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THE NEW METAPHYSICS 
 
MORRISON AND GIBB, EDINBURGH, 
 PRINTERS TO HER MAJESTY'S STATIONERY OFFICE. 
 
THE NEW METAPHYSICS 
 
 OR 
 
 THE LAW OF END, CAUSE, AND EFFECT 
 
 WITH OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 BY 
 
 FRANK SEWALL 
 if 
 
 JAMES SPEIRS 
 36 BLOOMSBUKY STREET, LONDON 
 
 1888 
 
<z 
 
 
TO THE READER. 
 
 TN the following pages I have discussed a theme as 
 -* old as philosophy itself, and in terras worn thread- 
 bare by ages of controversy. It is only because I believe 
 there is something substantially new in the argument here 
 presented, and that even the hackneyed language of meta- 
 physics may yet be clothed with living meaning, that I 
 venture to offer to the public this brief treatise. 
 
 I have included in the volume the essay entitled " A 
 Drama of Creation," and a number of other Articles 
 which have appeared in periodicals or as pamphlets, all 
 of which bear directly on the theme which gives this 
 volume its title. 
 
 FKANK SEWALL. 
 
 EOYAL TERRACE, CROSSBILL, 
 GLASGOW, 1 4th November 1887. 
 
 865103 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGK 1 
 
 To THE READER, v 
 
 THE NEW METAPHYSICS; 
 OR, THE LAW OP END, CAUSE, AND EFFECT. 
 
 PART I. 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Definition of Metaphysics History of Metaphysical Re- 
 search What lies beyond Matter ? Unity of all Being 
 sought for Monism and Dualism The Monist's Diffi- 
 culty Present Monism Materialistic Opposites Meet 
 Dualism Dualist's Difficulty Idea, Sensation, Sub- 
 stance Locke's Doctrine of Substance Agnosticism 
 essentially Dualistic Is there a Third Position? 
 Tendencies of Modern Thought toward a New View : 
 I. Unity of Law ; II. " Law in the Spiritual World ; " 
 III. Immanence of Deity, ...... 3-16 
 
 The New Metaphysics Theology and Science The Prob- 
 lem Matter and Spirit Defects in the Old Methods 
 How is certain Knowledge attainable ? Descartes 
 
 Hegel Classification of Being, 17-22 
 
 vii 
 
viii CONTENTS. 
 
 PART II. 
 THE DOCTRINE OF DISCRETE DEGREES. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Discrete Degrees End, Cause, Effect Degrees in 
 Series Continuous Degrees Illustrative Diagrams 
 Discrete Degrees are Three Degrees of Comparison 
 versus Degrees of Production Simultaneous and Suc- 
 cessive Order End, Cause, and Effect Inconvertible- 
 Mistaken for Continuous Degrees Leibnitz, Plato 
 Christian Materialism The Hylic School Discrete 
 Degrees a New Doctrine John Stuart Mill on Cause 
 and Effect Danger of Pantheism The Solution 
 Offered Degrees of Substance versus Matter The 
 One Substance Discrete Degrees Universal Examples 
 of Discrete Degrees "Will, Understanding, Exercise 
 Endeavour, Force, Motion Living Forces Love, 
 "Wisdom, Use Perfection of the Universe, . . . 23-46 
 
 PART III. 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF DISCRETE DEGREES AS APPLIED TO THE 
 CREATION AND THE EXISTENCE OF THE WORLD. 
 
 Degrees in Existence Degrees in Creation How Being 
 Exists Atmospheres Degrees of Divine Existence 
 Matter is not " all that Exists " Degrees of Substance 
 Matter and Substance What is Matter ? . . . 47-53 
 
 Theology the Science of the End What makes a World ? 
 Two Worlds ; Two Suns Time and Space : how 
 Created Origin of Matter The End of Creation 
 Nature is not God Uses of Creation produced through 
 the Earths Ends in Effects Love the Creator Love 
 demands an Object God and the " not-God " Creation 
 
CONTENTS. ix 
 
 PAGE 
 
 proceeding by Spheres Time and Space Necessary 
 Man's Immortality The End of Creation, where attained 
 Substances Spiritual "What makes Matter real ? The 
 Existence of Matter Form and Substance Matter a 
 Means to a Divine End Discrete Classification of 
 Knowledge Physics, Metaphysics, and Theology 
 Limitations of Physics Sublime Uses of Physics 
 Living versus Dead Science Union of the Sciences 
 The Science of the End Revelation, .... 54-79 
 Resumt Infinity and Eternity God the Inmost Con- 
 tinuous Degrees in each Discrete Degree The Key to 
 Causes Knowledge of Degrees The Problem Solved 
 Esse, Existere, Procedere Auras and Atmospheres 
 The Mineral Basis The Angelic Heavens The Uni- 
 verse is End, Cause, and Effect The End of Creation 
 attained Diagram illustrative of Creation by Discrete 
 Degrees in Descending and Ascending Order, . . 80-92 
 
 THE WORD: IN CREATION, IN REDEMPTION, IN HUMANITY 
 Pre-Christian Doctrines of the LOGOS, .... 96 
 
 The WORD in Creation, 97 
 
 The WORD in Revelation, 101 
 
 The WORD in Redemption, 103 
 
 The WORD as God Present, 106 
 
 The WORD in the World's History, . . . .108 
 
 The WORD in the New Creation, 110 
 
 The Spiritual Sense of the WORD, .... 112 
 
x CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF SWEDENBORG, .... 117-141 
 
 THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE 
 
 Goldwin Smith on the Progress of Science Preponder- 
 ance of Physical Studies A New Prometheus The 
 Weakest go down Herbert Spencer's New Basis of 
 Ethics Religion of Industrial Arts The Educa- 
 tional Use of Science The Survival of the Strongest 
 How to get Wisdom from Science The Utiliza- 
 tion of Science Morality of the Past What is 
 our Duty? 145-158 
 
 THE PERSONALITY OF GOD A LOGICAL NECESSITY, . 161-170 
 A DRAMA OF CREATION, 173-208. 
 
THE NEW METAPHYSICS. 
 
THE NEW METAPHYSICS 
 
 PAET I. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 IF we take the meaning of Metaphysics to be that which 
 appears from the original use of the term by Aristotle, 
 where, after treating of nature or TO. <^vo-t/ca, he discusses 
 other topics under the title Ta /xcra TO, <v<rtKa, "after" or 
 "beyond the physics," a sufficiently clear idea will be 
 had of the sense in which the term is used in the present 
 treatise. 
 
 What lies beyond this physical, visible, and tangible 
 world of nature ? If anything, then its realm is the 
 subject of metaphysics; the laws that govern it; the 
 relations it sustains to the world of tangible things, 
 these we shall hold to be the proper subjects of meta- 
 physical investigation. 
 
 Understood in this sense metaphysics is a thing quite 
 distinct from those vague creations of the mind which 
 have for so long a time borne this name, and brought 
 it into discredit with practical thinkers. To be meta- 
 physical has only too often been held to mean the same 
 as to be obscure, in the clouds, speculative, not practical. 
 
4 DEFINITION OF METAPHYSICS. 
 
 Perhaps there have been sufficient causes in the past for 
 the wide prevalence in our day of this prejudicial notion. 
 It shall be my attempt to remove this burden of miscon- 
 ception and prejudice, and to deal with our subject as one 
 that is not only of practical import, but capable of being 
 clsarly compiehended in every step. 
 
 ikil besides being something more than a name for any 
 ;kind of cloudy speculation, metaphysics at the same time 
 'id to be considered a branch of study quite distinct from 
 other forms of abstract research. Thus it is not identical 
 with philosophy, although a branch of it. While all 
 metaphysics is philosophy, all philosophy is not meta- 
 physics. Treating indeed of things of spirit and mind 
 as lying "beyond the physics," yet is metaphysics not 
 psychology, for this treats of the nature and laws of spirit 
 as exhibited in the individual human subject, while meta- 
 physics treats of spirit or mind in its operations in nature 
 at large. And further, we must distinguish between 
 metaphysics and spiritual or revealed knowledge in 
 general, since the latter has a religious bearing, while 
 the former is strictly and impassively scientific in its 
 scope and application. 
 
 The history of metaphysics has been that of a fruitless 
 effort 
 
 First, To find what if anything lies beyond matter, or 
 even our sense of it ; 
 
 Second, How is that Beyond connected with the physi- 
 cal substance we feel, see, and hear 1 
 
 The Beyond may occupy either of two relations. 
 The soul may speak of the body as its " beyond ; " the 
 body may say the same of the soul or of the power that 
 wills, thinks, acts, and feels in it ; but the term meta- 
 
MONISM AND DUALISM. 5 
 
 physics plainly means a search for that which lies leyond 
 matter, or the physical world. 
 
 Philosophy from its very first has sought to establish 
 as a principle the unity of all being, and to resolve all 
 things, however multiform and manifold in appearance, 
 into a single, permanent, self-existent, eternal One. That 
 the search began from physical knowledge as the starting- 
 point denotes indeed that to its view the world beyond 
 meant all that part of human experience which exhibited 
 mental force or the power of ideas. The relation of this 
 to the world of matter became a foremost question. 
 
 Two positions resulted from this inquiry 
 
 The one, purely philosophical, of Monism ; 
 
 The other, religious and popular, of Dualism. 
 
 Between these two the thinking world has ever been 
 and still is divided. After twenty-five hundred years of 
 philosophizing, men still have to admit their failure to 
 arrive at an answer which shall be satisfactory to all, 
 to the questions : What is matter 1 what is mind ? Let 
 us briefly examine these two positions respectively. 
 
 To make mind and matter identical, to say that the 
 thinker and the thing thought of, the subject and the 
 object of sensation, are one and the same kind of sub- 
 stance, is a short way out of many difficulties, and one 
 that is warranted by some of the deepest and most 
 important maxims of both philosophy and religion. God 
 is the All. God is one. All things are therefore one in 
 Him ; and things that are unlike and opposed, as matter 
 and spirit, in Him the One lose their unlikeness, and 
 are resolved into the one and the same. Matter is the 
 world extended; mind is the world thinking. In God 
 who is spirit, and in whom all being is all intelligence, 
 
6 THE MONISTS DIFFICULTY. 
 
 the two become one. So taught Descartes and his 
 followers. Spinoza saw matter and spirit as only two 
 modal substances, different only in relation to each other, 
 but losing all difference in the Absolute and All from and 
 in which they are. Aristotle ages before had said that 
 things thought of became, as such, a part of the intelligent 
 or thinking being himself, and thus the world may be 
 resolved into intelligence. Before him Plato had shown 
 how intelligence is the creative power which from pre- 
 existent eternal ideas has created a world of corporeal 
 things. Thus in the sweet sense of the unity of all with 
 itself, and of the possibility of its being effected only by 
 things similar to itself, the mind finds itself disposed to 
 rest content with this theory of monism, quite willing to 
 attribute the seeming opposition of spirit and matter, not 
 to the absolute nature of things, but to our meanwhile 
 ignorant apprehension of that nature. 
 
 Two unhappy facts come in to disturb this tranquil 
 dream of the monists : 
 
 One is the twofold application of which the theory is 
 capable of ; 
 
 The other the fatal result of either application when 
 carried to the extreme. 
 
 Thus, if it be true that matter and mind are one and 
 the same substance, it is evident that the one may as 
 truly be matter as mind. Deity may be resolved into 
 nature, mind into bodily sensation, and cause into mere 
 atomic modes and forces. So the French school of the 
 Materialists arose as a legitimate form or outgrowth of the 
 monistic theory. 
 
 The German Idealists, on the other hand, with Leibnitz 
 and Spinoza, resolved the world into God as into pure 
 
PRESENT MONISM MATERIALISTIC. 7 
 
 spirit and ideal essence. Matter and spirit are one, but 
 the one is spirit. The result was only a return of the 
 fallacies of the Greek Sophists. If mind is all, and 
 thought and being are one, then the world is what I 
 think it : and as no two minds agree, it follows that there 
 is no real absolute world. 
 
 Certain knowledge must give way therefore to opinion 
 in all things. Not knowledge, but doubt, is the normal 
 state of the mind, and the world and even our own exist- 
 ence resolve themselves into a mere succession of dreams 
 and guesses. 
 
 The monism of to-day belongs rather to the material- 
 istic than to the idealistic school. When Huxley says that 
 it is a matter of indifference whether we express the facts 
 of matter in terms of mind or the reverse, he implies that 
 the essence is one, only figuring under different names. 
 The remarkable changes which the physical sciences have 
 been recently undergoing, all show this one philosophical 
 tendency to monism, although of a materialistic kind. 
 " L'atom et la force ; voila Tunivers ! " exclaims Saigey 
 in La Physique Moderne. The Conservation of Energy, 
 the Equivalence and Transmutation of Forces, the Equa- 
 tion of Physical and Mental Forces, the reduction of 
 even the moral impulses of man, and thus of the whole 
 sphere of ethics and religion, to purely material origins, 
 and the establishment of their mechanical equivalents, all 
 these are strictly monistic theories. 
 
 Thus the most opposite schools of thought really meet 
 in the philosophic goal of monism. They necessarily 
 converge to this so far as they are impelled by the 
 genuine philosophic spirit, the search for the principle 
 of unity in all things. The three most divergent schools 
 
8 OPPOSITES MEET. 
 
 in modern philosophy have been, perhaps, the Materialists 
 and Sensationalists of France, as represented by Helvetius 
 and the Systkme de la Nature ; the Idealists of Germany, 
 from Spinoza to Hegel; and as the offshoot of these, 
 the Scepticism of Hume and his followers in England. 
 Unlike as these are in their dealing with phenomena, 
 they all agree in asserting the essential oneness and same- 
 ness of spirit and matter, under whatever difference of 
 manifestation and appearance. 
 
 The religious and the popular bent of the human mind 
 has, on the other hand, always been toward Dualism, or 
 the assertion of the absolute separation and unlikeness of 
 matter and spirit. As religion has placed at variance 
 God and man, the spirit and the flesh, grace and nature, 
 heaven and the world, so has the popular mind always 
 readily accepted the relation of the seen and the unseen 
 worlds as one of utter and irreconcilable separation and 
 antagonism. Everything pertaining to mind, spirit, and 
 soul essentially constitute an " other world ; " a world 
 which " flesh and blood do not inherit," and which being 
 incorruptible can never be invaded by that which is sub- 
 ject to corruption. Even when the ideas of spirit are 
 only such as are themselves grossly material, as in the 
 worship of savage tribes, and in the various sects of 
 Spiritists and necromancers ancient and modern, as well 
 as in the ordinary ghost-lore of all climes and ages, the 
 line seems to be no less distinctly drawn between spirit- 
 substance and world-substance. That the distinction is 
 essentially an ideal one is evident from the fact that 
 an apparition, at first mistaken for a being of flesh and 
 blood, becomes an object of terror only when known to 
 belong to and to have come from the "other world." 
 
DUALISM. 9 
 
 But apart from all superstitious and abnormal impres- 
 sions, the natural tendency of all minds is to regard mind 
 and matter as unlike and distinct. A certain substantial 
 quality is attributed to matter which is denied to mind, 
 while yet the world of notions has an existence which is 
 never disputed. . How these two are related is not yet 
 inquired into. To do this would demand an inquiry into 
 the nature of the respective worlds or planes of experience, 
 which inquiry itself arises from a philosophic impulse. It 
 is here in this position of dualism, then, as in its natural 
 status, that philosophy finds the mind, and as education 
 and disposition favour, seeks to lead it up to monism 
 as its goal. Meanwhile the senses and the religious 
 instincts all tend to dispute this principle of the unity of 
 mind and matter. There seems to be something profane 
 in this commingling of the finite with the infinite, of the 
 visible with the invisible, and something unlawful in 
 breaking down the awful barrier set up in the nature of 
 things. 
 
 That human speech is everywhere made up of physical 
 and corporeal terms applied to things purely immaterial 
 and mental, is as natural a circumstance as that men's 
 souls should act through the bodies given them for 
 the purpose; it is not an evidence of the identity 
 of the two sets of things, but only of their perfect cor- 
 respondence. It is impossible indeed to leave revelation 
 entirely out of the account in considering what the 
 purely natural or savage mind would conclude as to the 
 relation of spirit and body, until, at least, we can prove 
 that at any given period there had never been a previous 
 revelation of supernatural knowledge to man. But without 
 implication of formal religious tenets, we may safely hold 
 
io THE DUALISTS DIFFICULTY. 
 
 that men, uninstructed in philosophy and even in states 
 of considerable simplicity, provided they be not grossly 
 brutalized or debased so as to render all normal mental 
 action impossible, have a clear intuition of the difference 
 between the reality of an idea and the reality of its 
 material embodiments, and that only a long training in 
 philosophical processes of thought will bring them to see 
 that the thing and the idea of the thing are one and the 
 same substance under various conditions. 
 
 But while the dualist is thus positive in his perception 
 of the difference between spirit and matter, he is by 
 no means to be called upon at random to define and 
 prove it. Like most things of perception, this difference 
 is known best by feeling it, and can only poorly be re- 
 presented to intellectual sight. He thinks indeed he has 
 made a clinching definition when he asks you if you know 
 the difference between a " lamp-post in idea " and a 
 " lamp-post which you run against in the dark," for- 
 getting that all that the latter experience positively 
 amounts to is, after all, an idea, or if you like better, a 
 sensation of a " lamp-post run against in the dark." The 
 latter idea is probably more vivid than the mere idea of 
 a lamp-post in general. It is a more particular idea in 
 that it is an idea of vastly more reality and more hard- 
 ness and impenetrability as belonging to that particular 
 lamp-post. But what the experimental philosopher carries 
 away from the experience is not the lamp-post but the 
 " idea of a lamp-post " after all. What that something 
 is which lies behind the sensation and constitutes the 
 separate and absolute substance of matter itself, the un- 
 lettered observer does not presume to define. He is 
 willing " to take the evidence of his senses," and, ignoring 
 
IDEA, SENSATION, SUBSTANCE. n 
 
 entirely the old difficulty which the Greek philosophers 
 experienced in reasoning from the like to the unlike, he 
 readily attributes to these material substances themselves 
 that which his sensations tell him about them, as if the 
 sensations belonged equally to the material object and his 
 own mind. Thus he says the orange is sweet, round, 
 yellow, soft, when really these are only the sensations 
 which his own mind has received in regard to the orange. 
 What is the orange apart from or beyond these his own 
 sensations ? Do we know that it is anything \ 
 
 The difficulty becomes the more embarrassing when we 
 take into consideration the source of our knowledge. If 
 it be true that all the knowledge of the mind comes 
 through the senses, then the limit of our senses is the limit 
 of our knowledge, and our knowledge of the orange then 
 becomes limited to the knowledge of our sensations of 
 it. These we have seen to be the several sensations of 
 sweetness, roundness, etc. But these do not make up the 
 substance itself of the orange. 
 
 Has then the orange no substance but only the qualities 
 belonging to a substance] The qualities are all that 
 the senses convey to us. They are all that we can 
 attribute to the thing itself. Then the thing itself we can 
 never know*? Shall we now deny its existence altogether 1 ? 
 
 If we do this, it is clear that we are no longer dualists. 
 We have in the twinkling of an eye gone over to the 
 monists in spite of all our protests and abhorrence. If 
 there is nothing beyond our sensations of things, then 
 matter is only modified sensation, and all things are one 
 in substance after all. 
 
 But the dualist does not thus readily abandon his 
 theory. Two positions still remain to him. One is that 
 
12 LOCKE'S DOCTRINE OF SUBSTANCE. 
 
 of the vantage ground lie finds in Locke's doctrine of the 
 intuitive knowledge of substance ; the other is the kind 
 of dernier ressort which is afforded him in modern 
 Agnosticism. Locke, in his doctrine of the Human Under- 
 standing, while laying down the general principle, nihil in 
 intelledu quod non in sensu, that there is nothing in the 
 intellect which was not previously in the senses, excepts 
 one very important idea, namely, that of substance, or 
 the combined, total impression of an object which, while 
 the resultant of all its separate impressions, nevertheless 
 is composed by a process of mind, and is not itself con- 
 veyed to the mind by any distinct sense. In other words 
 we have an intuitive perception of substance but no 
 distinct sense of it, as we have a sense of hardness, 
 roundness, sweetness, etc. From this we infer two 
 important points ; one that the mind has the power of 
 originating and constructing ideas which cannot come 
 through the senses, and thus cannot be the product of an 
 external world; and secondly, unless our whole mental 
 apparatus is organized to deceive rather than to inform, 
 there must be in the external object a substance wholly 
 distinct from and exactly corresponding to that which the 
 mind has constructed in itself. 
 
 Both of these conclusions are distinctly dualistic. 
 Proceeding in the same manner, the mind projects into 
 the whole objective world a distinct, substantial reality, 
 and then builds up its two kingdoms of being, wholly 
 unlike in substance, but equally real and necessary the 
 world of matter and the world of mind. It is not to 
 be supposed that this discrimination between the sub- 
 jective and objective worlds, or that this or that process of 
 proving the reality of the latter is consciously entered into 
 
A GNOSTICISM IS D UALISTIC. 1 3 
 
 by the mind every time the judgment is formed. It is 
 not reflection but an instantaneous perception which yields 
 this conviction of the duality of mind and matter ; but 
 an examination of the mind in its operation enables us to 
 see on what kind of experience this perception is based. 
 The beholder perceives the external world as real. From 
 the reality of this perception he infers intuitively the 
 reality of the external world. 
 
 The other position to which the dualist may resort for 
 the maintenance of the theory is that of the present 
 Agnostic, a position which, while deserving a place in 
 the records of critical thought, cannot truly claim a place 
 in philosophy. 
 
