy and 
 Love of the First-begotten, or Adam (De 
 Cultu d Amoi^e Dei, etc.). The style of the work 
 is that of a prose poem. It might be called 
 a drama of Creation, in which figure the 
 various orders of the intelligences and loves of 
 the human soul moving upon a background of 
 the world's elemental activity in evolving a 
 cosmos. As a theory of evolution, in its splendid 
 audacity it puts the more modern theories 
 which pass by that name quite into insignifi- 
 cance. The language is graceful and elegant, 
 suggesting reminiscences of the author's early 
 studies of the Metamorphoses of Ovid. There 
 is 110 claim in it of supernatural knowledge, 
 the purpose being avowedly to study the 
 Biblical narrative of Creation in the light of 
 a scientific cosmogony and psychology and 
 purely ' according to the thread of reason.' l 
 
 1 For a full account of this remarkable work and an attempt 
 at its interpretation see the Essay, ' A Drama of Creation ' in 
 The Neio Metaphysics,. by Frank Sewall. London: J.. Spiers. 
 1887. 
 
 4 6
 
 THE TRANSITION 
 
 A description of the formation of our planet 
 out of the sun in the bursting forth of worlds 
 out of its womb and their projection into the 
 whirling spheres, is followed by that of its finding 
 its true orbit and the fixing of temperatures 
 and of seasons and the successive production 
 of vegetable and animal life, and, at last, of 
 the human creature; each of these orders 
 being truly evolved from the one below, but 
 immediately and successively, the transition 
 being not from the highest vegetable to the 
 lowest animal, but from the highest vegetable 
 to the highest animal ; so that man is born 
 from the fruit of the tree in which all the finest 
 essences of nature are centred and combined 
 and which grows in the midst of the earthly 
 Paradise. Nowhere else does the author speak 
 of this_theory of the origin of man. It seems 
 as if it were the poetic copestone to the 
 system of combined physics and metaphysics 
 which had occupied his mind for so many years, 
 but one which was, by an abrupt lifting of the 
 curtain, to give place to a vision no longer of 
 the phenomenal and theoretical but the real, 
 the immortal and the eternal the true know- 
 ledge of the spirit and of the spiritual world. 
 
 47
 
 SWEDENBOEG 
 
 d. THE SPIRITUAL DIARY 
 
 In this Spiritual Diary, an immense body of 
 memoranda written during the years 1747-52, 
 Swedenborg describes with prosaic exactness 
 the new world opened to his vision, the places 
 visited, the characters met, the conversations 
 held in the spiritual world. 
 
 The most startling and wonderful scenes are 
 here related, in the matter-of-fact manner of 
 e very-day occurrences. The entries in this 
 purely private record, published from the Latin 
 MSS. in 1844, number over 5,500, and they 
 constitute, with their careful analysis of 
 characters and situations, a storehouse of 
 spiritual data of an entirely unique value. 
 
 The following extract will serve as a sample 
 of these entries, and will at the same time 
 throw light upon the problems of modern 
 hypnotism, spiritism, telepathy, and like ex- 
 periences. 
 
 Self-Delusion of Spirits. ' It has been shown 
 to me many times that spirits who spoke with 
 me imagined that they were the men I was 
 thinking of; nor did other spirits know other- 
 wise. For instance, yesterday and to-day, one 
 
 48
 
 THE TRANSITION 
 
 of them was so much like a person known to 
 me in life, in everything (so far as I knew) 
 pertaining to him, that nothing could be more 
 like. Wherefore, let those who speak with 
 spirits beware when spirits say that they are 
 persons who are known to them, and that they 
 are the dead. 
 
 'For there are classes of spirits of a similar 
 nature. When accordant things are called 
 forth in the memory of a man and are thus 
 represented to them, they suppose that they 
 are the identical person about whom he is 
 thinking : then, all the things representing the 
 person thought of are called forth from the 
 memory, even the words, speech, tones of voice, 
 gestures, and many other things ' (Aug. 18, 
 1748). 
 
 Concerning the Lord's Prayw. 'When the 
 Lord's Prayer, which comprehends all celestial 
 and spiritual things, is read, there may be 
 infused into each particular so many things 
 that heaven itself shall not be capable of com- 
 prehending them, and that, too, according to 
 the capacity and use of every one. The more 
 internally and intimately any one penetrates, 
 the more fully or abundantly the things of 
 heaven are understood ; by those in lower states 
 E 49
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 they are not comprehended but are a kind of 
 arcana to them, some being ineffable. Celestial 
 ideas which all emanate from the Lord, the 
 lower they descend, or the lower the character 
 of the men to whom they come, the more com- 
 plete appears the closing up of the mind, till 
 at length a certain hardness ensues in which 
 there is little or nothing besides the sense of 
 the letter or the ideas conveyed by the words ; 
 whence it was given to know, from the Lord's 
 Prayer, what kind of souls they had been in 
 the life of the body as to the doctrine of their 
 faith, inasmuch as it was granted to them to 
 have their former sense of these things when 
 offering prayer (April 1, 1748). Thus it is that 
 the idea expands upwards or inwards from 
 corporeal things, and indeed to indefinite extent 
 in every degree, or, in other words, through 
 indefinitely multiplied expansions in the in- 
 teriors of the mind, and so in the more interior 
 parts, and in the inmosts.' 
 
 At length with the first volume of the Arcana 
 Ccelestia, written in the full and certain light 
 of the new revelation, Swedenborg begins those 
 remarkable treatises in which he publicly 
 claims to set forth, for the enlightenment of the 
 whole Christian world, the truths of a super- 
 
 50
 
 THE TRANSITION 
 
 natural and divine origin by the divine mercy 
 revealed to him. 
 
 The Arcana itself is a work in Latin in 
 twelve volumes, and consists of an exposition 
 of the internal and spiritual sense of the books 
 of Genesis and Exodus.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE THEOLOGICAL WRITINGS 
 17491772 
 
 INTERSPERSED between the chapters of the 
 Arcana are treatises on various phenomena of 
 the spiritual world and statements of 'heavenly 
 doctrine.' The publication of this stupendous 
 work, begun in London in 1749, covered a 
 period of seven years. The handsome quarto 
 volumes, as they appeared anonymously from 
 time to time, were mainly distributed in gifts to 
 the bishops and to the leading universities of 
 England and the Continent. Whatever funds 
 accrued from their sale were devoted to the 
 British Society for the Propagation of the 
 Gospel. After this initial work appear in suc- 
 cession at short intervals, for a period of fifteen 
 years, the following treatises : 
 
 In 1768 : Heaven and Hell ; also the Inter- 
 mediate World, or World of Spirits. A Relation 
 of Things Heard and Seen. 
 
 The Last Judgment and the Destruction of 
 52
 
 THE THEOLOGICAL WRITINGS 
 
 Babylon: showing that all the Predictions in 
 the Revelation are at this day fulfilled : being 
 a Revelation of Things Heard and Seen. 
 
 On The White Horse mentioned in the Revela- 
 tion, ch. xix., with particulars respecting the 
 Word and its Spiritual Sense ; extracted from 
 the Arcana Ccelestia. 
 
 On The Earths in our Solar System and the 
 Earths in the Starry Heavens, with an account 
 of their Inhabitants and also of the Spirits and 
 Angels there. 
 
 On The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly 
 Doctrines according to what has been heard 
 from Heaven ; to which is prefixed information 
 regarding the New Heaven and the New 
 Earth. 
 
 In 1763 appear Angelic Wisdom (Sapientia 
 Angelica*), concerning the Divine Love and 
 Wisdom, and the Four Leading Doctrines of the 
 New Church signified by the New Jerusalem in the 
 Revelation', being those respecting the Lord, 
 the Sacred Scripture, Faith and Life. 
 
 In 1764: Angelic Wisdom concerning the Divine 
 Providence. 
 
 In 1766: The Apocalypse Revealed, in which 
 are disclosed the Arcana therein foretold. 
 
 In 1768 : Conjugial Love and its Chaste De- 
 53
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 lights ; also Adulterous Love and its Insane 
 Pleasures. 
 
 In 1769 : A Brief Exposition of the Doctrine of 
 the New Church signified by the New Jerusalem in 
 the Revelation. Also tlie Intercourse between the 
 Soul and the Body. 
 
 Finally in 1771 appears the great summary 
 of his system, The True Christian Religion; con- 
 taining the Universal Theology of the New Church, 
 foretold in Daniel vii. 13, 14, and in the Apoca- 
 lypse xxi. 1, 2. In this work we have a com- 
 plete body of theology systematically presented, 
 proceeding from a profound discussion of 
 Absolute Being to the doctrine of the Lord the 
 Redeemer, the Holy Spirit and the Divine 
 Trinity ; the Sacred Scripture ; the Catechism, 
 or Decalogue, explained as to its External and 
 Internal Sense ; Faith, Charity, Free Deter- 
 mination ; Repentance, Reformation and Re- 
 generation ; Imputation, Baptism, the Holy 
 Supper ; the Consummation of the Age, the 
 Coming of the Lord and the New Heaven and 
 the New Church. 
 
 The chapters of this work, like those of the 
 Arcana, are interspersed with Memorabilia, or 
 accounts of the author's personal observations 
 and conversations in the spiritual world, em- 
 
 54
 
 THE THEOLOGICAL WRITINGS 
 
 bracing visions in the heavens and in the hells, 
 remarkable pictures of a Dantesque simplicity 
 and strength without the least indication of 
 poetic fancy or rhetorical effort. They are 
 relations of ' things heard and seen ' by a 
 traveller returned from a hitherto unknown 
 land. Bizarre and uncouth as many of the 
 scenes depicted are, being all of them phenomena 
 appearing according to the universal law of 
 spontaneous symbolic representation which pre- 
 vails in that world, they have their nearest 
 parallels in the prophetic visions contained in 
 the Holy Scriptures, and when carefully analysed 
 are found to be only the rational embodiments, 
 or Darstdlung, of spiritual states and relations 
 actually existing. In these narratives figure 
 spirits who had been inhabitants of other planets. 
 Scenes are portrayed as occurring in the Last 
 Judgment, the great Aufkldrung in the world 
 of spirits where were taking place those moral 
 changes from an old to a new age, which, from 
 the beginning of the French Revolution until 
 now, have been taking form on earth in the 
 transformation of all things political, economical 
 and religious. 
 
 All these narrations will bear the closest 
 rational scrutiny as to their credibility, provided 
 
 55
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 the single premise be granted that the other 
 world exists. So consistent, so realistic indeed 
 are they that the reader is compelled to admit that 
 these very experiences, instead of being extra- 
 ordinary and fanciful, are the things most 
 natural and likely to occur provided there be a 
 sphere of spiritual causes behind the shifting 
 scenes of the drama of our life here. 
 