 The claim of the Agnostic is one that is essentially and 
 entirely unphilosophic ; instead of arguing for the unity 
 of knowledge and the reconciliation of the two elements, 
 matter and spirit, it proclaims their absolute and unending 
 variance, and utters the cry of the final despair of more 
 than a one-sided, ever incomplete and misleading know- 
 ledge of things. Agnosticism is dualistic in that it em- 
 phatically declares that beyond the veil of sensation 
 there is a world of reality; but it is unphilosophic 
 because in the same breath it declares that what that 
 reality is can never be known, and that consequently 
 neither can the intercourse of that reality with the 
 sensible world be known. To know that an absolute 
 being is, without knowing what it is, is, philosophically, 
 to despair of the very centre and source of all true and 
 satisfying knowledge. To know that there exists a world 
 of which we know nothing is, at the same time, to admit 
 the extreme of dualism ; since nothing could more essen- 
 tially separate two worlds of being than the fact that the 
 
14 fS THERE A THIRD POSITION! 
 
 one is knowable to our mental organization and the other 
 is absolutely not so. 
 
 Such then is the division we find existing in human 
 philosophy and opinion after two thousand years of 
 metaphysical investigation regarding the actual world of 
 being : on the one hand, the monists claiming that mind 
 and matter are one and the same; on the other, the 
 dualists claiming that they are distinct. 
 
 Is there a third position, or can there be a new 
 metaphysics ? 
 
 The present age has not only exhibited a revival of 
 metaphysical study, which is in striking contrast with 
 the practical and materialistic tendencies so generally 
 characteristic of our time; but the turn which meta- 
 physical thought has taken has been plainly in the 
 direction of that which I shall attempt to show is verily 
 a new solution of the long-contemplated problem. 
 
 This favourable disposition of contemporary thought is 
 manifested, 
 
 First : in the general recognition of the Unity of Law. 
 The physicists have made the unity of nature and the 
 correlation of all the forces of nature a fundamental 
 principle in all modern and scientific research. While 
 the Agnostic school among them have been compelled to 
 stop short of extending this law of unity into the world 
 of the unknown Cause, and thus have been compelled to 
 seek their basis of unity in some of the ever -varying 
 phenomena of the sensible world, the other and a 
 growing division are ready to adopt as the principle of 
 this unity in nature the unity of the supernatural 
 Power and Law, and so to make all scientific progress 
 contribute to real metaphysical knowledge. 
 
UNITY OF LAW. 15 
 
 Meanwhile a distinct class of writers, possessed of 
 elevated perceptions and the power of wide generaliza- 
 tion, of whom the Duke of Argyll and Professor 
 Drummond in Great Britain, Professor Janet in France, 
 and Professor Hermann Lotze in Germany are notable 
 examples, have undertaken to extend the reign of natural 
 law into the spiritual world, in so far, at least, as to 
 show that beneficence, justice, intelligence, and love are 
 qualities discernible in the laws by which alike the 
 physical and spiritual worlds are created and governed. 
 To unify the laws by which worlds are governed is to 
 bring the worlds themselves into the most practical and 
 real contact, and to subject them to the view of a common 
 knowledge. When this unification of all law is accom- 
 plished, there would seem to be but one principle still 
 lacking, namely, that from which the law itself acquires 
 its unity, or that ground which still lies behind a single 
 Law for all worlds. 
 
 A second favourable disposition we find in a tendency 
 involved indeed in that which we have just described, 
 but forming a distinctly new feature in it. It is the 
 recognition which the idea of " law in a spiritual world " 
 implies, namely, that the spiritual is itself not only 
 " another world," but that it is a substantial world in the 
 truest sense. 
 
 This leads to a renewed investigation of the nature of 
 substance and its relation to matter. Unlike the ancient 
 Platonic inquiry based on the postulate of the primary 
 ideal substance, the process is now reversed, and from the 
 reality of matter, and the sure indications of law therein, 
 the reality of a spiritual world, a realm of substantial 
 ideas and of physical force is inferred. The study of 
 
1 6 IMMANENCE OF DEITY. 
 
 law in its objective forms, which has been the supreme 
 mission of modern science, thus lends a very positive aid 
 to the new metaphysics in having so closely identified 
 law with the subject-matter of law. 
 
 For even though the error be committed of reducing to 
 a single continuous plane things which occupy two planes 
 quite distinct, in thus confounding a law with the subject- 
 matter in which it is exhibited, still there is a gain 
 when the principle of unity extends the domain of law 
 into the spiritual world; for the notion of law carries 
 necessarily with it that of a substance in which it 
 operates, and "law in a spiritual world" suggests sub- 
 stances and forces there which are the subjects of 
 law. 
 
 A third favourable disposition of modern thought 
 toward a new departure in metaphysics lies in the 
 theological conception of the Immanence of Deity. God in 
 a world as at once its Life, its Order, its Law, and its 
 End or controlling Purpose, rather than God over a 
 world as its long-ago Creator and its far-away Ruler 
 and Judge, is the form of teaching which seems to be 
 everywhere gaining ground among thoughtful and earnest 
 theologians. The immanence of God in the world is 
 worthily attended by its grand correlative doctrines of 
 the immanence of Deity in the humanity of Christ, and 
 of the immanence of Christ Himself or the Word in the 
 Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, as their 
 genuine and only Inspiration and the source of their Unity 
 and Power. 
 
 Whether upon the basis of dualism or monism, these 
 characteristics of modern thought all favour a reconstruc- 
 tion of the fundamental notions of the nature of matter 
 
THE NE W METAPH YSICS. 1 7 
 
 and spirit, of the world and its cause, of the visible and 
 the invisible, and of the relations which these mutually 
 sustain. 
 
 I have ventured therefore to apply the title, The Xew 
 Metaphysics, to a theory which attempts the solution of 
 these ancient problems on a line of thought never, I 
 believe, hitherto applied, and by a method which coin- 
 cides harmoniously with the recent philosophic tendencies 
 above described. 
 
 The theory is that propounded by Swedenborg in his 
 doctrine of Discrete Degrees, or of End, Cause, and 
 Effect. 
 
 The history of this doctrine, as developed in the 
 writings of this author, would form a treatise by itself, 
 and cannot be examined in detail here. It will suffice 
 for our purpose to state that while, as a philosophic 
 theory or " working hypothesis," it was propounded in 
 the scientific and philosophical works of Swedenborg, 
 notably in the Animal Kingdom, yet it never received 
 its full corroboration, and became established as a 
 universal doctrine applying to both the natural and the 
 spiritual worlds, until its definition in the theological 
 writings, particularly in the work entitled Divine Love 
 and Wisdom}- The author nowhere names it a meta- 
 physical law the term metaphyics being one which 
 enters very rarely into his vocabulary. To him all 
 theology, all philosophy, all science were so veritably one 
 grand theatre of the Truth, that the use of any terms 
 indicative of conflicting planes of truth, or of truth as 
 theory unembodied in facts, was repugnant. The law of 
 Discrete Degrees is a distinct theological doctrine in 
 
 1 Sapientia Angelica de Dlvina Sapientia et de Divino Amore. 
 
 B 
 
i8 THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE. 
 
 Swedenborg, but not a whit the less a scientific principle 
 applicable to every phase of physical phenomena. Our 
 reason for denominating it a new metaphysical law 
 is that the object of this essay is to show how this 
 doctrine may be actually applied to present questions, and 
 to present modes of thinking, which, with a view to 
 general comprehension, may best be designated meta- 
 physical. Unfortunately, but undeniably, such is the 
 present status of thought in the learned world, that to 
 term a doctrine or law theological, is to imply at once 
 that it is not applicable to physical science; while the 
 term scientific means, to the popular ear, that which, 
 first of all, is not "theological." The conception of all 
 science as theological, because theology is the supreme 
 science, is one which would render the name and the 
 study of metaphysics unnecessary, but it is not a con- 
 ception which prevails in the thought of to-day, and we 
 must choose our terminology accordingly. 
 
 What, then, is the problem which the new metaphysics 
 proposes to solve 1 What is the solution it offers ; and 
 with what authority *? 
 
 The problem is that of the old difference between the 
 monists and the dualists : What is matter 1 ? What is 
 spirit ? Are they one or two kinds of being ? And what 
 relation do they bear to each other *? In answer, the 
 monist said, They are one ; the dualist said, They are two. 
 
 The new metaphysics says, They are one, and yet dis- 
 tinct ; or, to use our author's own expression, they are 
 distinctly one distinde unum. 
 
 To the question, How are they related 1 ? the monist 
 said, Their relation is that of essential identity, but 
 apparent difference. 
 
THE PROBLEM. 19 
 
 The dualist said, They are apparently one, but in reality 
 they are totally unlike. "We can only perceive and admit 
 their mutual influence ; we can never explain it, since 
 to explain it would be to show what connection exists 
 between kinds of being which, having nothing in common, 
 can have no connection. 
 
 The new metaphysics says, They are one, and at the 
 same time distinct; and they are related as effect and 
 cause, and by a law which is called correspondence. 
 
 The worth of the solution which the new metaphysics 
 thus offers will appear not in the terms in which it is 
 propounded, for these are in nowise new or unhackneyed, 
 but in the definition of these terms and in the degree of 
 authoritative force they derive by virtue of this defini- 
 tion. In other words, the explanation of the modes of 
 being and their relation will be sought in a definition of 
 being itself, and in such a definition as is necessarily im- 
 plied in the very notion itself of being. 
 
 In the solutions of the problem which philosophy has 
 hitherto offered, there has always been this defect, that 
 the proportion offered has had two members, one, the 
 necessary postulate growing out of the nature of the sub- 
 ject discussed; the other, that which has only an apparent 
 but no real being, and stands in no logical, but in only 
 an arbitrary relation to the necessary postulate. 
 
 Thus, in monism, the necessary postulate is the oneness 
 and the identity of all being ; but this was compelled to 
 admit to its companionship an apparent other being that 
 of the apparent and manifold world the creation, not of 
 logic, but of the senses. 
 
 In dualism, on the other hand, the necessary postulate 
 is that of the utter unlikeness and non-connection of the 
 
20 DEFECTS IN THE OLD METHODS. 
 
 two worlds, while the illogical fact, based on the experience 
 of the senses, but wholly unexplainable to the reason, is 
 that matter acts on spirit and spirit on matter, and that 
 things perceived are at least connected with the perceiving 
 agent, if not in some sense one and the same with it. 
 
 In the definition of being offered in the new metaphy- 
 sics, the whole, not dual, but trinal, constitution of being 
 flows alike from that which is involved in the notion of 
 being itself. If one plane or degree is a necessary postu- 
 late, the other two are equally so ; and if the postulate 
 " something is," or " something exists," is a necessary one, 
 then the three planes of that being or existence are an 
 equal necessity. Is there, then, such a definition of being 
 to be found in our notion of being itself that shall resolve 
 being into three distinct planes or degrees, each of which 
 is as clearly manifest and as logically necessary as the 
 general notion of being itself *? 
 
 The evolution of a world by a process of logic from a 
 fundamental single idea is no new process in metaphysics. 
 The Pythagoreans built up a world out of number. 
 " Atoms and motion," in no visible but a purely ideal 
 conception of them, are the simple raw material out of 
 which our modern scientists avow their readiness to build, 
 not only human brain, but human thought, will, moral 
 sense, and all. The success of these efforts must depend 
 on the degree in which the laws laid down by Descartes 
 and Pascal, on clearness of thought and certainty of know- 
 ledge, are obeyed. We must, it is evident, start with 
 some proposition that is clearly indisputable, such as the 
 fundamental one, " Something is ; " and the clearness and 
 certainty of this must be the standard by which to measure 
 the clearness and certainty of every proposition that follows. 
 
DESCARTES HEGEL. 21 
 
 If deductions from a fundamental statement can be un- 
 folded, logically or otherwise, in such a way that they are 
 all equally clear and certain as that from which we start, 
 then we may so far arrive at certain knowledge ; and if 
 our deductions embrace the world in their scope, then we 
 have a certain knowledge of the world. 
 
 It is well known that Descartes, starting with the 
 fundamental proposition which by himself could not be 
 disputed ' ' Cogito," / think, deduced not only the equally 
 necessary and clear proposition, " ergo sum," therefore / 
 am, but built thereupon his proof of the existence of God, 
 and then of the reliability of our knowledge of nature. 
 This we may call the process of evolution by clear per- 
 ception. 
 
 Hegel, on the other hand, affords us the remarkable 
 instance, in modern philosophy, of a purely logical develop- 
 ment of the conception of a world in all its widest 
 variety and completeness out of the fundamental postulate 
 of simple Being. It is unquestionably a system which 
 embraces, more than others of modern make, the rich stores 
 of ancient Platonism harmonized in a marvellous manner 
 with the best results of modern idealism. In a true philo- 
 sophic aim, it does not rest content so long as any field 
 of human life is left out of its scope ; and religion and the 
 arts, as well as ethics and politics, find themselves duly 
 ranged in its beautiful scheme. The conception of a 
 divine Trinity and the dogmas of the Christian Church 
 are even transformed into terms of this logical develop- 
 ment. Above all, the great idea that a trinal process of 
 existence, or of a trinity in unity, is involved in every 
 logical syllogism, as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, and 
 this in every conclusion formed by the mind, approaches 
 
2 2 CLASSIFICA TION OF BEING. 
 
 more nearly than any of modern philosophy to the doctrine 
 of Discrete Degrees, which forms the basis of the new 
 metaphysics. 
 
 What, then, is the doctrine of Discrete Degrees as 
 applied to the fundamental conception of Being 1 Granted 
 that " something is," what follows of necessity from this 
 supposition 1 
 
 We have seen how Descartes, setting out from a funda- 
 mental thesis, proceeded to demonstrate an evolution by 
 dear perception ; and also how Hegel has done the same 
 by the application of the logical process of thought ; the 
 process supplied by the new metaphysics we hold to be 
 that of the self-classification of being by interior gradation. 
 Its effort is not to develop the finite from the infinite, 
 nor the many from the one, but to see what is enveloped 
 in the idea of being itself, and how the infinitely many 
 are truly necessary to the being of an Infinite One. 
 
PAET II. 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF DISCRETE DEGREES. 
 
 IN all Being, whether universal or individual, there are 
 necessarily implied three distinct elements, which are 
 absolutely and entirely different, and which yet make a 
 one. No unity of being can exist without this trine. 
 " To be," even, when predicated of any existing thing, 
 means to be these three. 
 
 These three are END, CAUSE, and EFFECT. 
 
 If we contemplate any object, we shall find that it is 
 not a unit or a simple element in the sense that it is not 
 resolvable into these three constituents. If all being, 
 then, exists in these three discrete constituent planes or 
 degrees, shall we not find in the relation of these con- 
 stituents the real solution of the problem as to the nature 
 and the mutual relation of mind and matter, or of the 
 physical and the spiritual worlds ? 
 
 Any object we contemplate presents to us in the very 
 fact of its being, three constituent facts. It multiplies 
 itself into three, not by a process of negation or antithesis, 
 as in Hegel, or in Plato before him, nor by a borrowing of 
 other being than itself, but by an actual interior analysis 
 it discovers in itself these three 
 
 23 
 
24 DISCRETE DEGREES. 
 
 First The object existing as we see it, that is 
 
 the Effect. 
 Second The reason of its "being this, and not some 
 
 other object, which reason is its interior forming 
 
 principle or its Cause. 
 Third That from which its being arose ; that which 
 
 first moved to form it; that which as Desire 
 
 employed the reason as its forming instrument, 
 
 the End. 
 
 These three, then, are the constituent facts implied in 
 the being of any existing thing, and equally in the idea 
 of Universal Being itself. Whatever is, is end, cause, 
 and effect. Without a cause there can be no effect : 
 without an end, no cause. 
 
 The distinction may have to be drawn between actual 
 being and mere verbal or predicated being. We may 
 conceive, or at least may utter, a notion of being whose 
 actual existence is impossible. We may say a " three- 
 sided square," but we cannot call a " three-sided square " 
 a being or an object of thought or sense. So we may say 
 " End," or " Cause," or " Effect," meaning one of these 
 terms as isolated, as absolutely self-existent, or wholly 
 independent of the other two ; and yet we cannot really 
 make it an object of our thought, and we cannot say that 
 has actual being. No " End " has actual being unless it 
 is the End the desire and purpose of some ultimate 
 object or effect, which again must require its intermediate 
 and instrumental cause. Equally can no cause have actual 
 being unless it implies both the end which prompted it 
 and the effect it is to produce. Whether the effect be 
 actually realized or not, it must at least be contemplated 
 by us in order for us at the same time to contemplate 
 
END, CAUSE, AND EFFECT. 25 
 
 cause as actual. The same is true of our notion of 
 effect. It demands the accompanying notions of end 
 and cause, else it ceases to be an actual thing to our 
 minds. 
 
 It does not follow that because an end, apart from 
 cause and effect, cannot have actual existence, therefore 
 these three may not exist as true units, having each its 
 own constituent degrees of end, cause, and effect. The 
 desire in a man's mind may be rightly called the end, 
 which, through the reason of the intellect as cause, proceeds 
 into bodily act as the effect ; but in this case the desire, 
 which, so far as man is aware, is the originating motive of 
 the act, is itself an effect, involving its own higher and 
 hidden cause and end in powers within and above its 
 ken. Thus the spectacle of universal being is one of an 
 infinite series of involutions, of trines within trines, each 
 object brought into existence being the commencement of 
 a new series or of a new evolution of end, cause, and 
 effect, and yet without the possibility of the least con- 
 fusion, with no dimness of outline, with no possibility 
 of effacing these eternal distinctions these discrete 
 degrees fixed in the very nature of being end cause 
 effect. 
 
 That which constitutes the lowest degree in one series 
 may be the highest in a consequent series. The emotion 
 produced in Charles' mind is at once the effect of Henry's 
 appeal, and the end of his own subsequent resolution and 
 act. Even on the material plane there is a succession of 
 these series of ends, causes, and effects, one beneath the 
 other; and thus, "All effects or ultimate ends become 
 anew first ends in a continual series from God the Creator, 
 who is the First, to the conjunction of man with Him, 
 
26 DEGREES IN SERIES. 
 
 which is the last. That all ultimate ends become anew 
 first ends is evident from the fact that there is nothing so 
 inert and dead but has some efficiency in it, even the 
 particles of sand exhaling that which helps to produce, 
 and thus to effect something." 1 And as each individual 
 or smallest thing is resolvable into its trine of degrees, so 
 is each largest form of being, even to universal being 
 itself. Thus worlds exist, not only as comprising in them- 
 selves the three degrees, but also as constituting each its 
 several degree in a larger series. The physical world is 
 effect, or the lowest degree, in a trine, embracing the 
 spiritual world as cause, and God as End. But the 
 physical world is again divisible into its discrete planes 
 of being, which stand related to each other as end, 
 cause, and effect. Similarly is the spiritual world divisible 
 into its three planes in their successive order ; and at last 
 Deity Itself also exists in its own three Divine but dis- 
 crete degrees, which is the eternal Trinity " as it was in 
 the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without 
 end." 
 
 To avoid a misconception of this doctrine of degrees, it 
 is necessary that we arrive at a clear understanding of 
 what is meant by the terms, end, cause, and effect, as 
 applying to these degrees. The degrees are named " dis- 
 crete degrees " in distinction from " continuous," because 
 they are regarded as planes of existence entirely separate 
 and distinct from each other, and absolutely incapable of 
 being intermingled, blended, or in any way resolved one 
 into another. That the three degrees are distinct is quite 
 as important a fact regarding them as that they are or 
 make a one. On this absolute distinctness or separate- 
 1 Divine Love and Wisdom, No. 172. 
 
CONTINUO US DEGREES. 2 7 
 
 ness of the degrees rests their ability to make a one, and 
 thence to explain the unity of all being. 
 
 A continuous degree is a variation of being or quality 
 on its own plane, as from heavier to lighter, denser to 
 rarer, etc. Being on one plane, these degrees are also 
 named degrees of latitude. It is extension, succession, or 
 multiplication of the same element. The three " degrees 
 of comparison," positive, comparative, and superlative, 
 apply to the continuous degrees, because they state the 
 variation of an object which remains the same in kind or 
 quality. If we say " the sky is bluer than the violet," 
 the comparison is not between the different things, " sky " 
 and " violet," but between the degree of blueness existing 
 in each. Thus the continuous degrees never reach above 
 their own single plane of being or quality. They are 
 more or less, but not of different, but always of the same 
 thing. 
 
 Discrete degrees, on the other hand, are never of the 
 same, but always of entirely different forms or qualities 
 of being. Even though they are homogeneous in sub- 
 stance, and do actually differ in quantity, and so differ 
 by comparative or by continuous degrees, still their being 
 discrete consists in the absolutely new and clearly distinct 
 form or kind of being which each different degree assumes. 
 Thus, if we regard the point, the line, and the surface 
 comparatively, we might say that these differ in consist- 
 ing of one or more "points," or in the longer or shorter 
 " motion of a point," according to the definition we adopt ; 
 this would be a comparison by continuous degree, the 
 point being the standard of measurement. But if we 
 regard the line as a thing wholly distinct from a point, 
 although existing only by means or out of points, and if 
 
28 DISCRETE DEGREES. 
 
 we regard a surface as a thing wholly distinct from both 
 point and line, and yet existing wholly from these, we 
 shall then be regarding the surface itself in its three 
 discrete degrees^ the source from which it is, the means 
 ly which it is, and the effect or the resulting thing 
 itself. 
 
 It will be noticed that the line as line is wholly different 
 from a point, although the product of a point. It differs 
 as line from point by a discrete degree by thus being a 
 distinct thing from one substance or source. But if we 
 regard the line not as a line, but merely as more points than 
 one, then it differs from the point not by a discrete, but by 
 a continuous degree. If we arrange marbles in a series 
 thus : first, a single one, A ; second, three enclosed in a ring, 
 B ; and third, three such rings inclosed in a larger ring, C 
 
 then the relation of A, B, and C is that of discrete 
 degrees. Although C, like B and A, is composed wholly 
 of a homogeneous substance x, yet it is quite different 
 from A, and is produced out of the x of A only by 
 means of B's. Thus in C we may say that the three 
 degrees are one and yet distinct. If now we take the 
 elementary substance x, and simply multiply it with- 
 out regard to the geometrical progression, but only by 
 
THE THREE DEGREES. 
 
 29 
 
 indefinite accumulation of bodies like itself, we might 
 have 
 
 first, a single x element, A ; second, five x's arranged in 
 symmetrical order in a ring, D ; third, nine x's arranged 
 indiscriminately in a larger ring, E. The relation now 
 of A, D, and E is that of continuous, but not of discrete 
 degrees. If we compare the relation of E to A with that 
 of C to A, in the series of discrete degrees, we shall see 
 that while E, like C, is composed wholly of x's, and con- 
 sists, like C, of nine x's, yet it is not produced by means 
 of an intermediate B, as C is. There is no definite order 
 of progression in which a third is produced by, and is 
 dependent on a mediate. E can be constructed of A as 
 well without as with such an intermediate as D. 
 
 We therefore arrive at this clearer understanding of 
 the nature of discrete degrees, namely, that they must 
 always exist in a series of three, the first of which is in 
 the last by means of a mediate ; or of which the first is 
 in the middle, and the middle in the last. It is in this 
 fact that the unity of the three figures lies thus, not 
 in their identity, but their absolute diversity while yet 
 proceeding from a single source. In the last or lowest 
 degree, the three are one, not by identity or confusion 
 of substance, but by existing discretely, the first in the 
 
30 DEGREES OF PRODUCTION. 
 
 mediate, and through the mediate in the last. "While the 
 body C is composed wholly of the element x, yet x is 
 not in it immediately as A, but mediately as B, and 
 except as A and as composing B, x could never be in 
 and compose C. This, then, is the universal fact of dis- 
 crete degrees, that the first must be in the mediate, and 
 by the mediate in the last ; and that so in the last the 
 three make a one. 
 
 It will be noticed that in the above illustration of dis- 
 crete degrees, only one kind or plane of objects has been 
 considered. Our purpose has been to show as clearly as 
 possible how the discrete degrees are related to each 
 other, and thus how they differ from the continuous 
 degrees; and in order to compare the two series of 
 degrees, the discrete degrees were figuratively or geometri- 
 cally represented as existing in one plane or kind, just 
 as the continuous degrees must necessarily do. By com- 
 paring them thus on one plane, we have learned that the 
 continuous degrees are degrees of comparison indicating 
 the more or less of a certain thing or quality, whereas the 
 discrete degrees are degrees of production, or of the 
 development of an elementary first, through a mediate, 
 into a last. Such an image of the discrete degrees lies 
 in innumerable trinal series observable everywhere in the 
 physical world, wherein an inmost is enveloped in a 
 mediate, and so goes to construct a last. The fibres in 
 every nerve, muscle, and viscus exist in this trinal order. 
 A similar order of degrees is in every seed, in every fruit, 
 and in every metal and stone, for they are successive 
 compositions, or confasciculations and conglobations from 
 simples which are their first substances or materials. 1 
 1 Swedenborg, Divine Love and Wisdom, No. 207. 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS. 31 
 
 " The degrees of every subject and of every thing are 
 "homogeneous because they are produced from the first 
 degree. The formation of them is such that the first, 
 by binding together, rolling round, in a word by massing, 
 produces the second, and by it the third ; and distinguishes 
 each from the other by a superinduced covering. Hence 
 it is evident that the first degree is the principal and the 
 sole governing element in the subsequent ones. Con- 
 sequently the first degree is in all the subsequent ones." 
 
 But " when it is said that degrees are of this nature 
 with respect to each other, it is meant that the substances 
 are such in their degrees. Speaking by degrees is speaking 
 abstractedly, that is, universally, and thus in a way appli- 
 cable to any subject or thing which is in such degrees." * 
 
 Because our illustration of the relation of the discrete 
 degrees, both to each other and to the continuous degrees, 
 is drawn on the preceding page from the material or 
 geometrical plane, it must not therefore be inferred that 
 it is only to this plane of things that these degrees apply. 
 The application (of discrete degrees) may be made not 
 only to muscles and nerves, to the matter and parts of 
 the vegetable and mineral kingdoms, but " to the organic 
 substances which are the subjects of the thoughts and 
 affections in man, to the atmospheres, to heat and light, 
 and to love and wisdom." Thus those things which are 
 invisible and intangible, nay, those which are altogether 
 of the mind or of a spiritual substance, and thus in no 
 way subject to geometrical ratio or to molecular accumu- 
 lation, are equally subject to the three discrete degrees. 
 Of these equally with material or numerical subjects, it 
 can be said that they possess a first principle, a mediate 
 1 Nos. 195, 196. 
 
32 SIMULTANEOUS & SUCCESSIVE ORDER. 
 
 and a last, and that the first by means of the mediate is 
 in the last, and constitutes the all and only substance in 
 the last. In this way the doctrine of discrete degrees ex- 
 tends not only to natural things, but to civil and moral and 
 spiritual things, and to the whole and every part of them. 
 
 But besides learning to distinguish between the dis- 
 crete degrees and those which are merely continuous, it 
 is also necessary that we should understand that the 
 discrete degrees may exist both in simultaneous and 
 in successive order. When they are regarded as prior, 
 posterior, and postreme, they are in successive order ; 
 also when regarded as highest, inferior, and lowest ; but 
 when regarded as inmost, interior, and outmost, they are 
 in simultaneous order. Degrees in successive order may 
 be represented by a column divided into three sections, 
 called highest, inferior, lowest ; but if this column should 
 subside into a plane, that which in successive order was 
 the highest degree would in simultaneous order become 
 the inmost, the inferior would become the exterior, and 
 the lowest would become the outermost. Therefore, when 
 referring to discrete degrees, whether the first degree is 
 called the "inmost" degree, or the "highest" or "first" 
 degree, will depend upon the order in which the degrees 
 are regarded whether this be simultaneous or successive. 
 That the first degree should be before the last in time or 
 in successive order does not hinder its being the inmost 
 in the last in simultaneous order. 
 
 These two facts regarding the nature of the discrete 
 degrees are of the first importance when we come to 
 apply the principle of these degrees in studying the 
 nature of end, cause, and effect, viz. that the three 
 degrees while existing, the one within the others, are 
 
END, CAUSE, AND EFFECT. 33 
 
 yet entirely distinct and inconvertible; and, secondly, 
 that they exist in two orders, the simultaneous and the 
 successive. 
 
 If we have now obtained a clear vision of these discrete 
 degrees, we may proceed by means of them to examine 
 more definitely the nature of end, cause, and effect; to 
 establish their common relation, and so to apply our 
 knowledge of these to the solution of the great meta- 
 physical problem of the relation of mind to matter. 
 
 Recurring, then, to our fundamental proposition that in 
 all being there is necessarily involved the trine of end, 
 cause, and effect, we are now prepared to consider the 
 question in which kind of degrees does this trine reside, 
 since there are involved in all things also degrees of both 
 kinds, continuous and discrete. Are, then, end, cause, 
 and effect to be regarded as related according to the 
 continuous or discrete degrees of being 1 
 
 The fault in philosophy hitherto would seem to be in 
 having regarded the end, cause, and effect as only the 
 continuous degrees of a being. Under whatever name or 
 classification, it is in reality as variations in degree of the 
 same kind or quality, as being more or less dense or more 
 or less refined, that end has differed from cause, and cause 
 from effect. The monadology of Leibnitz, the atomistic 
 theories of the Greeks, the pantheism of all ages, only 
 repeat in different formularies the same fallacy that spirit 
 and matter, Creator and created, are the same being, 
 appearing and operating in different degrees of essential 
 purity and sublimity. The soul weighed down with 
 its grosser part is held to earth as by a law of natural 
 gravitation even in Plato. Spirit or breath is air, and 
 this is life ; and the "ethereal heavens," if not the stars, are 
 
34 CHRISTIAN MA TERIALISM. 
 
 the abode of the immortals. Even in Christian theology 
 the same doctrine has been taught with whatever con- 
 tradictory and illogical results, and so has influenced the 
 whole current of modern philosophic thought, namely, 
 that God is only a refined degree of matter. While it is 
 true that God has been dogmatically defined as a being 
 without " body, parts, or passions," yet in the same 
 breath the Christian has had to declare his belief that 
 God rose from the dead in a material body, and that 
 this is the all-sufficient proof that man when about to 
 enter his eternal home in heaven shall be raised from 
 the dead in a material body also, and that, however 
 purified and refined, this will still be the body that 
 was buried and raised to life again. The only answer 
 that the monistic philosopher at any period could give 
 to the problem how mind could operate upon matter, 
 has been the law that similars can touch and effect 
 similars. Whether the monists, in order to apply this 
 law, turned all matter into spirit, as did generally the 
 idealistic school, or turned all spirit into matter, as did 
 the materialists and sensualists, in order thus to bring the 
 active and passive agent into the category of similars, 
 the result remained the same : matter and spirit, the 
 world as caused and the world of causes, were essentially 
 similars, differing only as grosser and more subtle, as 
 denser and rarer, as visible and invisible. The degrees of 
 being were thus regarded only as continuous or on the 
 same plane, and their only relation and mutual connec- 
 tion was that of being indefinitely blended or fused 
 together. The idea that substance is anything else than 
 matter, while seemingly an old and familiar one, will be 
 found to mean, as generally employed, that the substance 
 
DISCRETE DEGREES A NEW DOCTRINE. 35 
 
 so referred to is only matter in a refined form. Not 
 only did the earliest school of Greek philosophers, the 
 so-called Hylic or Physical philosophers, seek, in this 
 sense, for the underlying " substance " of the world, but 
 the common idea of the masses from that day to this has 
 been that a " spiritual body " is only a thin filmy material 
 body such as one can see through ! The philosophers 
 have indeed in many schools of thought identified sub- 
 stance with Deity and with mental and spiritual entities, 
 but they have not at the same time separated this sub- 
 stance from matter by a discrete degree, but made it 
 rather continuous from matter by gradations of refine- 
 ment or purity or of active force. This, I hold, is the 
 reason why Swedenborg makes the remarkable declara- 
 tion : " Nothing, so far as I am aware, has hitherto 
 been known of discrete degrees but only of continuous 
 degrees; yet without a knowledge of both kinds of 
 degrees, not anything of cause can be truly known." 
 " He who thinks of creation not from discrete, but from 
 continuous degrees, can see nothing of them but from 
 effects and not from causes, and seeing from effects alone 
 is seeing from fallacies.''!). L. W., Nos. 187, 188. The 
 fallacies have arisen not from a failure to distinguish 
 between matter and spirit, or between effect and cause, 
 but in regarding these as differing by continuous degrees 
 only and not discrete degrees. Thus cause, however, dis- 
 tinguished from effect, was never lifted above the plane of 
 effect, nor spirit above the plane of matter. They differed 
 but by a continuous degree. So plainly did one of the 
 deepest thinkers and ablest intellects of recent times, 
 John Stuart Mill, see this identity of the planes of cause 
 and effect as these have been defined hitherto, that he 
 
3 6 JOHN STUART MILL. 
 
 boldly proposed to sweep away altogether the notion that 
 there is any law of necessary connection between cause 
 and effect, or any causing force in so-called "cause," and 
 also that we have any substantial experience upon which 
 to base our belief in " cause " of any kind, our whole 
 knowledge and possible knowledge being confined to the 
 mere fact of the succession of phenomena, and what \ve 
 have called cause being only a more or less "invariable 
 antecedent " to a certain observed phenomenon. If cause 
 and effect differ only by continuous degrees, then nature 
 is the cause of nature, and matter is the cause of matter. 
 .For the cause in continuous degrees is the same thing as 
 the effect, only differing in subtlety or in power. Matter 
 cannot be regarded as at once effect and cause, or if it is so 
 regarded, then it is because cause and effect have reduced 
 themselves only to Mill's " antecedents and consequents." 
 When Tyndall, in his famous Belfast address, spoke of 
 the primitive atom as having in itself the potency of 
 future worlds, he either was treating of matter as effect 
 only, or as constituting a continuous plane of effects, in 
 which case he meant that the phenomena of creation 
 present only a sequence of effects, the first atom being 
 equally an effect and no more a real cause than the 
 others, or else he meant that matter was self -causing, 
 and thus at once cause and effect ; but this is to obliterate 
 all distinction between cause and effect, and to reduce 
 these notions to that again of mere sequence of pheno- 
 mena. Thus it would appear that Mill was quite right 
 in affirming, as Swedenborg had done nearly a century 
 before him, that from the plane of effects alone no know- 
 ledge of causes is possible. 
 
 Not only is the fallacy of the monists or pantheists to 
 
DANGER OF PANTHEISM. 37 
 
 be attributed to the recognition of only continuous degrees 
 in all substance and being, but this error has been equally 
 fatal to the reasoning of the dualists. These, as we have 
 seen, have made it their principle to declare the absolute 
 unlikeness and duality of matter and spirit, of the world 
 perceived and the nature of the perceiver. Not only 
 have they closed their eyes to their law of similars acting 
 only on similars, but they have doubled the difficulty of 
 the problem by indefinitely extending each on its own 
 plane, without the remotest possibility of their mutual 
 approach or influence. Instead of matter and spirit, 
 indeed, constituting one continuous plane, they do rather 
 constitute two such planes, but without any explicable 
 relation. Cause or spirit is continuously extended as cause, 
 but like the gods of Epicurus without any perceptible or 
 admissible relation to a lower world of effects ; and effects* 
 remain for ever the distinct, but, so far as philosophy can 
 tell, uncaused effects of a continuous world or plane of 
 matter. That the relation of the two planes is a genitive 
 one, cause being always and only cause of effect, and 
 effect being always and only effect of cause, while doubt- 
 less admitted as a form of speech, was nevertheless not 
 seen to afford any bridge over the chasm which divides 
 the two irreconcilable facts of being. 
 
 To the difficulties thus resulting from an attempt 
 to explain the relation of matter and spirit from a 
 recognition of only continuous degrees as inherent in 
 universal being, the New Metaphysics now offers a solu- 
 tion in the doctrine of the three discrete degrees their 
 nature, their mutual relation, and their resemblance to 
 end, cause, and effect. I say their resemblance to end, 
 cause, and effect rather than their identity with these, 
 
38 THE SOLUTION OFFERED. 
 
 because while end, cause, and effect are the actual con- 
 stituents of all being, and in relation to each other are the 
 three discrete degrees of being, still the existence of the 
 three discrete degrees in a single plane of being (as, for 
 instance, in a muscle or a nerve, which is a body composed 
 of grouped and these of simple fibre) might not seem at 
 first glance to exhibit any real relation of end, cause, and 
 effect. In other words, it would seem to reduce end, 
 cause, and effect again only to a single plane of being, and 
 thus to a continuous degree. The language of Swedenborg 
 is therefore careful to describe the three discrete degrees as 
 being like, or "as end, cause, and effect " (D. L. W. 193), 
 and " in the relation of end, cause, and effect " (184). For, 
 as shown above, degrees are relations applicable to sub- 
 stances; they are not the substances themselves. The 
 simple fibre is related to the fascicle of fibres as end to 
 cause, and the fascicle to the composite or muscle as 
 cause to effect, but in reality the end is in the simple 
 fibre, the cause is in the fascicle or bundle formed of 
 these, and the effect is in the muscle which these compose. 
 Here again it is important that we avoid being misled 
 by the doctrine of the homogeneity of the discrete degrees. 
 That discrete degrees are always homogeneous, or of the 
 same genius or nature, means that they are produced from 
 the first degree in such way that the first degree is the 
 principal and sole governing in the subsequent degrees 
 (195), and that they are thus "concordant" (214). It 
 does not mean that the last degree is the same thing or 
 substance as the mediate, nor the mediate the same as the 
 first, but that the mediate and the last are such as they are 
 by virtue of their relation to a common first. Thus the 
 fibre is not first or end except in relation to the composite 
 
DEGREES OF "SUBSTANCE" V. "MA TTER." 39 
 
 called muscle. In this trine fibre is first and as end ; but 
 as a part of the material world it is a last in relation to a 
 larger trine embracing a spiritual cause and a Divine end. 
 
 In studying discrete degrees we must accordingly first 
 determine of what substance or being they are the degrees, 
 or out of what first they are formed. If it be from a 
 material first, it will be the three discrete degrees of a 
 material object that we investigate, and these will be 
 related as end, cause, and effect without being in reality 
 end, cause, and effect. If the object of our examination 
 be from a human will as a first or principle, then the 
 trine will be that of the three degrees of human action 
 will, thought, action, which are again related as end, 
 cause, and effect, without being these absolutely or in the 
 highest sense. But if, on the other hand, we are con- 
 sidering Substance itself, and our first or principle be the 
 true First or Essential Being itself, then the three discrete 
 degrees will be the degrees of Being itself, and these 
 will be not only as end, cause, and effect, but will be 
 truly the end, the cause, and the effect, not only of all 
 Being universally considered, but even of each least 
 individual thing that exists. In Substance itself, there- 
 fore, the three discrete degrees are end, cause, and effect, 
 while in all created or derived substances the three dis- 
 crete degrees are as end, cause, and effect. 
 
 Applying now the doctrine of discrete degrees to the 
 explanation of the relation of cause to effect and of 
 spirit to matter, we shall, by recurring to our demonstra- 
 tion on a previous page, see clearly shown the following 
 results. That while the end A is in the cause B and 
 composes it, and by means of B is in the effect C and 
 composes it, yet that C is neither A nor B nor like them, 
 
40 THE ONE SUBSTANCE. 
 
 but entirely distinct in form, that is, in composition, from 
 both. Moreover, the end is in the cause B not as x 
 merely, or as the primitive element repeated, but as the 
 end A; and the cause B is in the effect C not as a larger 
 accumulation of x's [as in E], but as cause in which is 
 the end. We are prepared, therefore, now to understand 
 with perfect clearness the following statement of the law 
 of end, cause, and effect. 
 
 " The end is all of the cause, and through the cause is all 
 of the effect ; wherefore end, cause, and effect are called 
 the first, the middle, and the ultimate end. 
 
 " Also the cause of the cause is likewise the cause of 
 the thing caused. 
 
 " And there is nothing essential in causes but the end, 
 and nothing essential in motion but effort ; and 
 
 " There is only one substance which is substance in 
 itself." 1 
 
 The further statements can now be clearly understood. 
 
 " In every effect there are the three discrete degrees, for 
 every ultimate or last consists of prior things, and these of 
 a first, and every effect consists of a cause, and this of an 
 end ; and the end is all of the cause, and the cause is all 
 of the effect. The end constitutes the inmost, the cause 
 the middle, and the effect the ultimate or last." 
 
 " From the progression of ends and causes to effects, it 
 manifestly appears that the ultimate or last degree is the 
 complex, the continent and the basis of the prior degrees. 
 That the effect is the aggregate, the container, the 
 basis of the causes and ends, may be comprehended by 
 enlightened reason ; but not so clearly that the end with 
 everything belonging to it, and the cause with everything 
 1 D. L. W., No. 197. 
 
DISCRETE DEGREES UNIVERSAL. 41 
 
 belonging to it, actually exist in effect, and that the effect 
 is their full complex. That this is the case may appear 
 from the following considerations : 
 
 " That one is from the other in a triplicate series ; 
 
 "That the effect is nothing but the cause in its 
 ultimate;" and 
 
 "That, as the ultimate is the complex, it follows that 
 the ultimate is the continent and basis." l 
 
 "All things which exist in the world of which the 
 trinal dimension is predicated, or which are called 
 compound, consist of degrees of altitude or discrete 
 degrees. This is true of every muscle and nerve of 
 the human body; of everything of the vegetable king- 
 dom, and of everything of the mineral kingdom. In 
 wood there is a gathering of the filaments in threefold 
 order. In metal and stones there is a spherical arrange- 
 ment of parts in a threefold order. Thus the nature of 
 discrete degrees is shown, namely, that one is formed 
 from another and by means of the second or third or 
 composite ; and that each degree is discrete from the other. 
 
 " These in their order are as ends, causes, and effects : 
 for the first or least produces its cause by the intermediate, 
 and its effect by the ultimate." (190-193.) 
 
 '"But this doctrine is of more ample extension: it 
 reaches not only to natural things but to civil and moral 
 and spiritual things, to the whole and to every part of 
 them. This is true, firstly, because 
 
 "In everything of which anything can be predicated 
 there is the trine which is called end, cause, and effect, 
 and these three are to each other according to the degrees 
 of altitude (i.e. the discrete degrees). 
 1 D. L. W., No. 212. 
 
42 EXAMPLES OF DISCRETE DEGREES. 
 
 "Secondly, because everything civil, moral, and spiritual 
 is not anything abstracted from substance but is substance. 
 For as love and wisdom are not abstracted things but a 
 substance, so in like manner are all civil, moral, and 
 spiritual things. These indeed may be thought of 
 abstractedly from substance, but still in themselves they 
 are not abstracted. 
 