 A Memorable Relation. ' Awaking one morning 
 from sleep, I saw two angels descending from 
 heaven, one from the southern quarter and the 
 other from the eastern, each in his chariot 
 drawn by white horses. The chariot of the 
 angel from the southern quarter shone like 
 silver, and that of the angel of the eastern 
 quarter like gold, and the reins which they 
 held in their hands glowed with a flaming light 
 like the dawn of day. These two angels appeared 
 thus to me when at a distance, but when they 
 came near they did not appear in chariots, but 
 in their own angelic human form. The one 
 from the eastern quarter of heaven was clad 
 in bright purple raiment, and the one from the 
 southern quarter in raiment of a violet blue. 
 As soon as they reached the inferior regions 
 below the heavens they ran to meet each other, 
 ts if they strove which should be first, and 
 
 56
 
 THE THEOLOGICAL WRITINGS 
 
 mutually embraced and kissed each other. I 
 was informed that these two angels, during 
 their abode on earth, had been conjoined in the 
 bond of an interior friendship, but that now one 
 was in the eastern heaven and the other in the 
 southern : in the eastern heaven are those who 
 are in love from the Lord, and in the southern 
 heaven those who are in wisdom from the Lord. 
 "When they had conversed together some time 
 about the magnificent objects and scenery in 
 their respective heavens, they entered upon the 
 discussion of this question: whether heaven, in 
 its essence, be love or wisdom. In this they 
 agreed that the one derived its origin from the 
 other ; but the debate was which was the primi- 
 tive and which the derivative. The angel from 
 the southern heaven then asked the other, 
 " What is love ? " to which he replied, " Love 
 originating from the Lord as a sun is the vital 
 heat of angels and men, consequently the ease 
 of their life ; and the derivations of love are 
 called affections, and by them are produced 
 perceptions, and thus thoughts, whence it 
 follows that wisdom in its origin is love, con- 
 sequently that thought, in its origin, is the 
 affection of that love ; and it is evident, from 
 the derivations examined in their order, that 
 
 57
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 thought is only the form of affection. The 
 reason why this is not known is, because 
 thoughts are in light and affections in heat, 
 so that the mind reflects upon its thoughts, 
 but not on its affections. That thought is 
 only the form of the affection of some par- 
 ticular love may also be illustrated by the case 
 of speech, which is only the form of sound; 
 which is a just illustration, because sound 
 corresponds with affection, and speech with 
 thought; therefore affection forms the sound 
 or tone of the voice, and thought the speech 
 or words of a discourse. This may be further 
 elucidated by this consideration, that if you 
 take away sound from speech, nothing of 
 speech remains ; and in like manner if you 
 take away affection from thought, nothing of 
 thought remains. Hence, then, it is plain that 
 love is the all of wisdom ; consequently the 
 essence of the heavens is love and their exist- 
 ence is wisdom; or, what is the same thing, 
 the heavens have their being from the divine 
 love and exist from the divine love by the 
 divine wisdom ; therefore, as was said above, 
 the one derives its origin from the other. ' 
 .... The angels conversed on these subjects 
 spiritually, and spiritual discourse contains and 
 
 58
 
 THE THEOLOGICAL WRITINGS 
 
 infolds in it thousands of things which natural 
 language cannot express, and, what is won- 
 derful, such as do not so much as fall within 
 the ideas of natural thought. After conversing 
 together for some time on these and similar 
 subjects the angels departed, and, as they re- 
 tired to their respective heavens, their heads 
 appeared encompassed with stars, and when 
 they were removed to a distance from me, they 
 again appeared in chariots as before.' 
 
 CLASSIFICATION OF THE THEOLOGICAL WORKS 
 
 The treatises on Theology, like those on 
 Philosophy, may be classified in three divisions : 
 the Analytic, the Synthetic and the Doctrinal. 
 
 The first, the Analytic, embraces the record 
 of things heard and seen in the spiritual world, 
 and the particulars of truth revealed in the 
 internal sense of the Scriptures. Here belong 
 the Arcana, The 'Apocalypse Revealed, Heaven arid 
 Hell, The Last Judgment, The Earths in the 
 Universe, and The Memorabilia interspersed 
 through all the works. 
 
 The Synthetic class embraces those which con- 
 tain the laws governing all spiritual phenomena 
 and Divine operations, and the relation of matter 
 to spirit, or of the two worlds. These are the 
 
 59
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 Angdic Wisdom concerning the Divine Love and 
 Wisdom, and Concerning the Divine Providence, 
 and the work on Influx. 
 
 The Doctrinal class, in which, from all these 
 particulars and summaries, a complete system 
 of theology and ethics is evolved, forming the 
 final and perfected form of Christianity, that 
 of a New Universal Church. Here are to be 
 named The True Christian Religion, The Four 
 Leading Doctrines, and The New Jerusalem and 
 its Heavenly Doctrines. 
 
 For a discussion of the loftiest and most 
 sacred relation of human life, that upon which 
 the whole social economy must rest or go 
 asunder the marriage relation the reader will 
 resort to the work on Conjugial Love and its 
 Chaste Delights, in which the complementary 
 relation of the sexes is shown to be mental 
 as well as physical, and hence having a 
 significance beyond the earthly life. 
 
 The twofold nature of the human mind in 
 will and intellect, patterned as ' the image of 
 God,' after the union of love and wisdom in 
 the divine nature, finds its ultimate expression 
 in both the mental and physical differences of 
 the two sexes. Their union in marriage con- 
 stitutes the complete man ; and from its origin 
 
 60
 
 in the Divine Itself the marriage union is essen- 
 tially chaste and holy. Swedenborg calls it 
 4 the precious jewel of human life and the re- 
 pository of the Christian religion.' Every 
 violation and perversion of this relation of 
 the sexes he designates as evil, and as such 
 forbidden in the Decalogue. Especially and 
 definitely does he make this assertion in the 
 work entitled ' The Doctrine of Life for the 
 New Jerusalem' in treating of the Command- 
 ment regarding adultery (Nos. 74-9) ; while in 
 an Appendix to Conjugial Love on Scortatory 
 Love and its Iiwaiie Pleasures, the reverse of the 
 heavenly order is shown, together with the pro- 
 visions by which, in the disordered moral condi- 
 tions of society, sexual evils may be mitigated 
 and some capacity for true marriage preserved. 
 
 Pervading all the writings of this period 
 is a complete system of Ethics based upon the 
 law of Use, or of Mutual Service, which law 
 pervades the universe throughout from its very 
 constitution and exhibits that ladder by which 
 all created things are conjoined to God, their 
 Creator. Social economics are treated in the 
 little work on Charity. This is defined, not as 
 meaning mere benevolence or alms-giving, but 
 as the faithful pursuance by every man of 
 
 61
 
 SWEDENBOBG 
 
 the duties of his own office in society, together 
 with the shunning of all evils as sins against 
 God. In this doctrine man is represented as 
 a 'form of charity,' or as that moral and free 
 instrument through which the universal love 
 of God the Creator can be dispensed among 
 men in their doing of useful service and in their 
 happiness realized in this doing. Neither the 
 good nor the happiness is man's own ; but it 
 flows down from God into those channels of 
 useful, neighbourly living which a truly organized 
 society provides ; and man's entire share in the 
 doing and the blessing consists in his removing 
 from his motives and his acts those evils of 
 self-love which are opposed to the inflow of the 
 divine Altruism. The little work on Charity 
 discusses the relation of the individual to the 
 common good, and what conduct constitutes 
 charity in the Ruler, the Magistrate, the Priest, 
 the Soldier, the Servant and other offices. On 
 its largest scale Swedeuborg's system of social 
 order is displayed in his doctrine of the Grand 
 Man (Maximus Homo), in which Society as a 
 whole or the Kingdom of God is represented 
 as forming an organic unit patterned after the 
 human form and so in the image of God. Thus 
 it reflects the perfections of the Creator who is 
 
 62
 
 THE THEOLOGICAL WRITINGS 
 
 essential love, on the plane of the infinite 
 relations and uses of men in their several 
 capacities for loving and serving the neighbour. 
 The work on The Earths in the Univerxe brings in an 
 important phase of this doctrine, showing how the 
 inhabitants of the several planets \)y their distinct 
 moral qualities, go to make up the completeness 
 in the spiritual world of the great Social Man. 
 
 THE NEW AGE 
 
 The distinctive character of the New Age is 
 the return to a rational unity in man's concep- 
 tion of God, of the Universe and of Life ; in the 
 conception of God as the unity of the three 
 essentials of personality in the Divine Humanity 
 of Jesus Christ glorified, the one Lord God of 
 Heaven and Earth ; in the conception of the 
 unity of the Universe through the influx of 
 One life in the three degrees God, Spirit, and 
 Nature which are one, not by confusion, but by 
 correspondence ; and in the conception of the 
 unity of Life by the restored unity of faith in God 
 with charity to the neighbour. Swedenborg, on 
 being asked to explain his theology, replied, 
 ' There are two principles of it that God is 
 One, and that there is a conjunction of Charity 
 and Faith.' 
 
 63
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 PHILOSOPHY AND THE SAPIENTIA ANGELICA 
 
 OF the twofold series of Swedenborg's writings, 
 the Scientific and the Theological, we have as 
 a unique result a complete Weltanschauung, or 
 World-system, which embraces in harmonious 
 and strictly logical accord the two worlds of 
 human experience, the natural and the spiritual. 
 Probably no such a complete survey of the 
 whole realm of Being in a scientific form has 
 ever been presented to rational contemplation. 
 Not to mention the open conflict between science 
 and revelation which from time immemorial has 
 been looked at as belonging necessarily to the 
 existing order of things, the attempts towards 
 a harmony hitherto essayed have reduced them- 
 selves without exception either into the mystic's 
 acceptance of the transcendental knowledge, 
 together with his abandonment of natural 
 learning as illusory and worthless ; or into the 
 denial of any real knowledge beyond the natural, 
 and the consequent regarding of ideas of God 
 
 64
 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 of the soul, its freedom and immortality as pious 
 fictions of the practical reason, the necessary 
 postulates of man's ethical nature, but merely 
 human in their origin, and subject to all the 
 limitations of the human mind. For the first 
 time appears a man who claims to have beheld 
 with twofold vision the twofold universe, and 
 whose understanding, in its unshaken integrity 
 and steady grasp, has taken in the laws and 
 relations of both spheres, and, ignoring and 
 despising neither, has combined the laws and 
 phenomena of the two worlds in a perfect 
 system. 
 
 This is Swedenborg's unique position in the 
 history of human thought. He has presented 
 to the world a system of Universal Philosophy 
 based in its spiritual as well as its natural 
 contents on analytic and experimental know- 
 ledge. ' Being asked,' says Swedenborg, ' how 
 from a philosopher I became a theologian, I 
 answered, "In the same manner that fishers 
 were made disciples and apostles by the Lord " ; 
 and that I also, from early youth, had been a 
 spiritual fisherman! On hearing this, the in- 
 quirer asked what a spiritual fisherman was. 
 I replied that a fisher, in the spiritual sense of 
 the Word, signifies a man who investigates and 
 
 F 65
 
 SWEDENBOEG 
 
 teaches natural truths, and afterwards spiritual 
 truths, in a rational manner : for the latter are 
 founded upon the former ' (Influx, 20). 
 
 It is a positive transcendentalism in that it 
 is a knowledge transcending the senses of the 
 physical body, but real to those organs of the 
 spiritual body which in every man become 
 released into conscious activity at death, and 
 in extraordinary instances enjoy this activity 
 even in this world. The two great fields of 
 research in all their distinctiveness claim each 
 its period of exhaustive development. ' Philo- 
 sophy' is the term which Swedenborg applies 
 to the kind of research employed in the first of 
 these fields. The term is used in the sense of 
 the natural philosophy of his day, as the survey 
 of nature, whether in the physical or psycho- 
 logical fields, as a grand mechanism, subject 
 everywhere to the laws discoverable in geometry, 
 physics and mechanics. Only he adheres to that 
 element as essential which he calls the soul ; and 
 while he confesses that his cosmogony reduces 
 itself to a perfect mechanism so absolute and 
 universal is the sway of physical law in nature 
 still the presence of this supernatural fact 
 must everywhere be conceded. 
 
 ' I have no objection,' he says, ' to my system 
 66
 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 of the world being called mechanism, only let 
 it be an animated mechanism.' This pursuit 
 of the soul throughout the first period is there- 
 fore always within the limits of a time-and-space 
 world. He sought its first essence in the fibre 
 and animal spirit, just as in physics he sought 
 his initial atom in the point and the first finite. 
 The conception of God throughout the philo- 
 sophic period is that of the Infinite as the 
 requisite source of initial motion, the idea of 
 an infinite personality and of a divine humanity 
 being as yet but dimly conceived. 
 