 " For example : Affection and thought, charity and 
 faith, will and understanding, are not mere abstractions ; 
 for, like love and wisdom, they do not exist out of their 
 subjects which are substances, but they are states of 
 subjects or substances." (209.) 
 
 How the three discrete degrees exist in moral and spirit- 
 ual things as well as in material things is thus shown : 
 
 "As regards love and wisdom, love is the end, wisdom is 
 the instrumental cause, and use is the effect ; and use is 
 the aggregate container and basis of wisdom and love, 
 and such an aggregate and container that it actually 
 contains the whole of love and the whole of wisdom, 
 being the simultaneous existence of them. 
 
 " Again, in a series of similar degrees we find affection, 
 thought, and action. For all affection refers to love, 
 thought to wisdom, and action to use. 
 
 11 Will, understanding, and exercise are in a series of 
 similar degrees ; for will is of love and thence of affection ; 
 the understanding is of wisdom and thence of faith; 
 and exercise is of use and thence of work. Therefore 
 as the whole of wisdom and love exist in use, so the 
 whole of thought and affection exist in action ; but they 
 must be all homogeneous and concordant. 
 
 " That the ultimate of each series, use, action, and exercise 
 is the complex and continent of all the prior principles, 
 
ENDEAVOUR, FORCE, MOTION. 43 
 
 has not hitherto been known. It appears as if there was 
 nothing more in use, action, and exercise than there is in 
 mere motion; but in reality all these prior principles, 
 that is, will and understanding, affection and thought, are 
 in them and entirely in them. They do not appear 
 because they are viewed only exteriorly, and in this view 
 they are only acclivities and motions. It is as when the 
 arms and hands move themselves without our knowing 
 that a thousand moving fibres concur in each motion, and 
 that to these thousand moving fibres a thousand things of 
 thought and affection correspond which excite the moving 
 fibres, but which, because they act interiorly, do not 
 appear to any of the bodily senses." (213-215.) 
 
 The relation of end, cause, and effect is again beautifully 
 and with great force illustrated in the case of motion as 
 the result of force and thus of endeavour. 
 
 "Endeavour does nothing of itself; it acts by forces 
 corresponding to it, and by these produces motion." The 
 endeavour is all in the forces, and through the forces in 
 the motion; and as motion is the ultimate degree of 
 endeavour, it is by motion that endeavour reaches its 
 efficacy. And yet endeavour is neither force nor is it 
 motion. Nor is motion either force or endeavour, but 
 simply motion. So end is never cause, and cause is never 
 effect ; nor is effect ever either cause or end, in its own 
 series ; and yet in the effect, and together with it, cause 
 and end make one. 
 
 Endeavour, force, and motion are connected not by 
 continuity, that is, by continuous degrees, but by corre- 
 spondence, which is the connection of discrete degrees. 
 Endeavour ever so much increased is not force, and 
 force ever so much increased is not motion ; and yet 
 
44 LIVING FORCES. 
 
 there is no force without endeavour, and no motion 
 without force. These, endeavour and force, are in 
 motion and constitute it, and yet are not it, but remain 
 for ever what they are, namely, endeavour and force. 
 Thus they are discrete, for ever apart, for ever absolutely 
 themselves, and they belong to their ultimate, motion, 
 and constitute a one in it by discrete degrees. 
 
 "Endeavour is not force, nor force motion; but force 
 is produced by endeavour, being endeavour excited, and 
 motion is produced by force. Wherefore there is no 
 potency in endeavour alone or in force alone, but in 
 motion which is their product." (218.) 
 
 Applying this illustration to living forces : " The 
 living endeavour in a man, who is a living subject, is his 
 will united to his understanding ; the living forces in 
 him are what constitute the interiors of his body, in all 
 of which there are moving fibres variously interwoven ; 
 and living motion in him is action, which is produced 
 through those forces by the will united to the under- 
 standing. 
 
 " The interiors of the will and understanding constitute 
 the first degree. 
 
 "The interiors of the body constitute the second 
 degree ; and 
 
 " The whole body, which is their complex, constitutes 
 the third degree. 
 
 " It is well known that the interiors of the mind have no 
 potency but by forces of the body, and that forces have 
 no potency but by action of the body. 
 
 " These three do not act by continuity, but discretely ; 
 and to act discretely is to act by correspondences. 
 ' " The interiors of the mind correspond to the interiors of 
 
LOVE, WISDOM, USE. 45 
 
 the body, and the interiors of the body to its exteriors, by 
 which actions exist ; wherefore the two former are in 
 potency by means of the exteriors of the body. 
 
 " It may seem as if endeavour and forces in a man are in 
 potency, although there is no action, as in states of rest 
 and in dreams. In these cases the determination of en- 
 deavours and forces falls on the common moving forces of 
 the body, which are the heart and lungs. When the 
 action of these ceases, the forces also cease, and the 
 endeavour with the forces." (219.) 
 
 That love, wisdom, and use constitute a trine of dis- 
 crete degrees, and are respectively as end, cause, and 
 effect, is evident from the fact that 
 
 " A man's love is the end of all things belonging to him, 
 since which he loves, he thinks, he determines upon, and 
 does ; consequently he has this for his end. 
 
 "Wisdom is the cause : since he or the love which is his 
 end seeks in his understanding for means by which he 
 may arrive at his end ; thus he consults his wisdom, and 
 those means constitute the instrumental cause. 
 " Use is the effect. 
 
 " But as love, wisdom, and uses vary in different men, 
 and yet are homogeneous one with another, it follows that 
 the character of the love determines the character of the 
 wisdom, and these the character of the use performed. 
 By wisdom is here meant whatever appertains to the 
 understanding." (241.) 
 
 It only remains to state that these degrees, in the re- 
 lation of end, cause, and effect, exist in all things, in the 
 least as well as the greatest, and as in man so also in 
 Deity ; but that whereas in man they are finite, in Deity 
 they are infinite. 
 
46 PERFECTION OF THE UNIVERSE. 
 
 " There are three infinite and uncreate degrees of alti- 
 tude [i.e. discrete degrees] in the Lord, because the Lord 
 is Love itself and "Wisdom itself ; and being these, He is 
 also Use itself, since love has use for its end, which it 
 produces by wisdom." (230.) 
 
 " In God the Creator, who is the Lord from eternity, 
 infinite things are distinctly one, and there are infinite 
 things in His infinity, and in these infinitely infinite 
 things there are degrees of both kinds, which are in Him 
 distinctly one ; and as these things are in Him and all 
 things are created by Him, and the things which are 
 created represent in a certain image those things which 
 are in Him, it follows that there is no finite thing, how- 
 ever minute, in which there are not such degrees. These 
 degrees are equally in the least and in the greatest things, 
 because the Divine in the least and in the greatest things is 
 the same." (223.) 
 
 " The perfection of the created universe consists in the 
 similitude of generals and particulars, or of the greatest 
 and least things, as to these degrees ; for then one has 
 respect to another as its like, with which it may be con- 
 joined for every use, fixing and exhibiting every end in the 
 effect." (227.) 
 
 "The 'greatest things' in which there are degrees of both 
 kinds, are the universe taken as a whole, the natural 
 world as a whole, and the spiritual world as a whole ; 
 every empire and every kingdom as a whole ; everything 
 civil, moral, and spiritual belonging to them as a whole ; 
 the whole animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms, each 
 in the aggregate ; and all the atmospheres of both worlds 
 taken together, and their heat and light." (225.) 
 
PAET III. 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF DISCRETE DEGREES AS APPLIED TO THE 
 CREATION AND EXISTENCE OF THE WORLD. 
 
 MY reader will have noticed that everywhere in the 
 doctrine I have been setting forth, stress is laid 
 upon the fact that in all things, greatest and least, there 
 are degrees of loth kinds. The purpose of this insistence 
 on a point so seemingly unimportant or so universally 
 conceded as the existence of degrees of comparison, or 
 continuous degrees in every subject, is to acquaint the 
 reader with the fact that universal and necessary as is this 
 presence of continuous degrees in all things, even so uni- 
 versal and necessary is the existence of discrete degrees ; 
 in other words, that it is as inherent in the idea of any 
 thing as existing, that it should have a prior and a first 
 standing in the relation of a cause and of an end, as it is 
 that the object can be conceived of as more or less. This 
 again is a re-statement of the principle w r e laid down as 
 that distinctively of the new metaphysics, namely, that of 
 the development or self-classification of being by interior 
 gradation. 
 
 Everything in its very existence implies, as we have 
 seen, two other things which, although one in it, are 
 nevertheless entirely and for ever distinct namely, its 
 
48 DEGREES IN CREATION. 
 
 own cause and its own end. Just as truly as these are 
 involved in everything that exists, just so truly are they 
 at the same time distinct from each other, and from the 
 effect in which they are involved. 
 
 In all created things the three degrees are instrumental, 
 or as end, cause, and effect, having reference always to a 
 prior and infinite trine of degrees in Him who is the only 
 and real Substance, in whom the End is truly the First 
 Cause and the first degree inmostly hidden in all sub- 
 ordinate series of degrees involved in all created things 
 even to the least. 
 
 As everything involves in its very existence, therefore, 
 its cause in something prior to itself, and its end in some- 
 thing prior to its cause, let us apply this law to the exist- 
 ing universe or the visible world. Of this we may at 
 least assert as a truth not to be disputed, that it exists. 
 But if it exists, then it exists from a cause which is not 
 itself, but is in itself, arid this from an end which is not 
 itself, but is in itself through the cause. 
 
 What is this cause which is in the visible or natural 
 world without being natural itself *? What is this end 
 which is in the cause of the natural world, and so in the 
 natural world without being itself either that cause or 
 that world *? 
 
 In other words, what are the discrete degrees of being 
 which are necessarily involved or declared in the very 
 existence of the natural world? 
 
 What plane of being is possible as being involved in 
 physical being and actuating it as cause actuating effect, 
 without yet being physical itself 1 
 
 What plane of being is possible in this causal and 
 actuating being, which at the same time is prior to it, and 
 
HO W BEING EXISTS. 49 
 
 the source of its causative and actuating force 1 The new 
 metaphysics brings now its answer to these fundamental 
 questions. 
 
 The natural or material world is the effect of which 
 the spiritual world is the cause, and God is the end. 
 
 God the eternal and infinite Being, or the Substance 
 of all things, exists by virtue of His own infinite trine of 
 degrees, the Divine Love, the Divine Wisdom, and the 
 Divine principle of Use. The Divine Ends are truly those 
 of the Divine Love ; they exist by means of the Divine 
 Wisdom ; they are attained and effected in the Uses of 
 a created world. 
 
 God as such, namely, in the Divine Ends of His love 
 operating through His Wisdom in His Divine Uses, is 
 inmostly present in the spiritual world as the world of 
 causes, and through that world in the world of nature 
 as the world of effects. The material world regarded in 
 itself and as material has its three discrete degrees in the 
 trine of sun, atmospheres, and earth, the sun being as the 
 end, containing as it does the source of all the forces and 
 materials of the physical world ; the atmospheres, con- 
 sidered in their three degrees of aura, ether, and air, are 
 as the means or causes by which the ends or primary 
 endeavours of the sun's elements become active forces ; 
 the earth is the ultimate and the effect in which the 
 endeavours of the sun and the forces of the atmospheres 
 become fixed and determined in natural uses. But, 
 strictly speaking, the natural world is of itself wholly dead 
 or without living endeavour or living force, except as 
 these are in it by means of a higher world, or world of 
 mediates, or causes. This world is the spiritual world, 
 which exists also in its own trine of degrees, possessing 
 
50 DEGREES OF DIVINE EXISTENCE. 
 
 namely its own spiritual sun, its own spiritual heat, light, 
 and atmospheres, even to the degree of natural, but not 
 material substance ; and these living atmospheres and 
 living forces of the spiritual world, like the living forces 
 of the mind in a man's body, are present, and actuate 
 every least thing of the material world, not only giving it 
 its distinctive form, but impelling it to the performance 
 of its peculiar use in the grand theatre and scale of uses. 
 
 Finally, in the living forces, in the atmospheres, the heat 
 and light, and therefore primarily in the sun itself of the 
 spiritual world, all of which being spiritual are actuated 
 by a force from witliin, while the material elements and 
 atmospheres are actuated or impelled by these spiritual 
 forces from without, dwell the living endeavours, the Ends 
 themselves of Divine Love, Wisdom, and Use, which again 
 are the degrees of Divine existence itself. Thus, not only 
 in the leasts as in the greatest, but in all the several 
 degrees of creation, we see ever repeated this image of 
 the Creator, in the three degrees which are as end, cause, 
 and effect, and in which reside inmostly the essential ends, 
 causes, and effects, in which Deity itself exists. 
 
 And now we observe, that so long as we regard the 
 material world as existing alone, or without other being, 
 we cannot truly speak of anything being either its 
 instrumental or its first cause as being either its cause 
 or its end. It is, as it were, neither caused nor self- 
 causing. As pure matter, it indeed must have its three 
 discrete degrees prior, posterior, and postreme, which 
 are as end, cause, and effect, but which are not truly these. 
 Thus it has its atmospheric forces, which are as its 
 instrumental cause, and in these its solar elements and 
 energies, which are as the ends of its being; and yet 
 
MATTER IS NOT ALL THAT EXISTS. 51 
 
 these, without the inflowing, living forces of the spiritual 
 world, are for ever dead, powerless, and inert. 
 
 But to speak of the world thus as only matter is to shut 
 out of view a vast part of that which "really exists." 
 In order to understand existence, we must first truly know 
 what exists. Surely matter is not all that exists ! The 
 very problem of metaphysics is based on the recognition 
 that something beside matter does exist, and the desire to 
 know the relation of this other something to matter. We 
 must take therefore a larger term than matter to embrace 
 " all that exists." Let us then take " substance," or 
 " being," nay God, as the all and the only substance. In 
 this only comprehensive and just view of being, or of 
 " all that exists," each discrete degree of existence at once 
 reveals itself in its proper sphere and relation ; at once 
 God is seen to be the End or the First Cause, the spiritual 
 world the instrumental cause, or the cause proper, and 
 the material world the effect. The question no longer 
 embarrasses us, as if blinded with a film of dust before 
 our eyes which should shut out the vision of a heavenly 
 expanse, how can a substantial world come from, or be 
 related to, pure spirit, or even a Divine essence 1 For the 
 only substantial world we own to is that which has God 
 as its inmost end or first degree, spirit as its cause or 
 mediate degree, and matter as its effect or lowest degree. 
 All are substance, but each in its own degree, and they 
 are one, as the discrete degrees make and can only make 
 one. Once admit the idea that spirit is substance, not 
 as a continuous degree of matter thus, as a rarefied gas 
 but as substance in a degree discrete from matter, thus as 
 dwelling in matter without being of matter, even as the 
 soul dwells in the body without being of the material 
 
52 DEGREES OF SUBSTANCE. 
 
 elements of the body, and immediately matter takes its 
 true place in the trinal order of existence, as the ultimate, 
 the basis, the aggregate, and the continent in which all 
 the prior degrees close and are at rest, as the effect in 
 which all ends by their causes are actually operating, as 
 the great field of uses in which the Divine Love and 
 Wisdom reach the object of their endeavour. 
 
 For the degrees, it should never be forgotten, are homo- 
 geneous ; they all take their character from their first. 
 If it is from a material first that we start, we shall have 
 only the three degrees of matter, not of being not of 
 " all that exists." But if it is from Substance itself that 
 we start as a first, then we shall have the three degrees of 
 substance or of being itself, and these being essential 
 end, essential cause, and essential effect, the material 
 world can only be assigned to the plane of effect, God to 
 the plane of First Cause or End, and the spiritual world 
 to the plane of the mediate cause. And so we come to 
 the summary statement of the law of creation : " that the 
 Lord produces all things that exist in nature from Him- 
 self, through the spiritual world." D. L. W., No. 356. 
 
 It is only therefore in recognising the discrete degrees 
 in Being that we can see the true relation of matter to 
 substance. To set out with the confirmed notion that 
 matter is all the substance or substantial being there is, 
 and then to inquire what relation does spirit or mind 
 bear to it, is either manifestly absurd, or else it is equiva- 
 lent to an assertion that spirit and mind are a kind of 
 matter, the position of the materialistic monists. For we 
 cannot establish a relation between a thing that is and a 
 thing that absolutely has no being except the bare relation 
 of mutual negation. We cannot therefore expect to 
 
WHAT IS MATTER? 53 
 
 understand the operation of the mind upon the body, 
 or to investigate the question of the soul's immortality, so 
 long as we set out with the denial that there is any mind 
 or any soul independent of matter. In the same way we 
 cannot expect to understand effects by the study of effects 
 simply, or so long as we regard them as at once cause and 
 effect ; but to truly understand effect we must know causes 
 and explain them from causes. If to understand a thing 
 is to know its relations, then to understand matter we 
 must know its relations to other forms of existence, and 
 especially its relation to spirit or that which actuates 
 and moves it, inasmuch as matter is itself inert. Thus a 
 true knowledge of matter requires that we understand 
 what place it occupies with relation to substance ; and the 
 doctrine of discrete degrees shows us that matter is the 
 lowest and outmost degree of substance, containing within 
 it and above it the higher degrees, which are respectively 
 those of its own cause and its own end. 
 
 Of matter we may say, therefore, that it is not substance 
 as that which has any being in and of itself, but that 
 it is the shape which substance assumes in the mental 
 sensations of time and space ; in other words, it is that 
 mode which substance puts on in order to strike our 
 senses and to be a basis of reaction from which the 
 currents of Divine Life descending into creation may 
 commence their re-ascent through man back to their 
 Divine source. 
 
 It is here that the lines of pure Metaphysics and of 
 Theology, as the Science of Sciences, cross each other. 
 
 For the general purposes of metaphysics this trinal 
 division of substance according to discrete degrees into 
 God, the spiritual world, and the material, answering 
 
54 SCIENCE OF THE END. 
 
 to End, Cause, and Effect, would be sufficient. That is, 
 we would have here a firm basis on which to proceed in a 
 true classification of all sciences, and in a real advance- 
 ment in all departments of human knowledge ; we could 
 with this gradation of worlds or spheres of being before 
 us proceed to intelligently see effects from causes, and 
 causes from ends. Starting with a world already existing, 
 and recognising the existence at the same time of a 
 superior world and of a Supreme Being, we would have 
 in these three degrees of being and their actual relations 
 the real subject-matter of meta-pliysical study. 
 
 But if we venture a step farther, and inquire into the 
 END itself which lies behind the existence or present form 
 of things ; if we ask why was matter made, or what is the 
 cause of creation itself, then we strike at once into the 
 domain of Theology, the supreme science, the science of 
 Ends, the science of God. 
 
 To know that matter exists in a degree discrete from 
 spirit is a metaphysical or philosophical knowledge. To 
 know why and how matter itself came into being, is a 
 knowledge purely theological. To know how matter came 
 into being, is to know the nature of the spiritual world, the 
 world of causes. 
 
 To know why matter came into being, is to know the 
 nature of God in whom are the ends, the purposes and 
 reasons of all being. 
 
 It is not the purpose of this essay to dwell upon the 
 nature of God, nor to discuss at length the ends of creation, 
 but a word shall be said, a word which I admit is purely 
 theological, but not the less on that account strictly 
 scientific, as to the reason why matter was made, and the 
 mode of its creation. 
 
THEOLOGY A SCIENCE. 55 
 
 Matter was made as the only means by which the end 
 of creation might be effected. 
 
 The End of Creation, the purpose for which the world 
 was made, lies in the highest or first Degree of the Divine 
 Xature, in the Divine Love. 
 
 Love by its very nature demands an object. That 
 object must be another than self, else the love of it would 
 be self-love. Love, then, in order to exist, must create 
 another than itself. 
 
 This other that Love creates must not only be wholly 
 other than its creative source, must feel itself to be 
 absolutely apart and distinct from it, but it must be able 
 to reciprocate this love, to love in return. For it is only 
 in reciprocation that love is satisfied, that the end of love 
 is attained. 
 
 These being the qualities and motives inherent in love 
 by its very nature, it follows that creation must necessarily 
 result, and that the Divine Love is, for no other reason 
 than its own being, the Creator of the world. 
 
 To create a world which shall not be the creative Love 
 itself, but the object of it and the reciprocator of it, the 
 Divine Love proceeds by spheres emanating from itself, and 
 yet not itself. These spheres, actuated by the Divine life 
 from within, become the living forces and substances 
 out of which a world is made. As living forces and 
 substances, they constitute the spiritual world or the world 
 of creative instrumental causes. They constitute a com- 
 plete world in all its discrete trinal order, a world having 
 a supreme central sun or source of vivifying power and 
 substance, and also atmospheres, waters, and earths. To 
 speak of a "world" without these three constituents, sun, 
 atmospheres, and habitable earth, is to deprive the term of 
 
56 TWO WORLDS TWO SUNS. 
 
 all its meaning. Therefore a spiritual world means a 
 spiritual sun, atmospheres thence proceeding, and an 
 earth or lowest plane of spiritual living substance. But 
 
 " Atmospheres, waters, and earths are spoken of as being 
 the general causes by and from which all and everything 
 exists in infinite variety. 
 
 4< The atmospheres are active powers, the waters are the 
 intermediate powers, and the earths are the passive powers 
 by which all effects exist. These three are such powers in 
 their series solely from the life which proceeds from the 
 Lord as a sun, and causes them to be active." D. L. W.^ 
 No. 178. 
 
 And beyond and beneath this instrumental world of 
 " active powers " and by means of them, the proceeding 
 spheres of creative Love produce a world of dead 
 inactive nature, in which the substances and powers, 
 instead of being living or actuated from within, are inert 
 or actuated only from without or from the living forces of 
 the atmospheres of the spiritual world. This world is 
 nature ; a world which, from its sun, through its heat, 
 light, atmospheres, and waters, even to its mineral structure, 
 is wholly dead and inert, that is, without life or power of 
 motion from itself. 
 
 " Since the sun of the natural world is pure fire, and 
 for that reason dead, therefore the heat proceeding is dead 
 heat, and the light proceeding dead light. By parity of 
 reasoning, the atmospheres, the ether and the air, which 
 receive and communicate the heat and light of that sun, 
 are dead ; and being dead, all and everything of the world 
 under them called the earths is dead. Nevertheless, all 
 and each are surrounded by spiritual things which proceed 
 and flow from the sun of the spiritual world ; and unless 
 
TIME AND SPACE. 57 
 
 they were so surrounded, the earths could not have been 
 actuated and made capable of producing forms of use, that 
 is vegetables, or forms of life, that is animals ; or of 
 furnishing a supply of material for the existence and 
 subsistence of man. 
 
 " Now since nature exists from that (natural) sun, all that 
 exists and subsists therefrom is called natural, it follows that 
 nature with all and everything pertaining to it is dead. 
 The appearance of nature as alive in men and animals is 
 owing to the life which accompanies and actuates nature." 
 
 " Since the lowest substances of nature which constitute 
 earths are dead, and are not mutable and various according 
 to the state of the affections and thoughts as in the spiritual 
 world, but immutable and fixed, therefore in nature there 
 are spaces and distances of spaces. Such things are the 
 consequences of creation closing there, and subsisting in 
 a state of rest. Hence it is evident that spaces are proper 
 to nature. And since spaces in nature are not appear- 
 ances of spaces according to dates of life as in the spiritual 
 world, they may also be called dead. 
 
 " Since times in like manner are stated and constant, they 
 also are proper to nature ; and as they are not states of 
 life as in the spiritual world, they therefore are dead." 
 (158-161.) 
 
 " The difference between the spiritual atmospheres and 
 the natural atmospheres is that the spiritual atmospheres 
 are receptacles of Divine fire and Divine light, consequently 
 of love and wisdom ; for they contain these within them ; 
 whereas the natural atmospheres are not receptacles of 
 Divine fire and Divine light, but of the fire and light of 
 their own sun, which is in itself void of life, and therefore 
 they contain nothing from the sun of the spiritual w r orld, 
 
5 8 ORIGIN OF MA TTER. 
 
 but still are surrounded by spiritual atmospheres wliicli 
 come from tliat sun." (175.) 
 
 " As the atmospheres decrease in descending, it follows 
 that they become more and more compressed and inert, 
 and at length in the outmost so compressed and inert that 
 they are no more atmospheres but substances at rest, and 
 in the natural world fixed, like those substances on the 
 earth which are called matter. These substances retain 
 from the atmospheres whence they originated an effort and 
 endeavour to perform uses" 
 
 " From this universal origin of all things in the created 
 universe a likeness arises in every one of its parts in that 
 they proceed from firsts to outmosts which are in a state 
 of rest respectively, there to close and subsist. Thus in 
 the human body fibres proceed from their first forms to 
 tendons ; the fibres and these vessels proceed from their 
 first forms till they become cartilages and bones upon 
 which they may rest and subsist. As there is such a 
 progression of the fibres and vessels in a man from first 
 to last, therefore there is a similar progression of the states 
 of those which are sensations, thoughts, and affections ; 
 these must also pass from their first where they are in 
 light to their last where they are in shade ; or from 
 their first where they are in heat to their last where they 
 are not ; and as there is such a progression of these, there 
 is also such a progression of love and all its predicates, and 
 of wisdom and all its predicates ; in a word, of all things 
 of the created universe." 
 
 " From the origin of the earth, as thus stated, it appears 
 that in the substances and the matters of which they 
 consist there is nothing of the Divine in itself, but that they 
 are deprived of all that is Divine in itself, being as was 
 
ORIGIN OF MA TTER. 59 
 
 said the ends and terminations of the atmospheres whose 
 heat has ended in cold, their light in darkness, their 
 activity in inertness ; but still they have brought with 
 them by continuation from the substance of the spiritual 
 sun that which was there from the Divine, namely, a 
 sphere surrounding the God-Man or the Lord ; from this 
 sphere, by continuation from the sun proceeded by means 
 of the atmospheres the substances and matters of which 
 the earths consist." 
 
 " The origin of earth from the spiritual sun by means of 
 atmospheres can only be so described in words flowing 
 from natural ideas. It could be otherwise described in 
 words flowing from spiritual ideas, since spiritual ideas 
 are without space ; but as such they do not fall into any 
 words of natural language. It is only by correspondences 
 that spiritual thought and speech can communicate with 
 natural thought and speech. But it will suffice if from 
 the above the origin of the earth is perceived in some 
 measure after a natural manner." (303-306.) 
 
 When therefore in the fixed matter of the earth the 
 Creative Love has reached a lowermost basis which is 
 absolutely inert and dead in being wholly void of the 
 Love . itself which is its source, there can begin a reaction 
 of the Divine force in the formation of a free voluntary 
 agent who shall reciprocate the Divine Creative Love, and 
 thus being at once loved and loving, the object of Divine 
 Love and the subject of human love, fulfilling the end of 
 creation. For the production and sustenance of such an- 
 intelligent and free agent of reciprocated love the natural 
 world was created according to a scale of uses reaching 
 from the lowest mineral up to the highest human and 
 angelic capacities. By these all created things tend to 
 
60 THE END OF CREATION. 
 
 the formation of an angelic heaven or a perfected and 
 immortal human society in which the Divine Love attains 
 the object of its desire. 
 
 " All things above mentioned, as the sun, the atmo- 
 spheres, and the earths, are only means to ends ; the ends 
 of creation are the things produced by the Lord as a sun 
 through the atmospheres from the earths, and these ends 
 are called USES ; they embrace in their whole extent all 
 things of the vegetable kingdom, all things of the animal 
 kingdom, and at length the human race, and by the human 
 race the angelic heaven. These are called uses because 
 they are recipients of Divine Love and Wisdom, and 
 because they have regard to God their Creator, and thereby 
 conjoin Him to His greatest work, and by this conjunction 
 cause themselves to subsist from Him as they existed." 
 
 " The uses of all created things ascend by degrees to 
 man, and by man to God the Creator, from whom they 
 originate."!). L. W., No. 307. 
 
 A doctrine of the gravest importance is here conveyed, 
 and one in which the general doctrine of discrete degrees 
 exhibits its highest worth, namely, the utter and absolute 
 severance of Deity from matter or from man, and thus 
 the closing of the way to pantheism in any of the forms 
 in which it has found abode in all monistic theories 
 hitherto. It will appear from the foregoing statements 
 and citations, that while the three degrees of substance, 
 end, cause, and effect, have their counterparts respectively 
 in God, the spiritual world, and matter, yet that God as 
 the End, or the Being in whom the ends of creation are, 
 is neither the spiritual sun nor the material earths, but is 
 in these. And in these, as in all the things of His 
 creating, He resides by virtue of the ultimate of His 
 
ENDS IN EFFE CTS. 6 1 
 
 own Divine Degrees Love, Wisdom, and Use. The 
 ends of the universe are not the mere product of matter 
 as the effect of spiritual cause; but matter itself is a 
 means by which the ends of creation are brought about, 
 or in which the Divine degree of use as the embodiment 
 of Divine Love and Wisdom can reside and take effect. 
 We are not therefore to think of matter as the lowest 
 degree of God, but as that which God has made to be 
 absolutely not Himself, in order that by and from it His 
 own principle of use may be actually and constantly 
 exercised in the raising up of beings capable of sharing 
 and reciprocating His love. Therefore, while matter or 
 the mineral kingdom is the lowest degree of natural 
 substance, and is the outmost and lowest effect in the 
 trine of being, still the " ends of creation," which are the 
 uses of creation, are not the matters, the earths them- 
 selves, but "the things produced through them." The 
 Divine uses are indeed the effects of the higher Divine 
 Degrees of Love and Wisdom, which are end and 
 cause, but these uses reside in the ultimates, and so in all 
 the ascending degrees of creation, not as being the things 
 themselves, but as finding in them their forms, embodi- 
 ments, and means. And thus it is that "all effects or 
 ultimate ends become anew first ends, in a continual series 
 from the Lord the Creator, who is the first, to the con- 
 junction of man with Him, which is the last" (172). 
 It is the end residing in the effect, as end, which makes 
 the effect to live, to thrill with the Divine living and 
 moving principle of use; and yet it is only in the effect, as 
 effect, that is as itself utterly and for ever discrete from 
 cause or source, that the end can thus exert its living 
 force and endeavour. So each degree, while operating one 
 
62 LOVE THE CREATOR. 
 
 within and through the other, remains for ever discrete 
 from the other. God the First, the Substance, the All of 
 Self-existent Being, in whom we indeed do "live, and 
 move, and have our being," must be for ever other than 
 the objects He created, and yet must be ever in them as 
 their only life, their only power of endeavouring or of 
 loving, and thus of becoming new ends in the series of 
 universal being. The Divine must become objective to 
 itself by the creation of things not itself, and the life of 
 these created, things and their ends, in their series, will 
 all be the result of the Divine Degree of Use, that is, the 
 result of the indwelling in them, as means, of the living 
 and ever-actuating Divine Ends of created things, which 
 live and have being only because they are the means by 
 which creation is for ever being effected. 
 
 How Divine Love, from its own substance, not by 
 continuity, but by the proceeding of discrete degrees, can 
 create things not itself as means of its own using, even to 
 dead matter, and as objects of its own delights, as in men 
 and angels, and how these can again, as from subjects 
 wholly free and spontaneous, become lovers in turn of 
 their creative and ever-sustaining source, mysterious as 
 the problem sounds in words, is simple and manifest 
 when viewed in the light of the doctrine of the three 
 necessary degrees of being. For the moment I admit 
 that I, who exist, require as a cause for my being some- 
 thing not myself, yet without which I am nothing, or 
 never would have been ; or, the moment I admit that all 
 the instrumental causes by which existing things are must 
 themselves be the result of some prior end or motive, as 
 no cause exists except there were a motive which it sub- 
 serves that moment I have conceived and intelligently 
 
LOVE DEMANDS AN OBJECT. 63 
 
 defined that link which alike connects and eternally 
 divides the discrete degrees of being, and which there- 
 fore distinguishes the Creator from the created; and in 
 the Creator the degrees of His own being ; and in the 
 created universe the degrees of its own existence. The 
 moment I conceive of an "other" to conscious being, 
 which " other " the conscious being can become aware of 
 only as that " other " becomes a part of its own conscious- 
 ness, that moment I form at least a mental image of a 
 creation or production by discrete degrees. For that 
 mental act, wherein I discern between myself as conscious 
 and some other being as the object of my consciousness, 
 whether it be by affection, or thought, or sensation, at the 
 same time establishes a division of all that exists into at 
 least two existences, present and actual viz. the conscious 
 being and the " other " of which it is conscious. Carrying 
 this discrimination beyond the limitations of my own 
 being even to the eternal and infinite I find that such 
 a division of being, being now possible, may have been 
 always possible; that a contemplation of being, as in- 
 volving both subject and object, is warranted by reason 
 and experience. If we ask the reason of this first 
 discrimination of being into subject and object, we find 
 it in the nature of Love itself as demanding an object on 
 which to dwell ; if we ask the means by which the loving 
 subject can procure an object to itself, we find it is in 
 the creating of substances from itself which shall be not 
 itself ; if we ask how can this created object respond to 
 the demands of Creative Love, we find it will be in 
 becoming itself a spontaneous loving subject. Thus the 
 eternal end procures to itself a cause by which it produces 
 the effect in which its ends are reached. That first step 
 
64 GOD AND THE " NOT-GOD." 
 
 from the consciousness of self to consciousness of an 
 " other " which can be an object of love, is the first step 
 in the process of creation by discrete degrees. Whether 
 that "other" be the very first sphere of spiritual life, 
 substance, and power proceeding from Deity itself, and 
 constituting a spiritual sun, which shall be the great 
 centre and medium of all creative operations ; or whether 
 it be the natural sun as the centre and creating medium 
 of a solar universe of the natural world ; or whether it be 
 the grain of hard and motionless sand on the sea-shore, 
 these are all equally "not-God," they are all absolutely 
 void of life and power and substance of themselves ; and 
 the power of the All-Creating First Substance to produce 
 the utterly dead, inert matter of our earth from itself 
 without its being itself is no more strange or inexplicable 
 than the power to emit from itself a sphere of the highest 
 vital forces and substances, such as constitute the spiritual 
 sun ; for one equally with the other of these projections 
 of being in distinct planes is really involved in the 
 primary fact of the division of the totality of being into 
 the self- conscious } and an object of that consciousness 
 and this division we know from momentary experience 
 now exists, and therefore must have had an original 
 existence in the beginning of creation itself. 
 
 If, then, the process of creation consisted in its first 
 step in this production by the Creative Source of some- 
 thing other than itself, the reason, nay, the necessity, of 
 such a self-division of Being lies in the nature of that 
 Creative Source in, namely, that the inmost being and 
 substance, alike of Deity as it is of created man, is essen- 
 tial Love. This Creative Love, producing an " other " as 
 the object of its delight, can be governed from the first 
 
CREATION BY PROCEEDING SPHERES. 65 
 
 by only the self-imposed law of removal by discrete and 
 not continuous degrees. It is not by merging and ming- 
 ling Himself indiscriminately in creation that the Creator 
 could form an object of His love, but by removing by an 
 absolutely impassable gulf the created from the Creator, the 
 finite from the infinite. Therefore " we are to beware of 
 thinking that the sun of the spiritual world is God Him- 
 self ; for that sun is not God, but is the first proceeding 
 of the Divine Love, which is essential spiritual heat, and 
 of the Divine Wisdom, which is essential spiritual light." 
 D. L. W., Nos. 93-97. 
 
 " As the things which constitute the sun of the 
 spiritual world are from the Lord, and are not the Lord, 
 therefore they are not life in itself, but are void of life in 
 itself ; just as the things which flow from an angel or a 
 man, and constitute the sphere (of his thoughts or his 
 affections), are not the angel or the man, but are from 
 them, void of their life. And these proceeding spheres 
 make one with the angel or the man only in the degree 
 that they accord with them, being derived from the forms 
 of their body, which were the forms of their life in them." 
 (294.) Seeing, then, that the first thing of creation, the 
 first proceeding sphere of Divine effluence, which is nothing 
 else than the sphere of the Divine Love and Wisdom 
 flowing forth as creative Heat and Light from a spiritual 
 sun, is absolutely not God, the severance of this created 
 plane of existence from its source in the eternal Being is in 
 nowise different in kind although differing in degree from 
 that separation between God and the lowest mineral. But 
 the purpose of creative love is not attained until it has 
 formed an image of Itself which can act from a conscious- 
 ness of absolute independence and severance from Deity ; 
 
 E 
 
66 TIME AND SPACE NECESSARY. 
 
 which, while recipient of the only, the Divine Life of 
 love and wisdom in its mental receptacles of will and 
 intellect, may yet act with absolute freedom, and by the 
 exercise of its own ratienal judgment. Such an image 
 of God to return the love of God freely must be, as it 
 were, a new creative centre and beginning, a new source 
 of power and motion ; his will must burn with the creative 
 fires of love ; his intellect must shine with the informing 
 light of truth. All this must be, and yet he must not be 
 God, for as such he could not be the object of God's love. 
 In him God's love and wisdom must have assumed forms 
 or states in which they are no longer Divine but human. 
 What are these forms by which the spheres of intelligent 
 life and love from God become not God, but objective to 
 God, and the subject in man? 
 
 They are the forms of human thinking and feeling, as 
 distinct from the divine. These distinctive forms of 
 human feeling and thinking are the mental forms of 
 TIME AND SPACE. 
 
 The conditions necessary to the creation of a free and 
 voluntary loving subject by an Infinite Source of creative 
 love are that there be a world of times and spaces. It is in 
 such a world only that a human life of will and intelligence 
 can begin and develop in a sense of absolute separation, 
 finitude, and independence of Deity. In a natural world, 
 and in the thoughts and feelings of a natural mind, with 
 all the gross delusions of sense and the limitations of 
 matter, mast that life begin which can develop an image 
 of God in the form of a man and an angel capable of 
 receiving and reciprocating freely the Love of the Creator. 
 
 But that times and spaces may exist we have seen that 
 matter must exist, as that fixed and dead and inert basis 
 
MAN'S IMMORTALITY. 67 
 
 in which the proceeding spheres of creative life rest and 
 terminate. Here these spheres find term and limit. Here 
 they are self-limited. Here is found the dividing line 
 between the lowest degree of conscious and active life, and 
 that which is absolutely unconscious, inert, dead. Until 
 this basis of absolute inertia is reached, there is still lack- 
 ing that utmost removal of finite from infinite which is 
 necessary in order to form the basis of a new degree of con- 
 scious being. In this sensation of the dead and inert and 
 unsubstantial as the veritably real and substantial, and in 
 this conviction that sensuous knowledge is the only know- 
 ledge of which the mind is capable, man, like the brute 
 animal, takes his position at the utmost possible remote- 
 ness from the Divine Self-consciousness. And from this 
 standpoint he begins his ascent upward to Deity ; not to 
 be merged into its infinite abyss by the gradual losing of 
 these perceived limitations, but by becoming, in constantly 
 higher degrees, a form for the reception and exercise of 
 Divine Love in the pursuit of its ultimate end the crea- 
 tion of a perfect human society, in a heaven of angels. 
 These human forms of the Divine uses become in their 
 ascent discretely separated from the merely animal forms, 
 by the creation in man of a spiritual mind above the 
 natural mind. By this spiritual nature, between which 
 and the animal or sensual intervenes the rational plane of 
 the mind, man is capable of rising out of the natural limita- 
 tions of his life, of thinking apart from time and space, 
 and of loving things above the body and its sensual life. 
 The soul of man, therefore, while born and given its 
 basis of human individuality in a body of earth and a 
 mind shaped from notions of time and space, does not die 
 when its material body dies, but continues to live in the 
 
68 END OF CREATION, WHEN ATTAINED. 
 
 spiritual world, preserving from its natural form of thought 
 its finite personality, but capable of living in a world of 
 spiritual substance, and of progressing there indefinitely 
 in the exercise and enjoyment of the Divine gifts of life 
 of which he is the constant recipient. 
 
 In the perfect life of a human society in the spiritual 
 world, in which the inflowing Love of God finds free and 
 intelligent exercise in the mutual love and service of man 
 to man, and in their adoring recognition and love of God 
 as its source, the Desire of Creative Love is satisfied, the 
 Ends of Creation are attained. 
 
 It is because we think from time and space that we 
 necessarily draw so broad a line of discrimination between 
 the degrees of creation at that point where living substance 
 and force become dead, inert matter. But it is because 
 this is the outmost, the extreme opposite to living, self- 
 moving substance that here creation terminates and rests. 
 We think naturally of matter as substance ; and it is 
 necessary that we should first think naturally in order 
 to become intelligent and voluntary recipients of spiritual 
 thought and life. Did not Creative life terminate in 
 matter, as that which is so manifestly without life as to 
 be known and distinguished from all other existence by 
 the fact that it is inanimate and inert, that is, lifeless 
 then we would in so far have no objective world for our 
 consciousness, and existence would be to us like a dream 
 from which we could never wake, instead of being the 
 world as we know it. But if we would in our metaphysics 
 rise into the plane of causes, we must rise above this plane 
 of natural thinking from time and space, and must think 
 from the plane of spiritual realities. We must think of 
 spiritual things of thoughts and affections, and, above 
 
SUBSTANCES SPIRITUAL. 69 
 
 all, of the Divine Love and Wisdom, as actual substances. 
 These things exist they exist as powers ; they exist as 
 the powers, the reasons, the causes, without which nothing 
 natural could exist, because matter has no power of creating 
 or moving or forming itself ; therefore in these spiritual 
 things we may readily recognise the causative plane of 
 being : their part in the sum total of " all that is " is the 
 part of the mediate degree in the trine of end, cause, and 
 effect. But these spiritual things exist not alone as the 
 reasons and the forming or determining cause of things, 
 but as the substances themselves. Apart from bodily 
 sensation, things have no other substance for us than the 
 substance they have to our thoughts and feelings, or the 
 existence they have to our minds. I do not say in our minds 
 as if they had no objective being ; for our own thoughts 
 become objects of our thinking and our affection when 
 ultimated in things we say or do or make, or even when 
 contemplated in themselves as pure mental creations. 
 They exist to our minds as substances, not by virtue of 
 the momentary and occasional contact of bodily sense, 
 but by virtue of the substance and form they have in our 
 thought of them and affection from them. Things that 
 we have seen and touched we know substantially, not 
 alone when in contact with our organs of sense, but 
 when entirely removed from sensuous cognition. A thing 
 we have never seen or felt or thought of has therefore no 
 substantial being so far as WE are concerned. If there be, 
 indeed, no minutest or remotest particle of matter but 
 what affects us in some indirect way by physical contact, 
 then the whole natural world still exists to us, or has 
 substantial being, only by virtue of its appeal to our 
 consciousness through our sensations. But if, on the 
 
70 WHAT MAKES MATTER REAL ? 
 
 other hand, it be true that there are innumerable material 
 things and vast universes of matter which do not thus 
 exist to our sensuous affection or knowledge, still this, 
 fact does not necessarily remove them from the realm of 
 real existence. Yea, even though they exist not to us, 
 still they exist to Him who knows all, and who in His Divine 
 Wisdom, from His Divine Love, is everywhere present. 
 Existing to the Divine mind, they have therefrom, or as 
 forms of Divine consciousness, their existence and all the 
 substantial being they possess. 
 