 All this becomes changed in the second 
 period. The philosophy of the first period now 
 gives way to the Sapientia Angelica, which term 
 we must take to mean, not the particular know- 
 ledge of a superior kind which the angels 
 possess and can impart to each other and to 
 men, but the kind of knowledge of which the 
 human soul becomes capable when translated 
 into a world above time and space and where 
 the very elements are spiritual, the sun of that 
 world being itself the first effulgence of the 
 infinite love and wisdom of God, and, conse- 
 quently, the very atmospheres, and the heat 
 and light conveyed in them, being tremulous 
 waves of substantial good and truth. The 
 
 67
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 Sapientia Angelica, hence, is a knowledge of 
 spiritual realities or of those truly vital sub- 
 stances and forces which go to furnish the great 
 mechanism of nature with a soul. It is the 
 actual vision and touch of a world of spiritual 
 substance which the purified human spirit is 
 capable of experiencing after rising out of the 
 world of symbolic material phenomena by 
 putting off the material body with its senses. 
 Rarely, if ever, does Swedenborg employ the 
 term ' philosophy ' in reference to this immediate 
 angelic experience, which he calls ' wisdom.' 
 He uses this term intentionally in distinction 
 from knowledge or intelligence, the first of 
 these being, in his definition, applied to the 
 acquiring of information through the senses 
 and their environment ; the second, to the 
 orderly arrangement of these acquired know- 
 ledges in their respective groups by means of 
 the rational faculty ; the third, the wisdom 
 itself, being the truth acquired now seen and 
 loved truly, in its own nature and worth, as the 
 form of good. Wisdom, therefore, while resting 
 upon knowledge and reason, yet is a distinct 
 kind of immediate perception which the purified 
 spirit enjoys after death in the degree in which, 
 in his own experience, the truth has become the 
 
 68
 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 form of his action from his very love of it as 
 the form of good. It is not to be identified with 
 the Gnostic's or the theosophist's immediate 
 vision of the truth as a state above and apart from 
 voluntary and intellectual activity. In wisdom 
 the propriiim, or the personality of the angel, is 
 realized in its most intense form. If it were not 
 so this angelic contemplation of reality would 
 fail of its purpose in the divine scheme of the 
 round of uses. The angelic contemplation of 
 reality comes from the shining of a real heavenly 
 light in the mind. 
 
 Can there, now, be any comprehensive philo- 
 sophy of Swedenborg, strictly speaking? We 
 answer Yes, for the two reasons that there are 
 certain fundamental constructive laws that 
 characterize alike both systems, the natural and 
 the spiritual, and that accordingly the two worlds 
 and their respective cosmogonies are brought 
 visibly into their relation of a perfect correspon- 
 dence. The harmony of the two systems can 
 only be attributed to their being constructed 
 according to a common organon, or method. 
 
 SWEDENBORG'S NOVUM OROAKUM 
 
 This truly new organum, which constitutes 
 Swedenborg's great contribution to philosophy, 
 
 69
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 is his doctrine of Influx, of Discrete Degrees 
 and their Correspondence. 
 
 The world is vibration, action, and reaction. 
 The Universe is the theatre of altruistic love. 
 Force originates in will, and the primal will 
 is the Divine Love. Life is love emanating by 
 wisdom into created spheres, and there operating 
 in uses. These spheres are not a continuous 
 plane, but are in discrete degrees, and related 
 by correspondence. 
 
 These discrete degrees are, in their eternal 
 divine potential nature, Love, Wisdom and Use ; 
 in their cosmological functions, End, Cause and 
 Effect ; in theology, God, Spirit and the Natural 
 World ; in revelation they are given the names 
 of a holy Trinity Father, Son and Holy Spirit. 
 In ontological terms they become Substance, 
 Form and Thing ; in philosophy, the Real, the 
 Ideal and the Actual ; in psychology, the Will, 
 the Intellect and Action; in speech, Affection, 
 Thought and Utterance ; in the building of 
 language, the Vowel, the Consonant and the 
 Word ; the Verb, the Subject and the Predicate. 
 In all these trines, which cover with sufficient 
 completeness the whole realm of being and 
 activity, there will be found the invariable 
 presence of these three essentials, which are 
 
 70
 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 necessary to the being of anything that exists 
 or can be conceived of as existing ; namely, the 
 why, or the purpose for which it exists, which 
 Swedenborg calls the End ; the how, or the 
 manner and law by which it exists, called by 
 Swedenborg Cause (meaning the instrumental 
 cause or, causa efficiens, in distinction from the 
 end as the causa finalis), and finally the resultant 
 thing, the what, or that which Swedenborg calls 
 the Effect. These three are discrete because 
 they are, by the very nature of things, intrans- 
 mutable. One may reside within and actuate, 
 the other, but without ever becoming that other. 
 Will may prompt the intellect, and put on a 
 form or determination in the intellect, and both 
 these may become actual in a word or deed of 
 the body. But will is not intellect, nor is 
 intellect action. They are for ever discrete in 
 their nature, however one may operate through 
 another, and so all become embodied in the 
 ultimate what, or thing. These fundamental 
 distinctions, existing eternally in the very order 
 of the world when strictly observed, forbid 
 the confusion of substance between spirit and 
 matter and between God and nature, and 
 so render possible a conception of the imman- 
 ence of God in nature which is free from
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 Pantheism, or the confusion of God with 
 nature. 
 
 These 'discrete degrees,' thus distinguished 
 by Swedenborg from ' continuous degrees,' or 
 the ordinary degrees of comparison which mean 
 merely more or less of the same quality, are 
 thus essentially constructive degrees; they are 
 productive, even dynamic in character, as they 
 imply the action of one force through various 
 media under a fixed law. The force is life 
 itself; the media are the series, orders and 
 degrees through which life descends from its 
 source to its ultimates ; the descent itself is 
 influx ; and the law of relation and adaptation 
 by which the descent is possible is the law of 
 Correspondence. 
 
 It is by virtue of correspondence that thought 
 can express itself in the definite form of air- 
 waves we call a word the two orders of exist- 
 ence being in themselves utterly discrete. So 
 the mind finds its utterance or activity in the 
 body, and the whole spiritual world its ex- 
 pression and its symbol in the whole physical 
 universe. There is no confusion of substance 
 even by means of the finest electron. The two 
 worlds are absolutely discrete in nature, but 
 they communicate by a perfect correspondence. 
 
 72
 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 The eye itself is formed in correspondence with 
 the nature of the ether vibrations which reach 
 it, and so is capable of transmitting, not the 
 ether, but its motions in the substance of the 
 nerves and fibres of vision and so to the seats 
 of sensation. Here these motions are again 
 taken up by the vessels of the mind in the 
 soul's vision, imagination, thought and deter- 
 mination, from which begins the reaction 
 through the motor nerves. There is no inter- 
 fusion of matter and thought. There is a series 
 and order of degrees, and there is a corre- 
 spondence, and so an influx of motion and of 
 force. 
 
 Viewed under the same law, the cosmos 
 is a system of spheres emanating from the 
 infinite Divine. The same law which governs 
 the series God, the Spiritual Word and Nature, 
 controls the relation of the successive atmo- 
 spheres aura, ether, atmospheric air. The same 
 trinal series is visible in the succession of forms 
 vortical, spiral, circular in the formation of 
 the material atom. It is the transmission of 
 one force by vibratory motion through various 
 media that constitutes what is known as the 
 transmutation of energy. The various planes 
 of the human mind, volitional, intellectual and 
 
 73
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 sensuous, constitute the same trinal series, and 
 so in consequence the same trinal division of 
 the angelic heavens. Of these the highest, or 
 celestial, is characterized by the spontaneity of 
 love, the second or spiritual by the guidance 
 of faith, and the lowest by the simple will to 
 obey and to serve the power from above. 
 
 In this universal world-view, the all of being 
 is brought into the unity of the trinal One ; 
 not by confusion of substance but by influx, 
 degrees and thus correspondence. So vast is 
 this extension of the law of Discrete Degrees 
 when seen to govern the spiritual as well as 
 the natural world, that Swedenborg speaks of 
 it, in his later period, as something hitherto 
 unknown. In its natural scope he had indeed 
 applied this law during the earlier period, and 
 had been guided by it in all his researches. In 
 his Principia he develops a world through the 
 three degrees of Finites, Actives and Ele- 
 mentaries. In the Soul he describes the effect 
 by contiguity, and the transmission, by vibra- 
 tion, of the ether rays upon the eye, of the 
 eye upon the nerve, of the nerve upon the 
 brain, of the brain upon the imagination, of 
 the imagination upon the intellect, of the 
 intellect upon the soul all by virtue of the 
 
 74
 
 perfect correspondence of each of these subtle 
 media with the force communicated. But it 
 was only the greater vision of the later 
 illumination that enabled Swedenborg to see 
 the same law operating in the action of God 
 upon the spiritual world, and of the spiritual 
 world upon nature. These entities are nowhere 
 interfused or blended into a pantheistic mass, but 
 for ever exist in their discrete degrees, eternally 
 distinct, but one by perfect correspondence and 
 harmonious interaction. Hence we may de- 
 nominate Swedenborg's philosophic system as 
 that of a Trinal Monism. 
 
 Without these three, End, Cause and Effect, 
 nothing is, whether we speak of universal 
 Being or the least existing thing. Each degree 
 constitutes a plane of being by itself ; it never 
 becomes the other in its own series by any 
 blending or continuity. It is in the other and 
 actuates it, but never becomes the other. The 
 End is in the mediate or Cause, and through 
 this in the Effect or the thing ultimated. 
 Effect is not continuous with cause, as mere 
 Cause intensified, nor is Cause intensified End. 
 God is in all spiritual things without losing 
 Himself in them by confusion with them. Spirit 
 is in all nature and in all matter, giving it 
 
 75
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 its form and all its force, without itself be- 
 coming matter, or matter by any process of 
 refinement ever becoming spirit. Just as a 
 man's will is in his thought, and both are in 
 the spoken or written word, yet the word is 
 not thought, and the thought itself is not 
 will ; but the three are one in the utterance, 
 without confusion of substance. So is God in 
 His going forth: is in all things and the Source 
 of all things, and yet these things are not 
 Himself. 
 
 In order that each lower degree may be the 
 form and expression of the higher, it must 
 perfectly correspond. Hence the Law of 
 Correspondence is the correlative of the Law of 
 Discrete Degrees. According to it each thing in 
 nature corresponds to something in a co-existing 
 spiritual world, which is the world of causes 
 inasmuch as it is only in mind or spirit that 
 relations have a real existence and hence that 
 design and direction are possible. Only mind 
 can do this. And finally, all things in the 
 spiritual world have their real being in those 
 particular ends in the Divine Love from which 
 they are created.
 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 THE LAW OF CORRESPONDENCE APPLIED TO THE 
 INTERPRETATION OF THE SCRIPTURES 
 
 The application of the Law of Correspondence 
 to the interpretation of Holy Scripture as actual 
 Divine revelation becomes manifest. As every- 
 thing in nature has a Divine end and a spiritual 
 meaning, so Divine revelation, expressed in 
 terms taken from nature and from the thoughts 
 and images of the human mind, becomes ration- 
 ally conceivable. For the mind can conceive of 
 the Divine Spirit selecting, by inspiration in the 
 mind of the amanuensis, out of the vocabulary 
 not only of nature but of human history and 
 tradition, those things, countries, persons and 
 events which may be the outward form and 
 symbols of inner, spiritual realities. 
 
 So may God ' open His mouth in parables ' 
 and make known ' by things that are made the 
 things invisible, even His eternal power and 
 God-head.' 
 
 Applied to the conception of God and the 
 Divine Trinity, the law of Discrete Degrees 
 distinguishes the Father as the Ease, the Divine 
 Love and primal Substance from the Son as 
 the Ezistere, the Wisdom or Word by whom all 
 things are, and from the Holy Spirit as that 
 
 77
 
 SWEDENBOKG 
 
 proceeding and perpetual Operation of the 
 Divine Love and Wisdom in uses in the created 
 world. It is in the sending forth of the Divine 
 that things are created. Potentially existing 
 from eternity as Love, Wisdom and Use in 
 the one God, Jehovah, the Trinity becomes 
 actual in time in the Divine Humanity of Jesus 
 Christ. In the Word made Flesh the Divine 
 Love, which is the Father, is made manifest, 
 and through this the Holy Spirit is breathed 
 upon the world. Thus in Him, Jesus Christ, 
 ' dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.' 
 The Divine Trinity is not a trinity of persons, 
 but of person. The essential trinity of love, 
 wisdom and their operation, or of will, thought 
 and work, constitute personality whether human 
 or divine. In the work of redemption Jehovah 
 has clothed Himself in the womb of a virgin 
 with the nature of man, and thus in the person 
 of Jesus Christ taken upon Himself the burden 
 of all the accumulated sinful heredity of man- 
 kind from the beginning. In the life of Jesus 
 Christ on earth the Divine fought with those 
 evils admitted into the infirm humanity by 
 temptation and conquered them. By so doing 
 He overcame the hells and subdued them unto 
 Himself, and was enabled with the cry upon the 
 
 78
 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 cross, ' It is finished,' to say to all men ' Be 
 of good cheer. I have overcome the world.' 
 Redemption therefore consisted, not in a plan 
 of judicature by which divine justice was 
 to be satisfied by a vicarious sacrifice, but it is 
 a veritable fait accompli, a most real warfare 
 with and victory over the hells, achieved by 
 the one Champion of human spiritual libert}-. 
 This liberty is attainable by men through faith 
 and obedience, not as conditions arbitrarily 
 imposed, but as essential to that free self- 
 activity on man's part, which enables him to 
 become a voluntary recipient of God's love, 
 and a willing subject of His Kingdom. The 
 worship of Jesus Christ in His Divine Hu- 
 manity as the one and only God of heaven and 
 earth, and the one and only Saviour of man- 
 kind, is therefore the corner stone of Sweden- 
 borg's religious system and of the doctrine 
 which he outlined of a New Christianity. 
 Swedenborg's religious scheme knows nothing 
 of sect or nationality as affecting the Divine 
 regard for man. All nations, and all religions 
 are embraced under the survey of the Divine 
 Providence, which looks to eternal ends, and 
 strives to lift men continually out of the 
 evil into which they have fallen through the 
 
 79
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 abuse of their moral freedom, and to bring 
 them into the liberty of heaven. 
 
 Since God in Jesus Christ is alone worshipped 
 in all the heavens, all men of all religions who 
 have believed and worshipped, however blindly 
 and grossly here, will, in the intermediate World 
 of Spirits, have the veils of heredity and local 
 ignorance removed, and come to see the one 
 true God behind all the various symbols by 
 which He has been worshipped here. The only 
 essential conditions of salvation are belief in 
 the Divine and voluntary self-subjection to the 
 Divine Law because it is Divine. 
 
 Swedenborg's religion is eminently ethical and 
 practical. According to him the ' Kingdom of 
 Heaven is a kingdom of uses.' ' All religion,' he 
 says, ' is of life, and the life of religion is to do 
 good.' But by doing good is not meant elee- 
 mosynary acts of benevolence of the works of 
 piety. It is rather the shunning of evils as sins 
 against God, and the faithful performance of 
 the duties of one's station from a religious 
 motive. This constitutes the essence of Charity 
 in the sublime sense in which Swedenborg uses 
 this much-abused word. Charity is simply the 
 love of God to man exercised by means of, or 
 through, voluntary human agents. Men, by 
 
 80
 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 shunning evils as sins, open the channels of their 
 life for the influx from above, and the outflow 
 to their fellow-man of this universal divine 
 benevolence and its delights. The universe is 
 love ; but love requires human moral freedom 
 as the condition of its own exercise. "When 
 sinful self-love is removed by man, all the works 
 that he performs become good works, and all 
 earthly uses become the ultimate forms in which 
 the ends of Divine love are realized in effect. 
 
 THE SPIRITUAL HISTORY OF THE WORLD 
 
 As life is essentially love, so a man's life is 
 what his love is : his intellect and his thoughts 
 are the servants of this master, and the spiritual 
 body is his immortal sensuous organism, adapted 
 to uses in a world whose atmospheres are 
 spiritual. Death is therefore but a cessation of 
 consciousness in the material plane or degree, 
 when the body, through injury or decaj^, ceases 
 to respond to the vibrations or influx of the 
 spiritual life. By death man wakes to the con- 
 sciousness of his spiritual body, and of the 
 objective and substantial reality of the spiritual 
 world. According to the law of Discrete Degrees, 
 the higher may enter into the lower, but not 
 G 81
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 the lower into the higher. On the plane of 
 physics, the ether may permeate the air ; but 
 not the air the ether. As matter can accord- 
 ingly have no place in the spiritual world, 
 there is no resurrection of the material body. 
 ' It is sown a natural, it is raised a spiritual 
 body.' 
 
 Every man undergoes his own judgment in 
 the great meeting-place of all departed spirits, 
 the intermediate '"World of Spirits.' This is 
 effected by the unveiling, in the light of eternal 
 realities, of his own essential character, ' his 
 ruling love,' and led by this the spirit now 
 seeks his own place, whether among the blessed 
 or the lost. But there also occur, in the World 
 of Spirits, at the end of each age or epoch 
 of the world's history, a great general or Last 
 Judgment, in which the spiritual throngs there 
 are restored to their social order. This order 
 becomes disturbed in the course of a long, 
 period by the accumulated confusion of incon- 
 gruous and undeveloped states, and these inter- 
 mediate spheres through which the heavenly 
 influences descend to man need to be clarified 
 of the invading clouds of evil. Through the 
 clarifying and rectifying adjustments of such 
 a judgment a new heaven and a new earth 
 
 82
 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 come into being. These great spiritual Auf- 
 kldrungen result in great moral and social 
 revolutions below. The history of the world, 
 therefore, has its counterpart and its true key 
 in the history of these great general judgments 
 in the World of Spirits ; and these are sym- 
 bolically revealed in the Holy Scriptures in the 
 great crises and epochal upheavals there de- 
 scribed. Swedenborg accordingly divides the 
 history of the world into five ages or churches, 
 each of which is characterized by ' its under- 
 standing of the Word,' i.e. by its mode of 
 receiving and obeying revealed divine truth. 
 Thus the real springs of the history of mankind 
 are religious. These five spiritual ages of the 
 world are, in their order : 
 
 I. The Adamic, or Eden Age : when the Divine 
 was revealed intuitively to the child-like per- 
 ception of the race, and ' heaven lay about us 
 in our infancy.' 
 
 II. The Noahtic Age : the age of the living 
 symbol, when symbols were chosen out of nature 
 to stand for their correspondent spiritual 
 essences or qualities. Here is the origin of 
 hieroglyphics, of mythology, and of all spoken 
 and written language. 
 
 III. The age of the dead symbol, when the 
 
 83
 
 SWEDENBOBG 
 
 living idea was lost and the natural object 
 substituted in its place. This is the age of 
 ' Animism,' the beginning of the historic ages 
 and generally but erroneously accounted the 
 beginning of religion. In reality the Animistic 
 Age is that of religion's lowest decline from the 
 primitive monotheism and child-like innocence 
 of the Golden Age. This third, or first historic 
 age, is that of the Israelitish Church, its written 
 Word, its sacrificial worship and obligatory 
 ritual. Revelation, which in the first age was 
 by immediate vision, and in the second by 
 symbol or allegory in which the heavenly 
 realities were clothed, now finds in a fixed, 
 divinely sanctioned ritual the only means of 
 preserving the human race from the universal 
 tendency to idol-worship and utter materialism. 
 IV. The Fourth Age is that of the Incar- 
 nation of the Word, which was necessitated 
 when the letter of Holy Scripture was becoming 
 of no effect through man's traditions, and when 
 the salvation of mankind could be effected no 
 longer by the presence of the Divine in nature, 
 in symbol, in written law, or in the holy ritual 
 now become dead. Only by the presence on 
 earth of God incarnate in human nature, and 
 His entering through human temptations into 
 
 84
 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 conflict with the hells, and by His victory over 
 them, could the human race now be saved from 
 self-destruction. The Christian Church thus 
 founded is a dispensation of the letter of the 
 Gospel ; its end is prophesied by Christ Himself 
 under the figure of the ' end of the world,' when 
 the 'love of many shall wax cold' and 'the 
 powers of the heavens shall be shaken.' These 
 prophecies are realized in the breaking up of 
 the old conceptions of Christian truth based 
 upon the ' letter that killeth.' The Christian 
 Church, or the Fourth Spiritual Age, has in its 
 turn, according to the divine prophecy, declined 
 into tritheistic conceptions of God, the substi- 
 tution of ' faith alone ' for charity, and the 
 building up of purely material ideas of heaven 
 and of the Lord's coming. But according to 
 Christ's promise, the ' parables ' and ' proverbs ' 
 of His own teaching are to give place to the 
 ' plain showing of the Father.' This full and 
 final revelation is, says Swedenborg, the opening 
 of the spiritual sense of the Word, and is 
 correspondently prefigured in the language of 
 Scripture as the coming of Christ ' in the clouds 
 of heaven, with power and great glory.' The 
 fuller revelation or coming of the "Word no longer 
 in the cloud, or symbol of the letter alone, but in 
 
 85
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 the glory of spirit, produced in the spiritual world 
 the great changes known as the Last Judgment. 
 Hence the illusions of the old fictitious heavens 
 pass away, and from the light of the new 
 heavens, the Holy City, the Church in her final 
 and perfected glory, descends to earth. 
 
 V. This is the inauguration of the Fifth Age 
 of the World, the New Jerusalem ' descending 
 from God out of heaven,' and whose religion 
 shall be the worship of Jesus Christ in His 
 Divine Humanity as God and the restored union 
 of charity and faith in man's religious life. 
 From this real inaugurative judgment, of which 
 Swedenborg claims to have been a witness in 
 the World of Spirits, have flowed down into this 
 world of effects those marvellous changes which 
 have constituted what all men testify to wit- 
 nessing in these days the beginning of a new 
 age of the world. It is a new spiritual age, 
 distinguished by its mark as a ' new church,' in 
 the broad and catholic sense in which Sweden- 
 borg uses this term. 
 
 86
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE DIVINE ALTRUISM, OR LOVE THE FINAL 
 CAUSE OF CREATION 
 
 SWEDENBORG'S entire system, regarded as a unit, 
 finds its highest and most complete summariza- 
 tion in the doctrine of the Divine Love as the 
 final cause of creation. In the earlier period 
 the Infinite is regarded as the source of the 
 universe, and creation begins with a conatus 
 of motion in the Infinite. In the Pnncipia we 
 are told that all existence originates in motion 
 from the Infinite ; and with motion all modifica- 
 tion, all variety, all force, all activity. Motion 
 is subject to the threefold analysis, conatus, 
 motion and force. Pure motion consists in 
 the internal state, or conatus. It is differen- 
 tiated from substance itself, and, while defined 
 as the origin of all existence, still is declared 
 to ' originate in a more subtle element than that 
 in which its activity is manifest' (Prindpia, i. 
 137). Again, we are told that motion itself is 
 not substantial, but produces an appearance 
 
 87
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 of substance and form. The internal motion 
 is the only producing power, for without it 
 there can be neither centre nor circumference, 
 neither contingency nor limit; but as a centre 
 and a conatus it can exist among finites and 
 in space. 
 