 Therefore the new metaphysics is as far as possible from 
 asserting the non-existence of matter, or the dependence 
 of matter for its existence on the conscious thought of 
 man. Matter is a Divine absolute fact, and is the sub- 
 stratum on which all our human consciousness is built 
 up ; but it derives its whole existence from God as the 
 only real substance, and it exists only as the forms which 
 Divine Love and Wisdom, the Self-conscious, and the 
 Creator of all consciousness and of all forms of sensation, 
 rest. It is that " other than itself " which Self -originating 
 and Self-conscious Being is compelled to create by the 
 laws of existence itself which the very knowledge we 
 have of the " all that exists," as involving in itself an end, 
 a cause, and an effect, demand as a necessary postulate. 
 
 If, however, we seek for substance and form in matter, 
 rather than in the spiritual or mental creation which U 
 represents to our senses, we shall surely fail to find either 
 the one or the other there. As for substance, there is 
 nothing discoverable in matter which is not destructible, 
 perishable, evanescent, and changing. Whatever we 
 may mean when we boldly generalize the law that the 
 total volume of matter is invariable, and that matter is 
 
FORM AND SUBSTANCE. 71 
 
 accordingly indestructible, we surely do not mean that 
 there is any known particle of matter which cannot be 
 destroyed or changed into something else. It is, then, 
 only of matter as a whole that we can say it is indestruct- 
 ible. But what is matter "as a whole " 1 Is it the 
 totality of matter as now existing ? But in the twinkling 
 of an eye this vanishes away in the changes that are every 
 instant occurring throughout the whole physical universe. 
 All that remains unchanged, undiminished, unimpaired " as 
 a whole," is not matter but it is substance, that alone from 
 which matter borrows its ever-changing being. 
 
 But what is it that changes this abiding substance into 
 the changing forms of matter 1 Or, in other words, if we 
 do not find substance in matter, shall we not at least 
 find form there 1 Shape, indeed, we shall find as the 
 spatial dimension which the natural world gives to objects 
 of sensation in the natural mind, but we shall find no 
 form in matter itself as a property. For form is that 
 which determines things into this or that shape, and thus 
 fits them for this or that use. All the forms of use 
 are mental creations, for they are all acts of designing 
 intelligence, being intelligent adaptations of means to 
 ends. Therefore forms as intelligent powers cannot 
 reside in matter itself, but must reside in some spiritual 
 agent to which matter is entirely subject. 
 
 We see, then, that matter, while neither substance in 
 itself nor form in itself, is created, that is, has its whole 
 existence, out of that substance and form which is spiritual. 
 Its existence, then, while a most real existence, is real in 
 the degree that, and because the Divine Love and Wisdom 
 as creative Substance and Form make it to be. These 
 make it to be as the effect of what they are the end and 
 
72 MATTER A MEANS TO DIVINE END. 
 
 the cause. They make it to be because such is the means 
 they require for accomplishing their own use. For the 
 Divine Will to desire a material world is to give it sub- 
 stance, since all substance originates in the Divine Will or 
 Love ; for the Divine Mind to think a material world, 
 from that desire, is to give a material world form, since 
 all form originates in the Divine Wisdom ; and for the 
 Divine Love and Wisdom to proceed in creation through 
 created means to the ends of creation, is to give a material 
 world an objective, tangible, visible existence in time and 
 space to give it shape to make it, what it is, an outmost 
 plane of lifeless, inert effect from which conscious life may 
 seemingly begin anew and develop with free human 
 rationality, liberty, and love. Matter is the translation 
 of substance into bodily sense of time and space. 
 
 The reader will now see how the doctrine of discrete 
 degrees results in the classification of the Science of 
 Being or Universal Knowledge into the three divisions of 
 Theology, Metaphysics, and Physical Science ; Theology 
 being the study of Being from Ends, Metaphysics the 
 study of Being from Causes, and Physical Science being 
 the study of Being in the plane of facts or effects. 
 
 The field of metaphysics or philosophy embraces the 
 study of the laws and principles by which the visible 
 world of our experience is formed, and its life governed. 
 Its subjects are the substances and powers of the world 
 of mind or spirit as distinct from the phenomena of 
 matter, but as operating on and affecting these. Carried 
 to its highest reach of vision, metaphysics contemplates 
 the manner by which the total of being resolves itself 
 into the two divisions of conscious subject and perceived 
 object, and so of creative cause and created effect. It 
 
PHYSICS, METAPHYSICS, THEOLOGY. 73 
 
 answers the question, How does creation proceed from 
 intelligent and voluntary substance to a phenomenal 
 world 1 But it does not answer, nor is it in its province 
 to inquire, Why creation was ever effected, what was 
 the grand primal necessity that compelled the self-divi- 
 sion of being into self-conscious being, and the not-self, 
 into the Lover and the thing loved, the Thinker and the 
 thing thought, the Perceiver and the thing perceived 1 ? 
 Why might not the All and the Eternal have remained 
 to eternity satisfied with absolute self-consciousness and 
 self-contemplation, without being ever going forth into 
 existence, and existence into proceeding and work 1 It 
 is the province of theology only to answer this question, 
 because theology is the science of Ends, of those first 
 causes and first springs of existence which lie behind 
 the laws and the instrumental causes of existing pheno- 
 mena. And this answer theology finds in the nature 
 of that discrete degree of being which is essential end or 
 motive, namely, in Love as the first creative essence of 
 all things demanding for its object an existing, thus a 
 created world. Theology, therefore, completes the trine 
 of knowledge, of which Metaphysics and Physical Science 
 or the Science of Matter constitute the two lower degrees. 
 As Physics constitutes the language of creation, so does 
 Metaphysics constitute its logic, and Theology its ethics. 
 The discrete degrees alone establish in a way satisfactory 
 to candid reason the boundaries and the relations of these 
 sciences respectively ; and if these boundary lines were 
 regarded, many a harsh and worse than useless controversy 
 would be avoided. 
 
 Thus it would be seen, that while the theologian is 
 qualified to inquire into the Why of creation, and to find 
 
74 LIMITATIONS OF PHYSICS. 
 
 in creative Love at once the substance and the reason of 
 the totality of existence, he is not to deny to the physicist 
 the most real and actual existence of matter, or to wonder, 
 even, that the physicist, as mere physicist, fails to take 
 account of a world existing without the boundaries of 
 time and space. On the other hand, he is to remember 
 that it is on the plane of effects, and only on these, that 
 the ends of creation are really exhibited in the fulness 
 of their power and perfection. The metaphysician, while 
 believing in and investigating the formative power and 
 influence of mind, and thus of a mental and spiritual 
 world upon a material and lifeless one, and so discovering 
 the laws of existence in general, is not to undervalue the 
 splendid antitype or reflection of these laws which the 
 physicist will find operating among the various degrees 
 and forms of material existence. He will remember that 
 correspondence requires two ranges of things to correspond; 
 that both End and Cause reside in the Effect, and that the 
 knowledge of being is far from complete until it embraces 
 the ultimate facts in which both the First Cause and the 
 Instrumental Cause find their complete expression. 
 
 Finally, the physicist whose study and business is with 
 effects simply, and who, as a consistent Agnostic, confesses 
 not to know anything above the phenomena of effects, 
 while he contents himself very properly with the sequence 
 of phenomena as constituting all that he knows of 
 u cause and effect," must not deny that to those at least 
 who recognise mind as a distinct entity, an entirely 
 different conception of cause and effect is quite possible ; 
 and because he can see no beneficence and no intelligence 
 in those struggles of blind mechanical forces and fortui- 
 tously massed atoms which, having no designing cause, 
 
SUBLIME USES OF PHYSICS. 75 
 
 come under his range of vision as mere dead phenomena 
 that therefore from a higher and wider survey of the 
 total of being there would not appear a purpose and an 
 end harmonizing and determining even these dead elements 
 into the final expression and embodiment of essential Love 
 itself. Because matter expresses not its own Divine cause 
 and Divine end to the physicist, seeing that these cannot 
 be seen from the plane of effects, therefore the physicist 
 is not to deny their existence to the higher degrees of 
 science. But neither let him suppose that, in the absence 
 of his knowledge of these higher degrees of being in 
 their discrete planes, therefore he can supply substitutes 
 or equivalents for them on his own ; for though he and 
 his followers may spend life after life in the accumula- 
 tion of well-attested phenomena, and so pile facts upon 
 facts until Ossas lie heaped upon Pelions, still they will 
 never have thereby risen one step above the plane of 
 effect into the discrete plane of cause, nor attained a 
 single perception of what is the end of creation and first 
 reason of the phenomena before them. How sublime, 
 how magnificent, on the contrary, becomes this treasure of 
 physical knowledge, however gained, to him who has 
 attained to true human knowledge, and who can from 
 the standpoint of all three planes of science behold the 
 Divine Ends of creative Love in the causative laws of 
 creative Wisdom, and both of these expressed in the facts 
 of physical science ! While they have their respective 
 boundaries, are after all either of these three great 
 sciences complete when severed from the others, and can 
 a universal knowledge or science of sciences, nay, can a 
 true theology, exist which does not embrace in its survey 
 alike the humblest fact of material nature, gathered in 
 
76 LIVING V. DEAD SCIENCE. 
 
 the patient and toilsome research of the physicist, together 
 with the Love that gave it birth, and the law of spiritual 
 influx and spiritual formation by which it subsists and 
 subserves its humble purpose in the great economy of 
 creation *? 
 
 It is the recognition of the end in the effect, and not 
 its identification with effect, that distinguishes alike a 
 living theology and a living physical science from that 
 which is dead. The accumulation of facts as facts is the 
 material out of which science is to be made, but these do 
 not make science. Science comes alone from the seeing 
 of facts in their relations. If these relations are upon a 
 single continuous plane, they belong all to one degree, 
 and the science resulting is a science of effects a 
 registry of observations merely. When these related and 
 grouped phenomena are now beheld in their true rela- 
 tions to the higher plane of spiritual laws and spiritual 
 causes, the science from physics becomes metaphysics. 
 The progress is like that from anatomy to the study of 
 psychology. Metaphysics is nothing else than psychology 
 on a universal scale. It is the study of mind in nature, 
 and the classification and interpretation of nature accord- 
 ingly. Theology contemplates the body of the world and 
 the causative laws and forces which animate it in their 
 still higher relations to the plane of a Divine creative will 
 and end. By the agency of the spiritual world, these 
 Divine ends descend into nature, and dwell there in the 
 firm rock of physical fact. But they are there not as 
 buried in a grave, but as the perpetual resurrection of 
 nature out of death to light. For the Divine ends of 
 creation exist in and by means of the effect matter 
 without becoming themselves effect; and they exist in 
 
UNION OF THE SCIENCES. 77 
 
 the scale of uses, reaching from the humblest vegetable 
 life to which the striving of even the mineral kingdom 
 has given birth, up to man and angel and the heavenly 
 society. 
 
 While the several planes of science are thus clearly 
 indicated by the doctrine of discrete degrees, and, for the 
 purpose of illustration, have been described as if pursued 
 by each its own votaries, it would be as erroneous as it 
 is unnecessary to conclude that these votaries may not all 
 be embraced in one person. Indeed, the ideal aim of 
 science can only be attained when the physicist is both 
 metaphysician and theologian, in so far as that he studies 
 facts in the light of spiritual laws, and spiritual laws in. 
 that of Divine Ends. In this way only can the Image of 
 God be found out and revealed in nature, and the pro- 
 found truth recognised that the " Divine and Infinite are 
 the same in the least and in the greatest." 
 
 It was from a principle of the intellect that Descartes 
 developed his proof of God and his system of knowledge : 
 he starts with the cogito, I think. 
 
 Likewise Hegel, in his development of being into the 
 existing world, proceeds according to the intellectual law 
 of thought the logical syllogism. 
 
 It is alone in the new metaphysics, as set forth in the 
 Divine Love and Wisdom, that the world is developed 
 from the necessity of Love, as the first essence and sub- 
 stance, demanding an object to itself. The preceding 
 philosophies, dealing as they do with the intellectual 
 means rather than the voluntary end of the world's 
 development, thus truly seem to lead up through the 
 science of cause to the science of the End theology. But 
 as the step from Physics to Metaphysics is a discrete 
 
78 THE SCIENCE OF THE END. 
 
 degree in science, demanding a new recognition in the 
 mind, that of the existence of spirit and of the influence 
 of spirit on matter, so did the step from philosophy to 
 theology demand the still further recognition of the exist- 
 ence of God and of a Divine influence upon spirit and 
 nature alike. The God thus recognised must be no mere 
 totality of physical or mechanical force, for this physics 
 was competent to behold in its own sphere. Nor is it 
 mere spirit as a general informing and intellectual force 
 a kind of vov<s pervading all things, or reason in all things 
 for this metaphysics has already taken note of ; but 
 God as a being of will and intelligence, of love and 
 wisdom, as well as the source of all natural substance and 
 force, since it is only in will that ends, as controlling 
 desires and motives, can abide. But as will is inseparable 
 from person, a person being naught else but a united will 
 and intellect, therefore God is a person the Divine 
 Person the God-Man. 
 
 The true knowledge of ends, and thus the universal 
 knowledge, is attainable only as all effects are seen from 
 their causes, and all causes from their ends. Such know- 
 ledge is attainable by no man, not only by reason of the 
 limited range of phenomena coming within the vision of 
 any single mind, but also because the end being the 
 inmost degree of anything, and being that Divine which 
 is alike in the least and the greatest, can be known truly 
 only to the Infinite. Since, then, the Infinite mind alone 
 can know the ends of all things from its own Divine 
 wisdom, it alone can provide this knowledge of ends for 
 finite minds according to their ability or willingness to 
 receive this knowledge. The knowledge thus provided is 
 Kevelation. Eevealed truth is that inmost Divine Truth 
 
REVELATION. 79 
 
 which, under the clothing of a literal symbolic Word or 
 Scripture, was conveyed by inward dictate to human 
 writers, as the same truth, enveloped in sensuous appear- 
 ances, is presented on the plane of effects in nature in the 
 visible universe. While the particulars involved in the 
 Divine ends are infinite, yet the general things which are 
 revealed are such as involve infinite things in each, and 
 these infinite things are gradually opened to the percep- 
 tion of the mind which has received the general truths of 
 Divine Revelation. 
 
 In what manner the particular ends of Divine creative 
 love can be discerned, when once the general end is per- 
 ceived, may be seen from the experience of every student 
 of nature who sets out with the acknowledgment of these 
 great truths of revelation : that there is a Divine Creator 
 of the world ; that man is created in His image ; that all 
 things are made to be subservient to man, and in order 
 that man may be united with God, and so the uses of 
 nature be constantly aspiring and returning to their 
 Divine source. The innumerable particulars of human 
 science will to such a mind be a constant and unlimited 
 revelation of Divine ends. If not upon the highest, yet 
 he stands upon a high plane, from which he is enabled 
 to view effects from their causes, and causes from their 
 ends. 
 
 In conclusion, I desire to place before the reader's eye 
 a brief rfaujni of the doctrine of Discrete Degrees as 
 applied to the subject of Creation and the ascending scale 
 of uses. For as, in Creation, the Divine proceeds in 
 descending degrees to the lowest basis or termination of 
 life in the mineral kingdom of nature, so in the Scale of 
 Uses does the Created Universe return again by ascending 
 
So RESUME. 
 
 degrees, through man, to God, its source. Any represen- 
 tation of this to the eye must be crude and imperfect a 
 mere rough outline. Such may, however, by spatial arrange- 
 ment suggest to the mind a series of principles which, never- 
 theless, are to be considered as spiritual essences and forms, 
 and apart from the limitations of space and time. If we 
 keep constantly in mind the relation of the successive to 
 the simultaneous order of discrete degrees, namely, that 
 the highest in successive order is the inmost in simul- 
 taneous order, we shall be less liable to be misled by any 
 spatial representation of the successive degrees in creation. 
 To think of God as highest above nature ought in true 
 science to be equivalent to thinking of Him as inmost in 
 nature ; equally to think of Him as before all time ought 
 to be equivalent to thinking of Him as in all time ; thus 
 the true science will contemplate God as a Being in all 
 space yet not of space, and in all time yet not of time. 
 Infinity will not be regarded as an infinity of space or 
 size, nor will Eternity be regarded as an eternity of times, 
 but infinity and eternity will be seen to be the two neces- 
 sary and only attributes of pure ESSE, or being per se, 
 apart from existence or a created world ; and space and 
 time will be regarded as those modes of finite human con- 
 sciousness of things, created by the Divine Proceeding, 
 by means of a fixed basis of sensation in matter. God, 
 as the Creator, is not to be thought of as remote from the 
 world either in space or in time ; rather, He is scientifi- 
 cally to be thought of as inmost in all present existing 
 being, as the life, the substance, the end of all; 'and so 
 is Creation to be thought of as a process continually going 
 on, and the subsistence of the world as its perpetual exist- 
 ence or coming forth from the Divine. 
 
GOD, THE INMOST. 81 
 
 Another truth to be carefully borne in mind when con- 
 templating the process of creation by Discrete Degrees, is 
 that not only do all existing things possess degrees of 
 both kinds, continuous and discrete, but that each discrete 
 degree is in itself capable of variation by continuous 
 degrees. Particularly is this to be remembered when 
 considering the statement in Divine Love and Wisdom : 
 
 " In either world, the spiritual and the natural, there 
 are three atmospheres, distinct from each other according 
 to degrees of altitude (discrete degree), and in their down- 
 ward progression they decrease according to degrees of 
 latitude (continuous degrees). And because the atmo- 
 spheres decrease in their progression downward, it follows 
 that they continually become more compressed and inert ; 
 and finally in the lowest things so compressed and inert 
 that they are no longer atmospheres but substances at 
 rest, and in the natural world fixed like those in the earth 
 which are called matter." (302.) 
 
 " That substances and matters such as are in the earth 
 have been produced from the sun through its atmospheres, 
 who does not affirm that considers well that there are 
 perpetual mediations from the first to last 1 and that 
 nothing can come into existence but from something prior 
 to itself, and finally from a first 1 The first is the sun of 
 the spiritual world, and the First of that sun is God-Man 
 or the Lord. 
 
 " Now as the atmospheres are the prior things through 
 which that sun presents itself in the outmosts, and as 
 those prior things continually decrease in activity and 
 expansion down to the lasts, it follows that when their 
 activity and expansion cease in the last things, they be- 
 come substances and matters such as are in the earth, 
 
82 CONTINUOUS DEGREES, ETC. 
 
 which retain in them from the atmospheres whence they 
 originate an incitement and endeavour to bring forth 
 uses." (303.) 
 
 The first impression derived from these passages is 
 likely to be that the discrete degrees are here merged into 
 continuous degrees, and that the earth is only the aura or 
 highest and rarest atmosphere in a state of dense com- 
 pression and inertia. This, however, is not the case ; 
 while each atmosphere does increase in density in its 
 descent, and while the lowest atmosphere becomes so 
 dense and inert as to come to a state of rest and inertia, 
 still the degree dividing one atmosphere from another and 
 the lowest from the earth remains a discrete one ; it is not 
 the confused blending of one into another of continuous 
 degrees. Thus water, although produced from the atmo- 
 spheric air, is not condensed air it has qualities which 
 distinguish it unmistakeably from the air ; and equally is 
 the mineral wholly different from the water although pro- 
 duced from it. The atmospheric air is divided from the 
 ether by a discrete degree, but the atmospheric air is also 
 in itself, as we have seen elsewhere, subdivided into its 
 three forces, its active, mediate, and passive forces, con- 
 sisting of air, water, and earth. 
 
 Thus while in each world, viewed as a whole, there is 
 a descent from the rare to the dense by continuous degrees, 
 yet in the descent the succession and relation of discrete 
 degrees is everywhere preserved in their trinal order, and 
 in every instance the dividing lines will be found to be 
 discernible between the three planes of a substance 
 related to one another, as end, cause, and effect. It is 
 thus only that the discrete degrees will be found to be 
 degrees of production or of causation and so of quality, 
 
THE KE Y TO CA USES. 83 
 
 while the continuous degrees are degrees of comparison, of 
 extension, and of quantity. 
 
 " The knowledge of degrees is as it were the key to 
 open the causes of things and enter into them ; without 
 it scarcely anything of cause can be known ; for without 
 it the objects and subjects of both worlds appear so 
 equivalent (univoca) as to seem to have nothing in them 
 but what is seen by the eye, when nevertheless this, as 
 compared with the things which lie interiorly concealed, 
 is as one to thousands, yea to myriads. The interior 
 things which lie hid can by no means be discovered unless 
 degrees be understood ; for exterior things advance to 
 interior things, and these to inmost by degrees not continuous 
 lut discrete. Decrements and decreasings from grosser 
 to finer or from denser to rarer, or rather increments and 
 increasings from finer to grosser or from rarer to denser, 
 like that of light to shade or of heat to cold, are called 
 continuous degrees. But discrete degrees are entirely 
 different ; they are in the relation of prior, posterior, and 
 postreme, or of end, cause, and effect. They are called 
 discrete degrees because the prior is by itself, the posterior 
 by itself, and the postreme by itself ; but still, taken 
 together, they make a one." 
 
 " The atmospheres, which are called ether and air from 
 highest to lowest or from the sun to the earth, are dis- 
 criminated into such degrees, and are, as simples, the 
 congregates of these simples, and again the congregates of 
 these congregates which taken together are called a com- 
 posite. These last degrees are discrete because they exist 
 distinctly and are understood by degrees of altitude, but 
 the former degrees are continuous because they continually 
 increase, and they are understood by degrees of latitude." 
 