 This concept of motion as the beginning of 
 creation, mathematically or formally complete, 
 lacks the element of substance itself, or the 
 ivhat that moves and is moved. It is only in 
 the Sapientia Angelica that Swedenborg reaches 
 the solution in the doctrine of the Good as 
 the substance of all things and Truth as the 
 Form of Good. This dual classification into 
 Good and Truth as essential Substance and 
 Form exhausts the entire realm of Being, and 
 gives us the dynamic explanation of the universe. 
 For in Good we have the end, the (Jausa finalis 
 itself of creation, or that which is loved by 
 the infinite Creator; and Truth is that inmost 
 law, or Causa, efficient, by which all things take 
 form in finite existence; and in use, or action, 
 we have the end ultimated. Love, Wisdom 
 and Use become now the divinely humanized 
 Infinite in place of the purely mathematical 
 conception of a causeless conatus and motion. 
 The Conatus now becomes that of the essential 
 
 88
 
 THE DIVINE ALTRUISM 
 
 nature of love itself. The essence of love is 
 conjunction ; its activity is only reciprocal. 
 There can be no love without an object, therefore 
 love, of necessity, creates an object, and from 
 necessity makes that object capable of freely 
 reciprocating and returning the love bestowed. 
 Hence Swedenborg lays down the funda- 
 mental law and cause of creation^ ' Thai the 
 divine love and the divine wisdom cannot be 
 and exist except in other beings or existences 
 created from itself. For love consists in our 
 willing what is our own to be another's and 
 feeling his delight as delight in ourselves. It 
 is an essential of love not to love itself, but 
 to love others and to bo joined to them by 
 love ; it is also an essential of love to be beloved 
 by others, for thereby there is a conjunction. . . . 
 Hence it is evident that the Divine love can- 
 not be and exist otherwise than in other beings 
 or existences whom it loves and by whom it 
 is beloved : for when such a quality exists in 
 all love it must needs exist in the greatest 
 degree, that is, infinitely in Love Itself (Divine 
 Love and Wisdom, 47-8). 
 
 The reciprocal love which love demands from 
 its object can only be exercised by an object 
 that is free. The universe as an automaton 
 
 89
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 acting only under the compulsion of divine 
 law would never furnish the response which 
 the divine creative love demands. Hence in 
 all creation there is, with the evolution of forms 
 recipient of divine life, at the same time an 
 evolution of freedom. All created forms, even 
 of the lowest mineral or atmospheric atom, act 
 from a certain conatus, or motive, as if from 
 some power of their own; but really as im- 
 pelled by the divine wisdom. The vegetative 
 and the animal souls are but an instinctive 
 following of the laws of their special service 
 in the kingdom of uses. Only in man is reached 
 the entire moral freedom that is capable of 
 returning a free answer to the love of the 
 Creator, and this implies equally the ability to 
 turn away from that love. Nature is but a 
 ladder of uses by which all things ascend in 
 higher and higher degrees of love and adoration 
 to the Deity. 
 
 The highest exercise of freedom is in man's 
 self-compulsion. The ability to compel one's 
 self is the highest gift of God to man and is 
 that upon which rests the whole order of 
 creation, which is that of action and reaction. 
 In order that there shall be an other to the 
 Infinite and the Self-existent, that other must 
 
 90
 
 THE DIVINE ALTRUISM 
 
 be finite and dead. Hence creation is a re- 
 ceding of the spheres of life emanating from 
 God into those extremes where existence 
 becomes utterly passive, inert and resistent; 
 and the material world is that sphere of exist- 
 ence which has the ability to react against the 
 living force of mind and life, and assert itself 
 as the supreme and utter other to life and the 
 infinite. Morally, freedom must consist in the 
 ability to love self alone utterly and to deny 
 truth ; to turn light into darkness and heat into 
 cold. All this is necessary to the creation of a 
 moral world. But even in the dead object 
 there must be a force and will to react, and 
 this is divinely imparted and constitutes the 
 gift of moral freedom, or the ability to act, 
 according to Swedenborg's formula, sicut a se 
 as if of oneself, 
 
 The principles of human freedom are thus set 
 forth by Swedenborg in treating of the Laws 
 of Divine Providence in his work entitled The 
 Apocalypse Explained (1150). 
 
 ' The fourth law of the Divine Providence is, 
 That the understanding and the will should not 
 be in the least degree compelled by another, 
 since all compulsion by another takes away 
 freedom ; but that man should compel himself ; 
 
 91
 
 for to compel himself is to act from freedom. 
 Man's freedom belongs to his will ; from the 
 will it exists in the thought of the understand- 
 ing ; and by means of the thought it shows 
 itself in speech and in the action of the body. 
 For man says, when he wills anything from 
 freedom, " I will to think this," " I will to speak 
 this," and "I will to do this." From freedom 
 of will he has also the faculty of thinking, of 
 speaking and of acting, for the will gives this 
 faculty because it is freedom. Since freedom 
 belongs to man's will, it belongs also to his 
 love, since nothing else in man constitutes 
 freedom, but the love which belongs to his will. 
 The reason is, that love is the life of man ; 
 for man is of the same quality as his love ; 
 consequently that which proceeds from the love 
 of his will, proceeds from his life. Hence it 
 is evident that freedom belongs to man's will, 
 to his love and to his life ; consequently, that 
 it makes one with his proprium (or selfhood), 
 and with his nature and disposition. Now 
 because the Lord desires that everything which 
 proceeds from Himself to man should be appro- 
 priated to man as if it were his own, for 
 otherwise there would be in man no means of 
 reciprocity by which conjunction is effected, 
 
 92
 
 THE DIVINE ALTRUISM 
 
 therefore it is a law of the Divine Providence, 
 that the understanding and the will of man 
 should not be at all compelled by another.' 
 
 The reconciliation of human freedom with 
 divine sovereignty lies in the hidden, unconscious 
 operation of the divine love upon the inmost 
 affections of man. 
 
 4 The reason that man does not perceive the 
 operation of the Divine Providence is, that 
 such perception would take away his freedom, 
 and hence the faculty of thinking as if from 
 himself, and with it also all the enjoyment 
 of life, so that he would be like an automaton 
 in which there is no principle of reciprocity. 
 He would also be a slave, not a free man. 
 The principal cause that the Divine Providence 
 moves so secretly that there is scarcely any 
 vestige of it apparent, although it operates 
 upon the most minute things of man's thought 
 and will which regard his internal state, is, 
 that the Lord continually desires to impress 
 His love upon man, and through it His wisdom, 
 and thus to create him into His image. There- 
 fore it is that the operation of the Lord is 
 upon man's love, and from it upon his under- 
 standing, and not from his understanding upon 
 his love. The love, with its affections, which 
 
 93
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 are manifold and innumerable, is not perceived 
 by man except from a most general feeling, 
 and that in so small a degree that it is 
 scarcely perceptible at all ; and yet man is to 
 be led from one affection of love into another, 
 according to the connection in which they are 
 arranged, in order that he may be reformed 
 and saved. This is incomprehensible, not only 
 to man but also to the angels. If man dis- 
 covered anything of these arcana, he could 
 not be withdrawn from leading himself, even 
 though it were continually from heaven into 
 hell ; notwithstanding he is constantly led by 
 the Lord from hell into heaven ; for from him- 
 self he constantly acts against [Divine] order, 
 but the Lord constantly according to it ' 
 (The Apocalypse Explained, 1153). 
 
 The two forces of the creative love, therefore, 
 lie at the base of human history ; the wandering 
 from God, the return to God ; the descent or 
 fall of man from the pristine innocence of his 
 infantile or golden age down to the beginning 
 of the Ascent in Christ, the New Adam, as 
 humanity redeemed. The same law operates in 
 the physical universe in two forces, the centri- 
 fugal force creating the ' other ' to the utmost 
 extreme, the centripetal drawing the : other ' 
 
 94
 
 THE DIVINE ALTRUISM 
 
 back to itself. The equilibrium of the two 
 forces establishing the fixed orbit of the planet 
 is nature's reflection of the plane of human moral 
 freedom. 
 
 The creation of the other than itself by 
 emanations is effected by degrees, or in suc- 
 cessive atmospheres or auras, receding farther 
 and farther from the source of life and motion 
 until they become inactive or dead. In the 
 Principia and the Regnum Animate these are 
 treated of as physical spheres, even to the 
 highest or universal aura in which the soul 
 lives, as it were, in its own element, and which 
 is above time and space and knows only the 
 force of gravity or the attraction and repulsion 
 which are most nearly allied to the forces of 
 love and so of the moral world. Beneath these 
 are successively the solar vortex, or the magnetic 
 aura, the interplanetary aura, or the ether, and 
 last of all the atmospheric air encompassing 
 each planet. But in the Sapientia Angelica 
 there is a wonderful transformation of these 
 physical auras into the great dual corresponden- 
 tial system of the Two Worlds. Here the 
 highest or innermost aura, the soul's atmosphere 
 of the Regnum Animate, becomes the complete 
 spiritual world, possessing its own sun and 
 
 95
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 its own trinal succession of atmospheres or 
 heavens, which at once are the types and 
 furnish the emanating forces of the natural sun 
 and of the physical atmospheres of the material 
 world. 
 
 ' "When I was in enlightenment,' says Sweden- 
 borg, meaning after his spiritual illumination, 
 'I perceived that, from the light and the heat 
 of the sun of the spiritual world, spiritual 
 atmospheres were created one from another 
 which were in themselves substantial: but 
 . . . the sun from which all natural things 
 proceed was created at the same time ; and 
 through this, in like manner by means of 
 heat and light, three atmospheres environing 
 the three former ones' (True Christian Re- 
 ligion, 76). Here we have the ultimate ex- 
 planation of Swedenborg's doctrine of the 
 Universe as an ' animated mechanism.' The 
 material world, dead, inert, powerless of itself, 
 as the ' other ' to the World of Spirits, is never- 
 theless actuated everywhere, even to its most 
 minute atmospheric particles, by the corre- 
 sponding particles of the spiritual atmospheres 
 emanating from the sun of the spiritual world ; 
 which sun itself is the first effulgence of the 
 Love and "Wisdom of the Creator. The nature 
 
 96
 
 THE DIVINE ALTRUISM 
 
 of the correspondence of the Two Worlds is 
 thus set forth : 
 
 ' The Divine Proceeding is what, around Him, 
 appears to the angels as a sun ; from this pro- 
 ceeds His Divine through spiritual atmospheres 
 which He has created for the transmission of 
 light and heat down to the angels, and which 
 He has accommodated to the life both of their 
 minds and their bodies, in order that they may 
 receive intelligence from the light, also in order 
 that they may see, and also that they may 
 breathe according to correspondence; for the 
 angels breathe like men. Also that they may 
 receive love from the heat, may feel, and also 
 in order that their hearts may beat according to 
 correspondence ; for the angels have a beating 
 of the heart like men. These spiritual atmo- 
 spheres are increased in density by discrete 
 degrees . . . down to the angels of the lowest 
 heaven, to whom they thus become accommo- 
 dated. Hence it is that the angels of the 
 highest heaven live as it were in a pure aura, 
 the angels of the middle heaven as it were in 
 ether, and the angels of the lowest heaven as it 
 were in air. Under these atmospheres, in each 
 heaven are earths on which the angels dwell ' 
 (Divine Wisdom, xii. 5). 
 H 97
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 * But it is to be known that the atmospheres 
 originating from the sun of heaven, properly 
 speaking, are not three, but six ; three above 
 the sun of our world and three below the sun 
 of our world. The three above the sun of our 
 world continually and immediately follow the 
 three natural atmospheres, and cause man in 
 the natural world to be able to think and feel. 
 For the atmospheres originating from the sun 
 of our world have not life in themselves, 
 because they originate from a sun which is pure 
 fire ; whereas the atmospheres originating from 
 the sun of heaven, which is the Lord, 1 have life 
 in themselves because they originate from a sun 
 which is pure love and pure wisdom. The 
 atmospheres originating from the sun of our 
 world, which is pure fire, cause those things 
 which are in the earth and in the human body 
 to remain in existence, and to be held together 
 in connection, and not to be changed except 
 
 1 Swedenborg is only intensifying the symbol when he says 
 here that the sun of heaven is the Lord ; for in Divine Love and 
 Wisdom, 93, he declares that ' that sun is not God, but it is the 
 proceeding from the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom of 
 God-Man : in like manner the light and heat from that sun. . . . 
 Beware of thinking that the sun of the spiritual world is God 
 Himself 1 God is Man. The first proceeding from His love and 
 wisdom is a fiery spiritual principle which appears in the sight 
 of the angels as a sun.' 
 
 9 8
 
 THE DIVINE ALTRUISM 
 
 according to the laws of natural order. Hence 
 is the difference of things in the natural and 
 spiritual worlds ' (Last Judgment, 31). 
 
 Together with the translation of the divine 
 love and wisdom as spiritual forms into their 
 equivalents in the natural world's heat and 
 light, there comes the representation of mental 
 states in the spiritual world by the fixed times 
 and spaces of the world of nature. 1 
 
 Times and spaces are determined in the 
 spiritual world, says Swedenborg, by mental 
 states of affection and thought ; whereas they 
 are determined in the natural world by the 
 fixed standards of the earth's revolutions and 
 dimensions. "While the spiritual times and 
 spaces are, therefore, ' appearances ' in the 
 
 1 An interesting inquiry is prompted here as to the real 
 relation of Swedenborg's doctrines of times and spaces being fixed 
 in the natural world but existing as appearances, or phenomen- 
 ally, in the spiritual world, with Kant's Phenomenology of the 
 Spirit and the mediatory function in the ^Esthetic of the time- 
 and-space forms of judgment. The sources of this comparison 
 are given in the Introduction on Kant and Smederiborg by Frank 
 Sewall to Goerwitz's translation of Kant's Dreams of a Spirit Seer, 
 published by Swan Sonnenschein & Co., London, 1900. It is an 
 interesting coincidence that Swedenborg's little work on the 
 Two Worlds, De Commercio, or Influx, published in 1769, should 
 have been followed the next year by Immanuel Kant's Inaugural 
 Address on the same theme, ' De Mundo sensibile et de Mundo 
 intelligibile.' 
 
 99
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 spiritual world, they are nevertheless real 
 because they are necessary to the spirit's 
 existence in an objective world, i.e. in a world 
 of that which is other than himself; and such 
 a world is morally necessary to man's exercise 
 of the neighbourly love which is the divine 
 altruism or charity taking finite form in himself. 
 Heaven is therefore not a world of personalities 
 submerged and dissolved in the one abyss of 
 Being, but a world of the utmost distinctness 
 of personality, each member being a distinct, 
 special ' form of charity ' inspired with the 
 love of others, and governed by the moral 
 law of use, or of service to the neighbour, 
 which is the fundamental law of creation from 
 first to last and from last to first. The spatial 
 distinctions of the spiritual world are, there- 
 fore, most real, because they are fundamental 
 to the existence of man in neighbourly rela- 
 tions ; they are made even more real, by deriving 
 their essence from living states of mind, than 
 are the actual spaces and times of nature which 
 depend on the mechanical standards of the 
 natural world. 
 
 100
 
 THE DIVINE ALTRUISM 
 
 THE GREAT CATEGORIES : THE Two KINGDOMS, 
 THE THREE DEGREES 
 
 Finally, the great categories under which 
 Swedenborg embraces all philosophical concepts 
 are those of the Two Kingdoms Substance 
 and Form, and of the Three Degrees End, 
 Cause and Effect. The substance of things 
 is their good : the form of things is their truth, 
 or that by which the good appears and acts. 
 But good, being also the end desired of the 
 purpose in anything, is of the will and love : 
 in like manner the form of its expression and 
 activities is of the intellect. Hence all that 
 pertains to substance is of the will or voluntary 
 kingdom, as all that pertains to form is of the 
 intellectual kingdom. 
 
 Man and nature not living of themselves, but 
 as recipients of life from God, are constituted 
 the twofold receptacles of the inflowing Divine. 
 Man by his will and intellect receives the love 
 and truth which are the essentials of his life ; 
 and nature receives the same inflowing principles 
 in the heat and light and the respective physical 
 forms and forces proceeding from the natural 
 sun. So do the two worlds correspond in every 
 minutest form and activity; and there is no 
 
 101
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 form or function in one that may not be ex- 
 pressed in the terms of the other, the heat 
 principle having everywhere a hidden relation 
 to love and to good, the light principle being 
 always manifestly related to truth. Upon this 
 law of the basic or constructive relations of 
 nature and spirit rests Swedenborg's doctrine 
 of the internal sense of the divinely dictated 
 Word, and of the possibility of its discovery by 
 means of the Science of Correspondences. Upon 
 the same dual constitution of nature rests all 
 the imagery of language, the possibility of 
 speech, and the laws of the mind's growth and 
 education. 
 
 Besides the Two Kingdoms of Good and 
 Truth as the essential substance and form of 
 things, Swedenborg also furnishes philosophy 
 with a new schema, of the activities of these two 
 Kingdoms, in their respective three Discrete 
 Degrees of End, Cause and Effect. These in 
 their descending order he names the Celestial, 
 the Spiritual and the Natural degrees of life. 
 The celestial, characterized by love, is the 
 highest of these planes of life in man or angel ; 
 the spiritual, where truth is the prevailing 
 motive, is the mediate, and beneath these two 
 there is the plane of action into which both 
 
 1 02
 
 THE DIVINE ALTRUISM 
 
 descend and find their ultimate expression and 
 use. To man's will and intellect there is added 
 therefore the body of sense and action. The 
 normal activity of the body is that of obedience 
 to the intellect which carries out the desire of 
 the will. So on the largest scale nature, as 
 effect, is the body obedient to the impulses of 
 spirit, or mind: and these are the great instru- 
 mental cause itself moved and actuated by the 
 Supreme End, the Good of the divine love. 
 
 God, Spirit, Nature ; Love, Wisdom and Use 
 such is the eternal Trinity which is reflected 
 alike in the macrocosm and in the microcosm, 
 in the universe and in man. By these successive 
 degrees in their descending order God enters 
 immediately into man from within and from 
 above, without his knowledge, but as the very 
 life itself from which man acts in all his con- 
 scious life. This is the subconscious, or in- 
 stinctive life of the man. From below or from 
 without, through the senses and into the plane 
 of the body's activity and bondage to nature, 
 God also enters into man's consciousness by 
 the mediate influx of what the senses perceive 
 and what the spirit imbibes from the world. 
 Intermediate between these inflowings is the 
 rational plane of the intellect and of the will's 
 
 103
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 moral freedom, and here is born the spiritual 
 man, or that principle where man leaves the 
 animal and natural plane and enters the truly 
 human plane , of his immortal and angelic life. 
 Here, as man consciously and of his free-will 
 puts on the hitherto subconscious states of the 
 higher life and makes them his own, he is born 
 again as the child of God and made an heir to 
 the kingdom of heaven. The ascending ladder 
 of life now enables man to bring all the trea- 
 sures of nature into the service of the Creator, 
 and so to realize the reciprocal conjunction of 
 God with the world. The spirit, when freed 
 from the bonds of a time-and-space world and 
 of a perishable body, finds its full social develop- 
 ment in the Maximus Homo, or heaven, as the 
 perfected society, the city of God. In heaven's 
 life of mutual love and service, inspired by the 
 devout adoration of the Creator, the divine 
 altruism finds its complete actualization and 
 Love, as the final Cause of creation, has attained 
 its End. 
 
 104
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE LAST DAYS AND DYING TESTIMONY 
 
 SWEDENBOBG completed the True Christian 
 Religion, that great summary of the Theology 
 of the New Church, in his eighty-third year. 
 After his repeated journeys abroad, chiefly to 
 Holland and England, for the publishing of his 
 works in those countries, where greater religious 
 freedom prevailed than in his own, he sought 
 in London the peaceful refuge of his last days. 
 Here he lived in the simplest manner, beloved 
 by little children and by the humble people 
 with whom he lodged. Says Pastor Ferelius, 
 the Chaplain of the Swedish Embassy, who was 
 with him frequently during these last days : 
 ' Some might think that Assessor Swedenborg 
 was eccentric and whimsical, but the very 
 reverse was the case. He was very pleasant 
 and easy in company, talked on every subject 
 that came up, accommodating himself to the 
 ideas of the company, and he never spoke of 
 his own views unless he was asked about them. 
 
 105
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 But if he noticed that any one asked him im- 
 pertinent questions, intending to make sport of 
 him, he immediately gave such an answer that 
 the questioner was silenced without being the 
 wiser for his asking.' 
 
 The dress that he usually wore when he went 
 out to visit was a suit of black velvet made 
 after an old fashion, with full ruffles at the 
 wrist, a curious hilted sword, and a gold-headed 
 cane. But he lived mostly a retired life. Mrs. 
 Shearsmith, at whose house he lived, said that 
 ' he was a good-natured man ; and that he was 
 a blessing to the house; for that they had 
 harmony and good business while he was with 
 them.' She also related that he announced 
 before his death when this would take place, 
 and ' he was as much pleased as if he were to 
 have a holiday or to go to some merrymaking.' 
 Shortly before his death he wrote to Mr. 
 Wesley that in the world of spirits he had 
 learned of his desire to see him. Mr. Wesley 
 on receiving this letter acknowledged to those 
 present that this was indeed the case, although 
 he had expressed this desire to no one, and he 
 replied, fixing a time for a visit to Swedenborg 
 when he should return to London from a six- 
 weeks' preaching tour upon which he was about 
 106
 
 THE LAST DAYS 
 
 to set out. Swedenborg wrote in reply that it 
 would then be too late, as he should ' finally ' 
 enter the spiritual world on the twenty-ninth 
 day of March. As the day of his death, thus 
 foretold by himself, approached he was visited 
 by the Pastor Ferelius for the purpose of 
 administering to him the Sacrament of the 
 Lord's Supper. On being exhorted by the 
 clergyman in that solemn moment to declare 
 whether he had written truly concerning his 
 intromission into the spiritual world and what 
 he had witnessed there, Swedenborg answered 
 that every statement he had made concerning 
 the opening of his spiritual sight and the things 
 of the other life was true, and that he ' could 
 have written more if he had been permitted.' 
 When asked if he would receive the Sacrament 
 he answered, ' With thankfulness.' ' I then 
 asked,' continued the clergyman, ' whether he 
 acknowledged himself to be a sinner.' 'Cer- 
 tainly, as long as I carry about me this sinful 
 body,' was the reply. And then, with much 
 devotion, folding his hands and uncovering his 
 head, he read the confession of sins and re- 
 ceived the holy Sacrament. It was on his 
 death-bed that he made thej reply to the Rev. 
 Thomas Hartley, who had asked him whether 
 107
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 all that he had written was true, or whether 
 any part or parts were to be excepted, 'I have 
 written nothing but the truth, as you will have 
 more and more confirmed to you all the days 
 of your life, provided you keep close to the 
 Lord, and faithfully serve Him by shunning 
 evils as sins against Him, and diligently 
 searching His Word, which from beginning to 
 end bears incontestable witness to the truth of 
 the doctrines I have delivered to the world.' 
 