84 KNOWLEDGE OF DEGREES. 
 
 " Without a knowledge of these degrees nothing can be 
 known of the difference between spiritual and natural 
 and therefore of correspondence yea, of any difference 
 between men and beasts or of the difference between the 
 more perfect and the more imperfect beasts ; or of the 
 difference between the forms of the vegetable kingdom 
 and between the materials which compose the mineral 
 kingdom. Whence it may appear that those who are 
 ignorant of these degrees cannot from any judgment see 
 causes. They only see effects and judge of causes from 
 them, which is done for the most part by an induction 
 continuous with effects ; when nevertheless causes do not 
 produce effects by continuity but discretely ; for a cause is 
 one thing and an effect another; there is a difference as> 
 between prior and posterior, or as between a thing forming 
 and the thing formed:' D. L. W., Nos. 184, 185. 
 
 With the foregoing very general and imperfect sketch 
 of the doctrine of Discrete Degrees in mind, we are now 
 prepared to appreciate in some degree how far the new 
 metaphysics has solved the old questions of the unity or 
 the duality of existence. We can behold how the unity 
 of all being is preserved without the possibility of pan- 
 theism, how the immanence of God in nature and in man 
 in nowise derogates from His absolute Deity nor destroys 
 the finiteness and objective reality of sensuous phenomena. 
 The contemplation of being thrust upon us by our very 
 consciousness as embracing subject and object requires 
 for its explanation an original process from Eeing per se 
 into existence, and thence into the creation of a world. 
 The very infinity of God demands the finitude of man as 
 the not-Divine to be the object of Divine Love, and 
 this finitude of man can only be realized by a proceeding 
 
THE PROBLEM SOLVED. 85 
 
 or going forth of the infinite from itself into the extreme 
 opposites of itself, into a world that is dead, inert, and 
 fixed. We have seen that the steps of this proceeding of 
 Deity into creation are the steps or degrees of production 
 and causation which are exhibited in the existence of every- 
 thing that is ; that these steps are the discrete degrees of 
 end, cause, and effect, the one being necessary to the others, 
 each, while distinct in itself, involving or demanding the 
 others as absolutely necessary to its own existence, and 
 the three in this manner making a perfect one. So the 
 world, the " All that is," stands before us a constant living 
 reality, a substance whose outer shape appeals to our 
 physical senses as matter, while its interior form and 
 essence are spiritual and divine, an exhaustless activity, a 
 perpetual going forth of a Divine Love to the achieve- 
 ments of its own ends in a world which it creates and in 
 a human society which it may perfect and bless to all 
 eternity. 
 
 We have attempted to represent in a diagram 1 the 
 following steps in the creation of the world by discrete 
 degrees in the descending order, and the return of creation 
 to union with the Creator by the scale of uses in ascend- 
 ing order. 
 
 Of the all-originating Being, the Divine Esse itself, 
 nothing can be predicated but infinity and eternity. For 
 Being pure and simple must always have been, nor can it 
 cease to be, nor can there be a limit to it, and yet until it 
 exists it has not become a thing to which we can assign 
 qualities or a name. 
 
 But the Divine Being not only is, but EXISTS ; it exists 
 in having relation to that which is, or is to be, outside of 
 1 Page 92. 
 
86 ESSE, EXISTERE, PROCEDERE. 
 
 itself. Its existence is in the three Divine Essentials of 
 Love, Wisdom, and Use. These are the qualities or prin- 
 ciples by which alone any created things may have being. 
 
 But besides the Divine Being and the Divine Exist- 
 ence, there is also the actual going forth or Proceeding of 
 the Divine, or the Divine in its going forth. What goes 
 forth is the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom and 
 the Divine of Use, and in these essentials pure Being 
 exists. It is because Being exists in Love, Wisdom, and 
 Use, that it can proceed in the works of creation. There- 
 fore of this trine of Divine ESSE, EXISTERE, and PRO- 
 CEDERE, the ESSE is the Infinite and Eternal End, the 
 EXISTERE is the Infinite and Eternal Cause, and the 
 PROCEDERE is the Infinite and Eternal Effect : and each 
 of these again contains within itself its corresponding 
 degree of the Divine Essentials, the ESSE being essen- 
 tially the Divine Love, the EXISTERE being essentially 
 the Divine Wisdom, Logos or Word, the PROCEDERE being 
 essentially the Divine Principle of Use or Work. 
 
 The First Proceeding of the Divine Love and Wisdom 
 constitutes the luminous sphere which is the sun of the 
 spiritual world, and is the source of spiritual heat and 
 spiritual light. " That heat and light are called spiritual 
 because God is called a spirit, and God as a spirit is that 
 Proceeding." (100.) And the world, which derives its 
 whole being from this sun as the source of spiritual heat 
 and light, is hence called the spiritual world. 
 
 The Divine Principle of Use is presented in the 
 spiritual world as the atmospheres proceeding from the 
 spiritual sun, embodying and conveying its heat and its 
 light, and constituting the successive heavens or expanses 
 of the spiritual world. 
 
A URAS AND A TMOSPHERES. 8 7 
 
 "Those spiritual auras and atmospheres which are 
 nearest to the Lord as a sun are the purest ; but further 
 away they are by degrees less and less pure. Hence it is 
 that there are three heavens ; the inmost heaven in the 
 purer aura, the middle heaven in an aura less pure, the 
 lowest heaven in an aura still less pure. These auras or 
 atmospheres, which are spiritual because they have sprung 
 forth from the Lord as a sun, when acted upon generally 
 present heat, and when modified molecularly present 
 light." Apocalypse Explained, No. 944. 
 
 From the spiritual sun itself its atmospheres proceed 
 respectively, and in their corresponding series, the natural 
 sun and its three atmospheres, the lowest of these em- 
 bracing its three discrete degrees of air, water, and earth. 
 
 In the mineral kingdom of the earth is found the 
 extreme limit to the outgoing Divine life and force. 
 Here it terminates, and rests in -fixed, dead, inert matter. 
 From this there is reaction, the sense of space and time, 
 and the possibility of thought from these, and thus a 
 return of all nature through man to the Creator, by the 
 ascending scale of uses. For these uses in which the 
 ends of creation are achieved, the mineral kingdom sup- 
 plies the materials, and is actuated by an endeavour to 
 furnish forms of use, from which endeavour come the 
 nourishing properties of the soil. The vegetable kingdom 
 furnishes the forms of use, the animal kingdom and man 
 the affections and the life of use. 
 
 The animal kingdom, ascending through its degrees of 
 less and more perfect animals, in man reaches again the 
 boundary of the spiritual world, in the natural degree of 
 the human mind, above which lie the spiritual degrees. 
 These are opened in succession in the minds of men after 
 
88 ANGELIC HE A VENS. 
 
 death, now angels, in the spiritual world. According to 
 the varying qualities of the ruling love, the several 
 societies of angelic spirits are ranged in successive heavens. 
 The highest of these is the celestial sphere, characterized by 
 the highest human love the love to the Lord. These dwell 
 more immediately in the effulgent brightness and warmth of 
 the spiritual sun, and in the love of these purified, beatified, 
 and exalted souls, the yearning of nature for a return to and 
 a union with its Divine Creator is satisfied, and the ends 
 of creation are accomplished. It is to God, not as formless 
 and aimless Being, but as Person, that creation can be 
 ascribed ; and the fact that creation exists is proof that 
 pure Being itself exists in a Divine Person of Love, 
 Wisdom, and Use, called in these pages the God-Man and 
 the Lord. As it is through the Lord as the creative Word 
 that all things were made, so it is in the Word incarnate 
 that the Divine goes out to the extremities of His creation, 
 and it is in the risen and glorified Word that all creation 
 returns to and finds conjunction with its Divine Source. 
 Therefore the Lord as the WORD is represented as the 
 first of the descending series, and in the Divine Humanity 
 as the last of the ascending series, not as denying to Him 
 supreme and sole Divinity, but because through Him and 
 in Him the absolute, eternal, and infinite Being assumes 
 relations with the world as its Creator, Saviour, and 
 Regenerator. 
 
 But in closing, let the summary of the whole doctrine 
 in its own majestic proportion, and as applied to the 
 vastest and noblest conceptions of which human thought 
 is capable, be given in the language of him to whom, 
 under God, the world is indebted for this new system of 
 metaphysics, which holds by either hand theology and 
 
UNIVERSE IS END, CAUSE, EFFECT. 89 
 
 physical science in friendly embrace, and opens the way 
 to a truly universal and living science, of which the 
 knowledge of earth shall be the body, and the knowledge 
 of God the soul. 
 
 " There are three things in every created thing, as well 
 in the greatest as in the least, namely, end, cause, and 
 effect. There is no created thing in which these do not exist. 
 
 " In the greatest, or the universe, these three exist in 
 the following order : 
 
 " The end of all things is in the sun, which is the 
 proximate proceeding of the Divine love and 
 Divine wisdom ; 
 " The causes of all things are in the spiritual world ; 
 
 and 
 " The effects of all things are in the natural world. 
 
 " It follows that the universe and everything in it was 
 created from the Lord by the sun, which has in it the end 
 of all things. 
 
 " Creation cannot be explained so as to be apprehended 
 unless space and time be removed from the thought. 
 
 " Remove space and time if you can, or as much as you 
 can, and, keeping the mind in an idea abstracted from 
 space and time, you will perceive that the greatest of 
 space and the least of space do not differ at all. The 
 idea of the creation of the universe, as a whole, cannot 
 then be any other than that of the creation of any par- 
 ticular part of it ; and the diversity of created things will 
 be seen to result from the infinite things which are in the 
 God-Man, and the indefinitely many things in the sun 
 which is the proximate proceeding from Him ; and these 
 indefinite things will be found to be imaged in all the 
 created universe. 
 
90 THE END OF CREATION ATTAINED. 
 
 " The creation of the universe, and of all things in it, 
 cannot be said to have been effected from space to space, 
 nor from time to time, progressively and successively, but 
 from eternity and infinity ; not eternity of time, for this 
 has no existence, but from eternity not of time, since 
 this is identical with the Divine; nor from infinity of 
 space, for this also has no existence, but from infinity 
 not of space, which also is identical with the Divine." 1 
 D. L. W., Nos. 154-156. 
 
 "These three end, cause, and effect exist in the 
 created universe, both in its greatest and in its least parts, 
 because they exist in God the Creator, who is the Lord 
 from eternity; but since He is infinite, and infinite things 
 in the Infinite are distinctly one [distincte unu?n\, there- 
 fore these three in Him and in His infinites are distinctly 
 one. Hence it is that the universe which was created 
 from His being, and which, regarded as to uses, is His 
 image, obtained these three in all and everything belong- 
 ing to it." 
 
 " The universal End, which is the end of all things in 
 creation, is that there may be an eternal conjunction of 
 the Creator with the created universe ; and this is impos- 
 sible unless there be subjects in which His Divine may 
 be as in Himself, consequently in which it may dwell 
 
 1 ' ' These things, I know, transcend the ideas of thought which 
 are in natural light, but do not transcend the ideas of thoughts in 
 spiritual light, for in these there is nothing of space and time ; nor 
 do they altogether transcend the ideas which are in nature, for 
 when it is said there is no such thing as infinite space, every one 
 assents to it from reason ; it is the same with eternity, this being 
 the infinite of time. The expression, 'to eternity,' is compre- 
 hended from time ; but from eternity is not comprehended unless 
 time be removed. " Z>. L. W., No. 156. 
 
THE END OF CREATION ATTAINED. 91 
 
 and remain; which subjects, in order that they may be 
 His habitations and mansions, must be recipients of His 
 love and wisdom as from themselves ; consequently they 
 must be such as to elevate themselves to the Creator as 
 from themselves and join themselves with Him ; without 
 this reciprocation no conjunction can be effected." 
 
 " These subjects are men, who can elevate and join 
 themselves [to God] as from themselves. By this con- 
 junction the Lord is present in every work created from 
 Himself ; for every created thing is finally for the sake 
 of man." 
 
 " Wherefore the uses of all things which are created 
 ascend by degrees from lowest things to man, and through 
 man to God, their Creator, from whom they originate." 
 D. L. W., Xos. 169, 170. 
 
A REPRESENTATION OF CREATION BY DISCRETE DEGREES ix 
 THEIR DESCENDING AND ASCENDING ORDER. 
 
 XII. 
 
 1. The Divine Love. 
 
 [2 The Divine Wisdom. 
 
 3. The Divine of Use 
 
 The Divine 
 HUMANITY. 
 
 L 
 GOD. 
 
 DIVINE ESSE". 
 
 Infinite. 
 Eternal 
 
 II. 
 
 Divine EXISTERE. 
 
 1. Love. 
 
 2. Wisdom. 
 
 3. Use. 
 
 The Creative 
 WORD. 
 
 XI. 
 
 The Spiritual. 
 Sun. 
 
 The Heavens 
 
 1. Celestial. 
 
 2. Spiritual. 
 3 Natural. 
 
 III. 
 
 Divine PROCEEDING* 
 in the 
 
 .3. Atmospheres. 
 
 X. 
 
 Angel- 
 
 1. Celwtial j s ? it . 
 1 2. Spiritual/ jj^ 
 ,3. 
 
 IX. 
 
 Van 
 
 1. Spiritual) Planes 
 
 2. Rational V of 
 3. Sensual) Mind. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Spiritual World. 
 
 1. Atmos. 
 Celestial. 
 
 2. Atmos. 
 Spiritual. 
 
 3. Atmos. 
 Natural. 
 
 V. 
 
 Natural Sun. 
 
 1. Aura. 
 
 2. Ether. 
 8. Air. 
 
 VIII 
 
 1. Man. 
 
 2. More perfect 
 
 Animals. 
 
 3. Less perfect 
 
 Animals. 
 
 VII. 
 
 1. Animal 
 
 2. Vegetable. 
 
 8. Mineral 
 
 THE WORD 
 
 INCARNATE. 
 
 VI. 
 
 1. Air. 
 
 2. Water. 
 
 3. Earth. 
 
 The Basis 
 
THE WORD: 
 
 IN CREATION, IN REDEMPTION, AND 
 IN HUMANITY. 
 
THE WORD : IN CREATION, IN REDEMPTION, 
 AND IN HUMANITY. 
 
 THE doctrine of the "Word is, and has always been, the 
 essential doctrine of all religion, pagan, Jewish, or 
 Christian. Barbaric or civilized, idolatrous, mystic, con- 
 templative, or practical, every religion, as such, rests upon 
 its conception of the WORD, or of God speaking Himself 
 forth, revealing Himself in some intelligible form to men. 
 In the higher thoughts of men this doctrine becomes 
 an element in philosophy and metaphysics of the very 
 first importance. 
 
 THE WORD IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 The Word, as creative, is set forth in Plato's philo- 
 sophy, 1 as the Idea, or Pattern, according to which the 
 world was created, or by means of which shapeless 
 matter, or chaos, acquired form or distinct existence ; so 
 that the visible world arose solely by its "mingling of 
 the Idea " with the primitive substance out of which all 
 things were made. 
 
 In Aristotle the creative Word appears as the Reason, 2 
 which gives actual and definite being to that which was 
 otherwise only potential and unformed. 
 
 1 See especially the Timaius. 
 
 2 The *ovs roHirtxos. See Aristotle, De Auima, iii. 
 
 95 
 
96 THE WORD: IN CREATION, 
 
 In the Stoics we find the same great doctrine in the 
 World-Reason, or creative fire which contains the rational 
 germs 1 of all things, and pervades the world as the 
 enlivening breath of Deity. 
 
 In Philo of Alexandria, the great Jewish philosopher, 
 who flourished at the time of Christ, the LOGOS, or 
 WORD, is a being intermediate between God and the 
 world, dwelling with God as His Wisdom, through whose 
 agency God created the world and has revealed Himself 
 to it. With Philo the Word (Logos) is the highest of 
 the Divine forces : " The world of ideas has its place in 
 the Divine Logos as the plan of a city is in the mind 
 of the master builder." (De Mundi Opificio, i. 4.) In 
 God, he says, dwell reason, thought, and its expression. 
 This reason is God's Wisdom. The creation of the 
 world he attributes to God's love, but it was through 
 the instrumentality of the Logos, or the Word. In this 
 philosopher the Ideas of Plato seem to be transformed into 
 Divine thoughts, having their seat in the Logos, or Word. 2 
 
 Finally, in the new Platonic philosophy, Plotinus set 
 forth the mind, or the Ideas, as the first emanation from 
 the One, or the Good, and as containing the formative 
 forces, or Words, logoi (Xdyot), by which mere shapeless 
 being is reduced to form and order. 3 
 
 We see, therefore, how the highest gleams of ancient 
 philosophy seem but the radiations of the Divine truth 
 declared in the sublime words of John's Gospel "In 
 the beginning was the Word : all things were made by 
 Him, and without Him was not anything made that was 
 made." 
 
 1 \oyos frip^mnxos. 2 Ueberweg, Hist. Phil. i. p. 231. 
 
 3 Ibid. i. 241. 
 
IN REDEMPTION, AND IN HUMANITY. 97 
 
 What then must be the deep and awful significance of 
 those other words which follow : 
 
 " And the Word was with God, and was God. 
 
 "In Him was life, and the life was the light of 
 men. 
 
 " And THE WORD WAS MADE FLESH AND DWELT AMOXG 
 
 US, AND WE BEHELD HlS GLORY THE GLORY AS OF THE 
 
 ONLY BEGOTTEN OF THE FATHER, FULL OF GRACE AND 
 TRUTH." 
 
 I. The Word in the beginning, or in Creation. 
 
 II. The Word in Revelation : first, as " made flesh," or 
 in the work of Redemption ; and second, as the Presence 
 of God with man, or as the perpetual Revelation of the 
 Glory of the Father of mankind. 
 
 Let these three topics engage our attention at this 
 time. 
 
 I. THE WORD IN CREATION. 
 
 As said above, the Word in Creation is not a dogmatic, 
 any more than it is a scientific or philosophic assumption. 
 It is simply a fundamental fact. In the beginning was 
 the Word, for the reason that without a Word, yea, a 
 Divine Word, there would have been no beginning. The 
 beginning of things is their being defined. This means 
 that they are shaped into " this " and " that ; " in other 
 words, that they are " made." But this distinction into 
 "this" and "that" is an act of mind: the idea must 
 exist before the thing, and before the world became a 
 world of distinct form, order and beauty, there was the 
 idea, the logos, or logic of it in the mind of the Creator. 
 Indeed, it is only by virtue of the Divine Wisdom that 
 the Divine Love can create or make a world for its 
 
 G 
 
$8 THE WORD: IN CREATION, 
 
 loving. This Divine Wisdom is the Creative Word 
 which first proceeds from the primal being of Deity, the 
 Divine Love ; it is the existence (existere) of the being 
 (esse) of God. By this primal wisdom all ideas and the 
 whole reason of the world came into being as the forms 
 of the Divine Love. They are thus the origin of things, 
 in being the first idea of things, the first mental distinc- 
 tion of this from that ; the first to fix the relation of M/x 
 to that. For God to love or desire a world was to give 
 that world substance, or being; for God to think that 
 world which He desired was to give it form. The Word 
 is the spoken thought. The beginning of the world was 
 the spoken thought of God. This is the "Let there be 
 light!" at which a visible and beautiful world spring;. 
 into being out of chaos and darkness. While things are 
 in darkness, it is as if they were not. It is as the light 
 appears that they take shape, and have a definite, cogniz- 
 able existence. The mass of clay before the artist is as 
 chaos ; the idea broods over it, and breathes itself into it, 
 like the Spirit of the Creator over the face of the deep. 
 The Word, the forming idea, goes from the artist into the 
 clay, moulding that into form which had no form, and 
 making each part to be a related part, or part of a whole ; 
 thus distinguished from, at the same time that it is 
 united to, other parts. 1 In this way a new thing is 
 created which, without this living Word, had never 
 been ; and so the statue stands forth complete a form 
 of beauty, of harmony, of "parts" and " relations "- 
 things purely ideal ; and so expressing the mind and 
 the dream of the artist. So did the creative Word of 
 God give to each thing in nature its distinctive being. 
 1 Compare Swedcnborg, Divine Love and Wisdom, No. 367. 
 
IN REDEMPTION, AND IN HUMANITY. 99 
 
 "Without Him was not anything made that was made." 
 It is the Divine Wisdom going forth from the Divine 
 Love that put form, and thus a meaning into nature, and 
 made it in any sense a book. It is not uncommon for 
 scientists to speak of the " meaning " of nature. But 
 surely there can be no meaning in nature but that which 
 was put there. Nature, as unintelligent force, could not 
 have blindly shaped itself to have a " meaning," and then 
 the meaning have come in, or rather come out, as an after- 
 thought or accident. But meaning is a thing of mind, 
 and a "meaning in nature " is nothing else than "mind 
 in nature," i.e. the Word as Creator. For a book is only 
 what has words, and nature is a book only as it contains 
 the Words, the expressed ideas, of its Maker. To the 
 eye of the brute, a book is not a book of words ; it is a 
 lump of matter. So to the naturalist, who sees in nature 
 no wisdom or intelligence written in words to such a 
 mind nature is no book ; it is sheer bulk. To him, nature 
 is as yet truly without form, and void : it has not yet 
 been touched by the creative Word. 
 
 As said above, for God to love is for Him to give sub- 
 stance to things ; for Him to think is to give them form 
 and definite existence. For thought is the form of His 
 own substance, since love exists by wisdom. The 
 thinking out of God's love is His wisdom, and these 
 thoughts shown forth in language or in things are the 
 Word. 
 