 Swedenborg passed away in London on Sun- 
 day, March 29, 1772, aged eighty-four years. 
 His remains were interred, with all the ceremonies 
 of the Lutheran ritual, in the Swedish Ulrica 
 Eleanora Church, Ratcliffe Highway, London, E., 
 where their resting-place was marked later by 
 a suitable memorial slab and tablet. In the 
 Swedish House of Nobles, on October 7, a 
 eulogy was pronounced upon him by M. Sandel, 
 counsellor of the Board of Mines, in the name 
 of the Royal Academy of Stockholm. The 
 Prime Minister, von Hopken, writing the follow- 
 ing year to General Tuxen, remarks : ' The late 
 Swedenborg was certainly a pattern of sincerity, 
 virtue, and piety, and at the same time, in my 
 opinion, the most learned man in this kingdom.' l 
 
 1 Documents, vol. ii. p. 410. 
 
 108
 
 THE LAST DAYS 
 
 Shortly before Swedenborg's death Dr. Mes- 
 siter wrote to the Professor of Divinity at 
 Edinburgh University : ' As I have had the 
 honour of being frequently admitted to the 
 author's company when he was in London and 
 to converse with him on various points of 
 learning, I will venture to affirm that there are 
 no parts of mathematical, philosophical, or 
 medical knowledge, nay, I believe I might justly 
 say, of human literature, to which he is in the 
 least a stranger ; yet so totally insensible is he 
 of his own merit that I am confident he does 
 not know that he has any ; and, as he himself 
 says of the angels, he always turns his head 
 away at any encomium ' ; and the same writer, 
 addressing the Professor of Divinity at Glasgow, 
 says of Swedenborg : ' I can with truth assert 
 that he is truly amiable in his morals, most 
 learned and humble in his discourse, and super- 
 latively affable, humane and courteous in his 
 behaviour ; and this joined with a solidity of 
 understanding and penetration far above the 
 level of an ordinary genius.' 1 
 
 Eighty years after Swedenborg's death a 
 silver medal was struck in his honour by the 
 Royal Swedish Academy. His remains still 
 
 1 Document*, vol. ii. pp. 522, 525. 
 109
 
 SWEDENBORQ 
 
 lay in the Swedish Church in London. His 
 scientific and theological works were translated 
 into English ; the latter chiefly by the Sweden- 
 borg Society, established in London in 1810, and 
 the former, including the Principia, the Animal 
 Kingdom, the Ecwwmy of the Animal Kingdom 
 and the Chemistry, by the labours of Charles 
 Edward Strutt, of the Royal College of Surgeons 
 in Edinburgh, the Rev. Augustus Clissold, M.A., 
 of Exeter College, Oxford, and Dr. James John 
 Garth Wilkinson, of the Royal College of 
 Surgeons. Through the Swedenborg Society 
 of London the theological works have also 
 been translated and widely disseminated in 
 various modern languages. The scientific and 
 philosophical were, however, but partially 
 published in the original Latin texts, and the 
 English translations brought out in the middle 
 of the last century have practically gone out 
 of print. About the beginning of the present 
 century a movement was made by the Sweden- 
 borg Scientific Association of America to publish 
 the English editions of the Scientific "Works and 
 to procure the publication and translation of the 
 still unpublished MSS. preserved in the library 
 of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Stockholm. 
 In the year 1903 the Royal Swedish Academy 
 no
 
 THE LAST DAYS 
 
 of Sciences at Stockholm, having been requested, 
 through the Swedish legation at Vienna, to 
 furnish certain information regarding Sweden- 
 borg's unpublished MS. De Cerebro, began an 
 investigation of the Swedenborg MSS., which 
 resulted in the appointment by the Academy 
 of a Committee to edit and publish the entire 
 series of the Scientific and Philosophical works 
 in the original languages. Latin and Swedish. 
 The Committee consisted of the following 
 eminent scholars : Professor Gustaf Retzius, 
 Alfred GK Nathorst, Svante Arrhenius, S. E. 
 Henschen and Christian Loven. The volumes are 
 being issued with special introductions in English 
 by the respective editors, the general preface 
 being furnished by Professor Retzius, the Chair- 
 man of the Committee ; the literary editorship 
 is in the hands of Mr. Alfred H. Stroh. The 
 initial volume of this stately and monumental 
 edition appeared in the year 1907. 1 Since then 
 the Cosmologica, with an Introduction by Svante 
 Arrhenius, has been added. The introductions 
 
 1 Emanuel Swedenborg, Opera Qucedam out Inedita avt 
 Obsoleta de Rebut Naturalibui nunc Edita sub Auspleiis 
 Regue Academice Scientiarum Suecia : I Qeologica et Epiitola. 
 Prefatus est Gustav Retzius ; Introductionem adjunxit, Alfred 
 G. Nathorst ; EdicUt Alfred H. Stroh, Holmiae : Ex Officin 
 Aftonbladet. 1907, 4to. p. 344. 
 
 Ill
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 show that these volumes are given to the public, 
 not as works of mere historic interest, but as 
 containing facts and principles of the highest 
 practical value to the science of this age 
 principles which were too far in advance of 
 the information of Swedenborg's own time to 
 be then appreciated, but which are now being 
 confirmed by constantly accumulating data, 
 and are affording, by their unique and profound 
 method, a guide of the greatest value for the 
 progress of science in the future. Meanwhile 
 the theological works of Swedenborg have been 
 translated and published in more or less com- 
 plete editions in many languages, including, 
 besides the languages of Europe, Japanese and 
 Hindi ; and they are read by scholars and 
 clergy of all denominations, Greek, Catholic 
 and Protestant. 
 
 In the year 1908, at the request of the King 
 of Sweden, moved by the desire of the Royal 
 Swedish Academy of Sciences, the British 
 Government consented to the removal of 
 Swedenborg's remains to their native soil, after 
 their repose in exile for one hundred and thirty- 
 six years. With impressive ceremonies they 
 were taken from their long resting-place in 
 the little Swedish Chapel in the Minories, in 
 112
 
 THE LAST DAYS 
 
 the presence of the representatives of the two 
 governments and of the Lutheran Church and 
 the Church of the New Jerusalem. The re- 
 mains were conveyed to Sweden in a Swedish 
 warship, and, after a suitable public reception, 
 they were deposited in the Cathedral at Upsala, 
 where by vote of the Swedish Parliament a 
 monument is now in process of erection in the 
 Bjelke chapel, immediately across the nave from 
 that containing the monument to Linnaeus.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 EELATIONS TO MODERN THOUGHT 1 
 
 ALL great systems of philosophy and religion 
 have had more or less influence on the contem- 
 poraries of their founders and on the opinion of 
 succeeding generations. Socrates, although he 
 did not found a school of thought, yet, by his 
 conversation with his disciples and the Athenian 
 youth, gave a trend to that spirit of inquiry 
 which Plato, his disciple, followed in his works. 
 Aristotle, the father of formal logic, worked 
 out a philosophy which subsequently dominated 
 scholasticism, and played an important part in 
 mediaeval schools of philosophy. In more recent 
 times Kant fundamentally influenced meta- 
 physical thinking, on the question of space- 
 and-time relations; while Berkeley practically 
 founded a school of Idealism. It is not, there- 
 
 1 At the desire of the publisher and with the consent of the 
 author this chapter has been added, being furnished by the Rev. 
 Isaiah Tansley, B.A., with a view to showing the present status 
 and influence of Swedenborg's system in relation to modern 
 thought and faith. 
 
 114
 
 RELATIONS TO MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 fore, remarkable that so original a thinker as 
 Swedenborg should have attracted the attention 
 of a certain class of minds. As shown in the 
 preceding pages, he was a pioneer in the region 
 of metaphysical and scientific speculation. Like 
 Newton, he had a love for framing hypotheses ; 
 and, although he was attracted to the study of 
 the ancient philosophers, particularly Aristotle, 
 and, later, Christian Wolff, yet in a masterful 
 way he cut out a path for himself. He, however, 
 founded no school, and in his own country his 
 works attracted only a minor attention. It was 
 reserved for a few students in this country to 
 recognize his great claims, and to translate some 
 of his earlier writings from the Latin; and 
 the remarkable revival of interest in his scientific 
 works at the present moment indicates that 
 what he wrote in his scientific period is of 
 commanding interest. It is yet too soon, how- 
 ever, to say what the results of this renaissance 
 may be, but it is certain that Swedenborg was 
 far ahead of his day, both in scientific imagina- 
 tion and reach of ideas. 
 
 But, like Newton, Swedenborg gave his mind 
 at a later period to the study of the Bible and 
 questions arising out of it ; unlike Newton's 
 Biblical speculations, however, the works which
 
 SWEDENBORa 
 
 Swedenborg wrote attracted thoughtful and 
 scholarly minds almost from the first moment 
 of their publication. So distinctive are the 
 principles enunciated in his theological works 
 that they were bound inevitably to give rise 
 to a separate cult, or church. This is generally 
 known as the New Church, popularly termed 
 " Swedenborgianism," although this term was 
 distinctly repudiated by Swedenborg. Early 
 students in this country, becoming deeply 
 impressed with the marked cleavage between 
 the theology of Swedenborg and orthodoxy, felt 
 compelled to dissociate themselves from current 
 contemporary opinion, the result being the 
 formation of societies for worship, as has been 
 the case with other schools of religious thought. 
 Not being a philosophy merely, but a distinc- 
 tive theology, a separate cult was a natural 
 consequence. In a short time the societies of 
 students and worshippers became an organiza- 
 tion whose object was both ethical and pro- 
 pagandist. In this there is a parallel with 
 Wesleyanism, although this cult was not based 
 on a new theology, but on an enthusiasm for 
 the deepening of the religious spirit. The 
 particular cult which we are dealing with 
 originated in London with a few men some- 
 116
 
 RELATIONS TO MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 what more than a hundred and twenty years ago ; 
 it soon gained adherents throughout this 
 country, the Continent and America, and to- 
 day has votaries in every part of the world. 
 
 It is worthy of remark that the theological 
 writings of Swedenborg, from the commence- 
 ment, had an attraction for Anglican clergy, 
 among whom may be mentioned the Rev. 
 Thomas Hartley, of Winwick, and the Rev. 
 John Clowes, of St. John's, Manchester, two 
 of the earliest translators of his works. 
 
 Swedenborgianism, other than a formal wor- 
 ship and particular cult, has found students 
 amongst distinguished men, of whom Flaxman, 
 the sculptor, S. T. Coleridge the poet, Dr. 
 Garth Wilkinson, Coventry Patmore, Robert 
 Browning, and others may be named, while in 
 America Emerson marked his admiration for 
 Swedenborg as a philosopher by including him 
 in his Representative Men. The cult was very 
 early carried to America, where, ever since, it 
 has attracted thoughtful and instructed minds. 
 
 It would not be difficult to show in some detail 
 the influence of the principles of Swedenborg 
 upon the theology of the past and the present 
 were this the place ; but we may say generally 
 that while, on the one hand, criticism and a 
 
 117
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 wider outlook upon problems affecting human 
 nature are acting destructively upon theological 
 views, the trend of thought in a more rational 
 direction is due, we believe, to the principles 
 and teachings of Swedenborg finding their way 
 amongst thoughtful people. These principles, 
 in their issue are, on the one hand, destructive 
 of old, irrational conceptions; and, on the other, 
 eminently constructive in the sense that they 
 give us a philosophical system of faith which 
 appeals to reason and the feeling for the fitness 
 and logic of things. 
 
 Swedenborgianism differs from orthodox 
 Christianity on the fundamental ground of 
 the nature of the Deity, as based on absolute 
 unity of function. There can be no rational 
 conception of Being apart from unity in this 
 regard. The unity and solidarity of the universe 
 follow from this, while the forces of nature are 
 but the expression of this unity in its primal 
 origin in the Deity. The Incarnation was a 
 particular manifestation of Infinite Being on 
 the plane of matter and the demonstration of 
 the Divine as essentially personal. All the 
 functions of Being are derivable from the latter 
 fact that of unity and personality ; and in 
 Swedenborg's teaching it is the antithesis of 
 118
 
 RELATIONS TO MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 that distribution of Divine functions over the 
 mysterious tri-personality of Being character- 
 istic of orthodoxy. The central feature of 
 Swedenborg's teachings, therefore, on this point 
 is the assertion of this unity of Being and 
 function in the glorified and Divine Humanity 
 of Jesus Christ as God manifest ; it is this that 
 renders his philosophy unique in its starting- 
 point and claims. 
 
 Without discussing the bearing of this on 
 the question of revelation and inspiration, we 
 may remark that this principle imparts to his 
 ethics a definite form in its reference to human 
 relations. And here, again, Swedenborg is 
 divided impassably from the accepted prin- 
 ciples of Christianity on the question of salva- 
 tion. Ethics, that is duty, with Swedenborg 
 is altruism, and altruism in his system involves 
 an ideally organic whole. The functions of the 
 individual are inseparably involved in the col- 
 lective functions of the race ; and, as the whole 
 is conditioned by the parts, an infinite diversity 
 of uses distributed amongst the individuals of 
 the State will result in an altruistic unity and 
 in the reciprocal action of the unit on the 
 whole, and the whole on the unit. 
 
 The love of the neighbour is the basis of 
 119
 
 SWEDENBOBG 
 
 Swedenborg's ethics, tlie term. ' neighbour ' being 
 extended to cover all human relations, the 
 individual, one's country, the world and the 
 Church. While this in no way ignores inevitable 
 race differences, it demands the recognition of 
 the common heritage of the human family, and 
 holds out the hope of an ultimate international 
 unity and brotherhood. This is the end, purpose 
 and climax of Swedenborg's ethical philosophy, 
 and is the very outcome of his conception of 
 Infinite Being as the Infinite Good, or the 
 summum bonum. 
 
 Whether in discussing the fundamental and 
 complex problems involved in conceptions of 
 Deity and immortality or the question of duty, 
 the whole of Swedenborg's philosophy culmi- 
 nates, then, in this doctrine of Use, or Altruism, 
 which will mean, in ultimate practice, a perfectly 
 ordered world and the happiness of the race. 
 While Swedenborg's doctrine of Use, or Altruism, 
 bears some resemblance to Plato's conception of 
 the functions of the state and the individual, 
 it is necessarily dissimilar because of their 
 different point of view, and the mental atmos- 
 phere in which they lived. 
 
 Swedenborg found his ideal State in the 
 government and organic unity of the Divine 
 120
 
 RELATIONS TO MODERN THOUGHT 
 
 Kingdom, in the heavens of which, as he de- 
 clares, he had conscious knowledge during a 
 long period of unique spiritual experiences. And 
 in bringing the knowledge thus gained to bear 
 on human problems, he sets forth the principles 
 which must rule in the human organic world, 
 showing that a true philosophical theology 
 has a direct and intimate bearing on life, duty 
 and practice, and not only in this world but the 
 world to come. For on the question of the 
 immortal life Swedenborg writes with reasoned 
 and strong conviction, the outcome of his unique 
 experiences. What, in the Christian view, is 
 vague and nebulous he renders emphatically 
 clear, not only by telling the result of his own 
 observations in the other world, but in philo- 
 sophic deduction from facts. In the light of his 
 argument and statements man stands out clearly 
 in the other life as a perfect, complete, conscious, 
 rational being. This is the antithesis of 
 the shadowy conceptions undeniably current 
 among Christians to-day. It co-ordinates the 
 mundane life with the spiritual, indicates the 
 unity of mankind in both worlds, and imparts 
 a true dignity and grandeur to the idea of 
 immortality. 
 
 Man, then, is a spiritual being not only intrinsi- 
 121
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 cally as to personality, but also in his relation 
 to God and the world. He is not an accident 
 of evolution, but the ultimate factor of creation. 
 The world, the non-ego, being the plane of man's 
 existence, it is pervaded by that spirituality 
 which renders it intelligible. In fact, for 
 Swedenborg the whole universe is the expres- 
 sion of the spiritual. It exists from the Divine ; 
 God is in it by immanence and discreted from 
 it by transcendence, and therefore infinite love 
 and infinite intelligence are manifest in it and 
 discernible in it ; which, working in men accord- 
 ing to the degree of each one's finite reception 
 shall, in the fulfilment of the ultimate Divine 
 purpose, realize a spiritual Kingdom wherein 
 justice, peace, righteousness and brotherhood 
 will be the permanent elements. If this be a 
 true presentation, in brief, of some of the chief 
 points in Swedenborg's theological philosophy 
 then it seems explicable why its range of 
 influence is not inconsiderable, and why it has 
 commended itself to men of a studious and 
 practical turn of mind. 
 
 122
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 BIOGKAPHIES 
 
 AN exhaustive and trustworthy account of Swedenborg, 
 his life, his work, and his relations with his contem- 
 poraries is to be found in the Documents Concerning 
 Swedenborg, in three volumes, compiled and edited 
 by R. L. Tafel, A.M., Ph.D., Swedenborg Society, 
 1 Bloomsbury Street. Excellent biographies are also : 
 Swedenborg and His Mission, by Benjamin Worcester ; 
 Emanuel Swedenborg : a JJiography, by J. J. Garth 
 Wilkinson ; Hobart's Life of Swedenborg ; Emanuel 
 Swedenborg : A Lecture by the Rev. John Hyde. Also 
 Articles in Prospective Review, May 1850, National 
 Review, 1858; Herder on Swedenborg in Werke zur 
 Philosophic der Geschichte, vol. xii. pp. 1 1 0-25 ; Goerres, 
 Emanuel Swedenborg, Seine Visionen und sein Verhalt- 
 niss zur Kirche, 1827 ; Doerner, Geschichte Protestant- 
 ischer Theologie( Munich, 1867) ; Sammlung von Urkunden, 
 Dr. J. F. Immanuel Tafel (Tubingen, 1841). Also the 
 quite recent works : Emanuel Swedenborg : his Life, 
 Teaching and Influence, by George Trobridge (Frederick 
 Warne & Co., London and New York), pp. 140; 
 Swedenborg, af Ernst Liljedahl : De Storsta Markes- 
 mannen, IX Stockholm (Hugo Gebers), p. 72 ; Grund- 
 dragen af Swedenborgs Lif, af Alfred H. Stroh (Stock- 
 holm : Nykyrkliga Bokforlaget, 1908, 811), p. 176 ; A 
 Great Thinker : Review of Swedenborg's Complete Works. 
 Rotch Edition, by Mayo Hazeltine (Reprint from the 
 New York Sun), 1908; Le Prophete du Nord: Vie et 
 123
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 Doctrine de Swedenborg, avec portrait et diagrammes, 
 par Charles Byse (Paris : Librairie Fischbacher, 33, rue 
 de la Seine). 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 A Bibliography of Swedenborg, Royal 4to. Com- 
 piled by the Rev. James Hyde : Swedenborg Society, 
 London. 
 
 The works of Swedenborg have been translated for 
 the larger part into English, German, French, Swedish, 
 Danish and Italian. Single treatises have been pub- 
 lished in Russian, Spanish, Norwegian, Dutch, Welsh, 
 Icelandic, Japanese, Arabic, Hindi, and Esperanto. 
 
 The Swedenborg Society, 1 Bloomsbury Street, London, 
 publishes a uniform edition of the Theological Works in 
 twenty-nine volumes, and the Scientific Works in ten 
 volumes, several of the latter being out of print and 
 new editions in preparation. 
 
 The American Swedenborg Printing and Publishing 
 Society, 3 W. 29th Street, New York, publishes the 
 Theological Works in a complete and uniform edition, 
 and has in course of production a very elegant edition 
 in Latin, and one in Latin and English. 
 
 A considerable number of Swedenborg's works were 
 published posthumously, including the extensive exposi- 
 tion the Apocalypse Explained. Thirteen folio volumes 
 of photo-lithograph copies of the original MSS. in the 
 Royal Library at Stockholm have been published through 
 the donations of followers in England and America. 
 
 The collateral literature connected with Swedenborg 
 and the New Church is very extensive. The entries 
 under ' Swedberg Swedenborg ' in the Catalogue of the 
 British Museum number between five and six hundred. 
 124
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 PUBLISHED WORKS 
 
 IN ENGLISH 
 A. THEOLOGICAL 
 
 The Apocalypse Explained according to the Spiritual 
 Sense. Six vols. 
 
 The Apocalypse Revealed, wherein are disclosed the 
 Arcana there foretold which have hitherto remained 
 concealed. 
 
 Arcana Codestia. The Heavenly Arcana contained in 
 the Holy Scripture or Word of the Lord unfolded, be- 
 ginning with the Book of Genesis i., together with 
 wonderful things seen in the World of Spirits and in 
 the Heaven of Angels. Twelve vols. 
 
 The Athanasian Creed and Subjects connected therewith. 
 
 Brief Exposition of the Doctrine of the New Church. 
 
 Canons : or the Entire Theology of the New Church 
 (in outline). Posthumous. 
 
 Delights of Wisdom pertaining to Conjugial Love. 
 
 The Coronis, Appendix to the True Christian Re- 
 ligion. Treating of the Four Churches on the Earth 
 from the Creation of the World, their Periods and 
 their Consummation. Of the New Church which is to 
 succeed those Four, which will be truly Christian and 
 the Crown of the Preceding ones, etc. 
 
 Angelic Wisdom concerning the Divine Love and the 
 Divine Wisdom. 
 
 Angelic Wisdom concerning the Divine Providence. 
 
 Doctrine of Life for the New Jerusalem. From the 
 Commandments of the Decalogue. 
 
 Doctrine of the New Jerusalem concerning Charity. 
 
 Doctrine of the New Jerusalem concerning Faith. 
 
 125
 
 SWEDENBORG 
 
 Doctrine of the New Jerusalem concerning the Lord. 
 
 Doctrine of the New Jerusalem concerning the Sacred 
 /Scripture. 
 
 The Earths in our Solar System, which are called 
 Planets, and the Earths in the Starry Heavens. With 
 an Account of their Inhabitants and also of the Spirits 
 and Angels there : from what has been seen and heard. 
 
 Heaven and its Wonders and If ell : from things heard 
 and seen. 
 
 The Intercourse of the Body and the Soul (De Commercio). 
 
 An Account of the Last Judgment and Babylon 
 destroyed, showing that all the predictions in the 
 Apocalypse are at this day fulfilled. 
 
 The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine, 
 according to what has been heard from Heaven, to 
 which is prefixed Information regarding the New 
 Heaven and the New Earth. 
 
 The Spiritual Diary of Emanuel Swedenborg. Being 
 the record during eighteen years of his supernatural 
 experience. Five vols. 
 
 Summary Exposition of the Internal Sense of the 
 Prophets and Psalms. 
 
 The True Christian Religion. Containing the Uni- 
 versal Theology of the New Church. 
 
 The White Horse mentioned in the Apocalypse. 
 
 B. SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. 
 
 The Infinite, and the Final Cause of Creation. 
 Motion and Position of the Earth and the Planets. 
 Ontology, or the Signification of Philosophical Terms. 
 Prindpia, or the First Principles of Natural Things : 
 being New Attempts towards a Philosophical Explanation 
 
 126
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 of the Elementary World. Translation from the Latin 
 by the Rev. Augustus Clissold, M.A. Two vols. 
 
 Principles of Chemistry, with other Treatises. Trans- 
 lated by Strutt. 
 
 The Economy of the Animal Kingdom, considered 
 Anatomically, Physically and Philosophically. Two vols. 
 Translated by J. J. Garth Wilkinson. 
 
 The Animal Kingdom. Considered Anatomically, 
 Physically and Philosophically. Two vols. Translated 
 by J. J. Garth Wilkinson. 
 
 Scientific and Philosophical Treatises : on Anatomy, 
 Physiology, Psychology and Philosophy. Published by 
 the Swedenborg Scientific Association. 
 
 The Soul ; or, Rational Psychology. Translated and 
 edited by Frank Sewall. 
 
 Miscellaneous Observations connected with the Physical 
 Sciences. Translated by Strutt. 
 
 On Generation. Posthumous. Translated by J. J. 
 Garth Wilkinson. 
 
 C. COLLATERAL TREATISES 
 
 Emanuel Swedenborg as an Anatomist and Physiologist. 
 By Professor Dr. Gustaf Retzius. Published under the 
 Auspices of the Swedenborg Scientific Association : Bryn 
 Athyn Pa. 1903. 
 
 Emanuel Swedenborg sasom Hjarnanatom och Fysio- 
 logisk Psykolog : af Alfred H. Stroh, M.A. (Dpsala. 
 1909.) 
 
 The Cartesian Controversy at Upsala, 1663-1689, and 
 
 its connection with Swedenborg's Nebular Hypothesis. 
 
 By Alfred H. Stroh. From the Proceedings of the Third 
 
 International Congress for Philosophy (Heidelberg, 1908.) 
 
 127
 
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