 All the life we have is a part of this going forth of the 
 Divine Love into the creature by means of Wisdom, or 
 the Word. This is the source of all mental as well as of 
 all physical life. Equally with the world without, was 
 and is the world within created by the Word of God. 
 
ioo THE WORD: IN CREATION, 
 
 The Wisdom of God is His Word giving form and 
 taking form in human minds. We could never think, 
 had not God thought before us, any more than we could 
 live without God having lived before us. The Word of 
 God not only made all nature, or all objects, to be what 
 they are, but is equally what enables us to have ideas 
 of these things to know one from another to know 
 differences and relations among things or the parts of a 
 thing. There would therefore be no things in the mind 
 any more than in nature, except by the created Word. 
 Of our every mental consciousness, perception, judgment, 
 conclusion, knowledge, and faith, it is absolutely and 
 essentially true that all of these things were made by 
 Him, the Word, and without Him was not anything 
 made that was made. This is why the human mind is 
 a world while the brute mind is not. 
 
 A dumb brute looking at the printed page of the Bible 
 would see 'no things there. The things that are there to 
 the rational sight of man are to the brute as if they were 
 not. They are as yet not made, because the Wisdom is 
 not yet there to make them. 
 
 Thus things in the mind or what is the same, the 
 mind's perception of things in or out of itself have 
 their being from the Word, or from the primal reason 
 and the rational power imparted from it to man. Within 
 and without, all things were made by Him, and without 
 Him was not anything made that was made. 
 
 The Word of God as the truth of God, is that Light 
 which in its appearing calls forth a world into being. 
 It is, therefore, the true Light that enlighteneth every 
 man that cometh into the world. The light of the sun 
 of our universe is but the physical side of the creative, 
 
IN REDEMPTION, AND IN HUMANITY. 101 
 
 formative Truth of the Creator. This Truth makes 
 worlds physical, moral, spiritual. It is of the Word 
 that it is said, " Behold, I create new heavens and a 
 new earth." It is of the Word that Swedenborg s,ays : 
 A Church is a Church, or has its distinct being' ar.d fovm 
 as a Church, "according to its understanding of tl>o 
 Word ; " l and the inauguration of eve^y aa'^v growth, 
 new age, new movement in the life of man, political, 
 moral, and spiritual, is in the dawn of new truth, with 
 its world-forming power. It is true now and always 
 " In the beginning is the Word." 
 
 When the sun rises, and its sweet, cheery light steals 
 silently over the earth, what a creation does it call into 
 being ! 
 
 "A new-created world springs up at its command." 
 
 " Let there be light," means let there be to the human 
 mind a visible world ; and at the silent bidding of God's 
 messenger, mountains lift their heads ; the oceans and 
 broad lakes unveil their bosoms ; the forests show their 
 plumy heads ; the clouds roll forth in splendour ; the very 
 air is tremulous with glory. It is the Word that begins ! 
 It is the making of things ! It is the creative power of 
 
 light ! 
 
 II. THE WORD IN REVELATION. 
 
 From the Word in Creation to the Word in Eevelation 
 the transition is from the mind of God to the mind of 
 man. It is to man alone that God reveals Himself, and 
 this is because the creative Word has already formed in 
 man, and in him alone, a heaven and an earth in which 
 
 1 True Christian Religion, Nos. 243-247. 
 
102 THE WORD: IN CREATION, 
 
 the light of Divine Truth may shine, and where it may 
 produce its forms of order, and beauty, and use. 
 
 The purpose of revelation is the salvation of the world, 
 with all that this implies. It is, therefore, a new genesis, 
 or ^'creating of a new world out of a moral chaos. It is 
 redemption, and io this end, the Word made flesh, suffer- 
 ing, tirluEi pniftg, and ascending in glory. It is the coming 
 of the Lord to judgment. It is the City of God. It is 
 the permanent presence and indwelling of God with 
 men. In a word, the Creator of the world is its Saviour ! 
 and "becomes so by revelation. THE FATHER OF MAN 
 REVEALS HIMSELF TO His CHILD. God as unknown and 
 inconceivable is not the heavenly Father. No rational 
 conception of God can admit that He created intelligent 
 souls only for ever to evade their knowledge, to hide 
 Himself from their recognition and their love. The 
 father reveals himself to his child. God the Father 
 of all reveals Himself to His immortal creatures in His 
 Word, which is His Wisdom. By means of His Word 
 made flesh He, as the Divine Truth, clothes Himself 
 with human nature, and Himself comes down to the low 
 estate of us men, to redeem and save us. The Father of 
 men, in His revealings of Himself to man, is Life, the 
 life of the Father's love, and that life is thus become 
 the "Light of men." The Creator of the world thus 
 becomes its Preserver, its Saviour. The salvation He 
 procures by means of His Word is the restoration of 
 human souls to the laws of His own Divine Order the 
 laws of a blessed, an eternal, heavenly life. This is the 
 full, round plan of God's Providence as the end of 
 creation. To create a world is not enough to answer 
 the ends of an infinite love, if creation is not followed 
 
IN REDEMPTION, AND IN HUMANITY. 103 
 
 by salvation. The end of the creation of the world is 
 that a heaven of angels, who have first been men on 
 earth, may enjoy to eternity the gifts of the heavenly 
 Father's love, and reciprocate this love in love and service 
 to one another. This end or purpose would have been 
 realized in the first creation, the first genesis, had not 
 mankind, by the abuse of free will and rationality, be- 
 come the father of evil, and thence of the disease and 
 disorder, the misery and strife that come from breaking 
 the laws of a perfect Creator. To restore human life to 
 order, to make it possible for man freely to return to the 
 life of heaven and to become that immortal angel of 
 light, and beauty, and power that God first designed 
 him for this, Redemption was necessary, and for this 
 the Lord became man. The Divine becomes now the 
 Sender and the Sent The Love is what sends; the 
 Truth, or WORD, is what is sent. 1 The Divine becomes 
 now the Father and the Son. The Father is the Love 
 that sends; the Son is the Truth, the Word, that is 
 sent. Truth is the messenger of the gospel, but its 
 message is Love. The Truth, the Word, of God is 
 made flesh, and we behold His glory, the glory of the 
 only begotten of the Father, the glory of the Divine 
 Wisdom begotten of the Divine Love full of grace 
 and truth. 
 
 THE WORD IN KEDEMPTION. 
 
 To redeem man, the Truth, the Word, made itself man. 
 Not only so did it bear to our vision the glory of a 
 Divine Wisdom when all true wisdom had vanished from 
 
 1 " That the world may know that Thou hast sent me, and hast 
 loved them " (St. John xvii. 23). 
 
104 THE WORD: IN CREATION, 
 
 the belief of men, but it lay the sharp edge of pure, 
 undeviating, fearless truth at the root of the evils of the 
 world ; it let the tinselled wickednesses of men appear in 
 all their depravity and deadly power, and it strengthened 
 mankind with the power of a new aim, a new ambition, a 
 new hope, and a new faith. The redeeming power of the 
 Word was first put forth in the combat which the Lord 
 sustained in the flesh with all the hells, a combat for the 
 liberation of human souls from the infestation and obses- 
 sion of devils. He drove out devils. He first resisted the 
 devil in His own person, and so obtained power to subdue 
 all the hells and to command devils to come out of men, 
 and to bid men henceforth be of good cheer, because He 
 has overcome the world. The ability of man, from free- 
 dom, to choose the right and to do it, this is what the Word 
 won in its conflict with hell. It was the power of truth 
 that destroyed the sway of falsity and evil, because it not 
 only opposed itself as a law of conduct to the unrighteous 
 and corrupting ways of the world, but in the new law of 
 living which it gave to men there was the virtue of a 
 Divine power. The Word was the channel of truth and 
 grace from the Father. In this Word incarnate, suffering 
 under the woes of humanity, beating down our foes, 
 carrying the cross before us, raised upon it, and by His 
 very death drawing men to Him, in this Word the 
 human race found its new genesis. Again, in " the 
 beginning God made a heaven and an earth; " and in this 
 beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God 
 and was God. The power that made over the world in 
 the inauguration of Christianity; that threw down the 
 pagan temples of Kome and of Greece, and quenched their 
 altar fires; that made to cease the gladiatorial fights in the 
 
IN REDEMPTION, AND IN HUMANITY. 105 
 
 arena; that called the savages of Scythia, the Hun, the 
 Goth, and the Briton to cease to live for war and plunder, 
 and to beat their spears into pruning-hooks, this was the 
 silent, irresistible, creative power of truth. It was the 
 Word in the beginning of a new epoch of human existence 
 and development. 
 
 In all the realms of life it is the same : in science, in 
 politics, in social reform the new truth is what makes 
 over the world. The Word is thus not only the former 
 but the re-former of man, and thus is the great mediator 
 between Creation and Salvation. Where the moral 
 nature of man has fallen into darkness, the light shining 
 in his intellectual nature is given as a lantern to lead him 
 out. And this shining light is the Word. Through the 
 planes of the intellect, 1 as through crystal doors, shines 
 down the light from the world above matter, above 
 nature, from the world of pure spiritual substance, where 
 light itself is truth, and where truth is the form of love. 
 It is in this light alone that man sees true light, that he 
 may know the truth as it is in God. Knowing this, he 
 may accept it, be guided, yea, be ruled by it, be defended 
 by it, and be saved by it. By keeping its command- 
 ments, and only by doing so, he may enter into life. 
 Unless God should thus by His Word enter into man, by 
 revealing Himself first to the intellect and then to the 
 will, man would never be reformed, regenerated. There 
 would remain in him only the first genesis the begin- 
 ning in which he obtained his being only as an animal 
 and a part of nature. His own mental nature is left to 
 chaos and darkness, such as the world w r as before the 
 Word was spoken, " Let there be light." The Creator of 
 1 Didne Love and Wisdom, Nos. 242, 406. 
 
io6 THE WORD: IN CREATION, 
 
 the world, in order to "become the Re-creator and Saviour 
 of His world, now speaks the Word and becomes the 
 Revelator of Himself to that subject which alone can 
 receive what He gives. 
 
 That which reveals is the Word; but the Word is 
 heard, can be heard, alone by man. The Divine end in 
 creation, therefore, includes not only God's speaking the 
 Word, but man's hearing. Except for this, the Love 
 which is the Father of all things waits in an eternal 
 silence for that response which alone it desires, and for 
 which it has made all and given all. My words and 
 your words speak our minds one to another. The Word 
 of God speaks the Divine nature and the Divine mind 
 to man. 
 
 The relation of revelation to creation is that, therefore, 
 of religion to deism. That may well be called a natural 
 theology which stops at the acknowledgment of God as 
 pure Being, or the inner Keality, or Force, of nature, and 
 such in its infinity that it cannot be known to man, and 
 its attributes even such as cannot be conceived of. This 
 may do for an idea of the God of nature, or of a natural 
 God. It is not yet the God of intelligent souls. It may 
 be a science of God as Being, or mere JSsse. It is not a 
 science of God as Creator ; not, of God as the Word ; as 
 the Existere; as the Divine Love and Wisdom, going 
 forth in distinct, intelligible forms into the intelligence 
 and recognition of men. 
 
 III. THE WORD AS GOD PRESENT. 
 
 We have now seen how God is, by His Word or 
 Wisdom, in the world, in creating it and in redeeming it. 
 
IN REDEMPTION, AND IN HUMANITY. 107 
 
 Neither creation nor salvation is a deed accomplished, 
 but is ever being accomplished. God is at this instant 
 creating the world and saving it as truly as in any former 
 time. Existence is perpetual creation, and all orderly 
 and happy life, here and above, is perpetual salvation by 
 Him who is at once Creator, Father, and Saviour. In 
 creating the universe in the beginning, the Word of God 
 clothed itself with the outward forms of inorganic matter 
 and organic life. When the free moral and rational life 
 of man had reached the boundary of its divergence from 
 God, when it had reached that point where to go farther 
 would be to drop humanity for ever and fall beneath the 
 brute into the monster, then the Word clothed itself with 
 that humanity, even to its farthest separation from God, 
 that, breaking the fetters that were crystallizing about it 
 there, the human soul might be free again to respond to 
 the Father's love, to rebound to God, its source. Thus is 
 the Word "gone out into all the ends of the world," that 
 " from the ends of the earth " the souls of men, finding it 
 there, may cry out to it and find in it a loving God and 
 a Saviour. Such is the Word in the Divine work of 
 redemption and in the Divine Humanity of the Lord 
 Jesus Christ, who is become the First and the Last, the 
 inmost and the outmost Man, and God in all. 
 
 And finally, where else dwells this creative, this restor- 
 ing and saving Word, the wisdom of God 1 ? The very 
 consciousness of God, but unbeknown to us, it dwells in 
 nature and in our whole being; it gives form to our 
 bodies from the first cell to the whole figure and face 
 radiant with grace and beauty. It gives form to our 
 reasoning power from the simplest impression of sense 
 to the vastest conclusion of our science or philosophy. 
 
io8 THE WORD: IN CREATION, 
 
 But so the Word works in our unconsciousness. It works, 
 in the Divine Humanity, in all the power of God's love 
 put forth to withhold the souls of men from falling into 
 evil, and to draw them into the delights of heaven. But 
 it must still dwell in one other factor, in an intelligent, 
 willing, reciprocating agent. The Word must have a 
 hearer and an answer ; that hearer and that answer is the 
 mind and heart of a believing man. " Faith comes by 
 hearing, and hearing by the Word of God." The answer 
 and the hearing is the Church among men. It is the body 
 of the faithful ; strictly and internally, of those who 
 4< hear the Word of God and do it ; " formally and visibly, 
 of those who hear and publicly profess it. And so we 
 come to that fundamental definition or distinction given 
 by Swedenborg that " a Church is a Church according 
 to its understanding of the Word." The Word is the 
 Truth of God the Form of His love seeking a response 
 from His creature, man, the object of that love, in man's 
 intellectual and moral nature ; in his intellectual nature, 
 by acknowledgment of God and faith in Him ; in his 
 moral nature, by obedience to His commandments. Where 
 this Word finds no reception and response in man, there 
 is no Church ; the circle of Divine life in creation is 
 broken, and the human race must perish. Where the 
 Word is acknowledged, there the Church is. 
 
 THE WORD IN THE WORLD'S HISTORY. 
 
 And according to the various degrees of the revelation 
 of Divine Truth in different ages, and to the various 
 modes of understanding it and applying it to the forming 
 of life, in different times and places in the history of the 
 
IN REDEMPTION, AND IN HUMANITY. 109 
 
 world so has been the progress of the Churches or of 
 the ages of the world. And as the beginning of a world 
 is the spiritual formation of man, as a reflection of God, 
 by means of the Word, so is the end of a world the 
 destruction or dying out of that spiritual form which the 
 creative Word has given. It is of the beginning and 
 the end of worlds in this sense that the Scriptures treat ; 
 the creation of heavens and earths and their passing away, 
 not merely in the plane of physical being, but more in 
 that of moral and spiritual being. So have worlds been 
 formed, and so have worlds come to an end as the Word 
 of God has been received, and perverted, and rejected, and 
 received again by men. These successive ages, seons, or 
 worlds, are the successive Churches which have existed 
 in each, and have been distinguished according to their 
 understanding of the Word. From the golden age of the 
 world, when in childlike innocence the race saw heavenly 
 realities by open vision, and thus read the meaning of 
 nature and found in it verily God's Word written in 
 things of beauty, order, and use ; to the succeeding age 
 of symbols, when, in place of celestial realities perceived 
 in immediate vision, the various earthly correspondences or 
 types of spiritual things were used as the reminders of 
 heavenly and Divine things, and also as tokens of man's 
 self-sacrifice and worship ; thence to written law and the 
 statutes and ceremonies of a theocracy, a state, in whose 
 wars, conquests, sins, banishment, decline, and restoration 
 are depicted unerringly the fortunes of the kingdom of 
 God in the heart of man ; thence to the gospel of grace 
 and truth coming forth alike from the lips, the deeds, the 
 healing touch, the glance of love, the tears of pity, the 
 blood poured out and the prayer sighed forth upon 
 
1 1 o THE WORD : IN CREA TION, 
 
 the cross, of the Word Incarnate, the Conqueror of hell, 
 the Eedeemer of the world ; thence to the apocalyptic 
 vision, the New Jerusalem descending from heaven, the 
 final, the everlasting tabernacle of God with men " the 
 tabernacle which shall not be taken down, not one of 
 the stakes whereof shall ever be removed, neither any 
 of its cords be broken." 
 
 THE WORD IN THE NEW CREATION. 
 
 A Church, a revelation, a religion to endure for ever, 
 Avhat is this New Jerusalem, this final vision, the fulfil- 
 ment of all prophecy ? At the end of Scripture it is of no 
 account, or it is of the utmost account ! Is it a mere 
 bauble to be tossed about in the hands of biblical critics, 
 a kind of plaything to amuse the fancy, as Henry Ward 
 Beecher has recently described it, or is it the most real, 
 the most comprehensive and practical part of the whole 
 Bible, because the end to which all tends, the answer to 
 all the soul's longings, hopes, and questions the realiza- 
 tion of all the promises of God's mercy from the beginning 
 of the world till now 1 The New Jerusalem, descending 
 from God out of heaven ; what is this but another and a 
 final beginning, in which the Word is again the Creator 
 of a new heaven and a new earth 1 Is it not the beginning 
 of a new world, a new age, now that the old is passing 
 away a new world, morally, spiritually, intellectually 1 
 Is not the Word, the formative wisdom and reason of 
 God, making over the mental world to-day in a new 
 revelation of itself to man ? And is not this new revela- 
 tion such that when received it must abide ; that "its sun 
 shall never go down ; " that its dominion must be an ever- 
 
IN REDEMPTION, AND IN HUMANITY, in 
 
 lasting dominion, and its kingdom that which shall not 
 pass away 1 Is it not, therefore, the permanent dwelling 
 of God with man *? has not the Word at length become 
 actually and finally the presence of God upon the earth 1 
 
 We have seen what the Word has done in creating the 
 world, both physical and mental, in endowing nature with 
 forms of use, and minds with faculties of use ; and what 
 the Word has done in redeeming and saving the worlds 
 thus created ; we have seen the Word itself grow forth in 
 a universe, in a written book, and in a Divinely-human 
 life and death on earth. These are all as yet objective 
 revelations and operations of the Word; they are the 
 Word seen and believed from without by man, seen on 
 the surface, touched in the flesh, believed and understood 
 in the letter ; as such they were aspects of the Word to 
 pass away, not by being destroyed, but by being fulfilled ; 
 not by no longer being seen and felt, but by being 
 allowed no longer to hide the spirit, the life, the essential 
 reality within. " Blessed are they that have not seen and 
 yet have believed ! " The real revelation is to the eye 
 within ; the real Word is that which speaks not to eye 
 and ear alone, but to understanding, to reason, to heart 
 and soul ! When the Word has penetrated there, and 
 there is received, when the reason, in perfect spiritual 
 freedom, has accepted it, and the will of man has sub- 
 mitted to be created anew by this law of life seen to be 
 Divine and loved because it is Divine, then are the 
 stakes driven and the cords drawn of that tabernacle of 
 God which shall never be removed. The Word of God 
 dwelling in the very reason it has formed, as the highest 
 law, as the most perfect science, the most luminous and 
 sublime philosophy, as the most beautiful of arts and the 
 
H2 THE WORD: IN CREATION, 
 
 soul of all arts, the mother of faith, the spring of all hope 
 and high ambition and desire, the everlasting arm beneath, 
 the wings that bear us up out of the shadow of death, 
 this is what God seeks in erecting His abiding tabernacle 
 with man. This will be the close embrace of the Father 
 and His child, this will be the real fruition of creation 
 the abiding of God with man in such a rational, actual, 
 conscious way that they shall be His people, and He shall 
 be their God. 
 
 To this end the old must pass away that the new may 
 be revealed. The old is the apparent, the delusive, the 
 superficial, the outside knowledge or half-knowledge of 
 things. In science, in political affairs, this change from 
 an old to a new world has already taken place. Science 
 has brought to light the inside forces and forms of nature, 
 and is correcting the judgment of the naked eye by the 
 sight of reason and of philosophy ; States are learning the 
 source of power, the true methods of civil and social com- 
 bination and co-operation. From the outward emblems 
 of power, of law, of right, of justice, the people are strik- 
 ing inward to the things themselves. But beyond what 
 science or political wisdom shall reveal and construct, 
 there comes the creative ray from a higher sun " the 
 new light shining from the Word of God." 
 
 THE SPIRITUAL SENSE OF THE WORD. 
 
 For the earth has a meaning deeper than all that the 
 geologist or biologist can find in it from nature alone ; the 
 earth has its spiritual sense, and that spiritual sense of 
 the earth is heaven ! This is what nature means ; it is a 
 book only so far as it contains this Word. And as the 
 
IN REDEMPTION, AND IN HUMANITY. 113 
 
 earth has a meaning within and beyond the hammer of 
 the geologist, although explored and brought to light by 
 it, so have the Scriptures a meaning within and beyond 
 the research of learned critics of the text. The spiritual 
 meaning of the written Word lies beneath and within its 
 letter as truly as God and heaven lie within and behind 
 nature; and the blindness that shall refuse to see God 
 and heaven behind the forms, the evolutions, and the 
 present uses of nature, is the same in character with that 
 theological blindness which shall refuse to see God and 
 heaven in the spiritual meaning now revealed out of and 
 beneath the letter of the written Word. The revelation 
 now given to the world is that of the real in place of the 
 apparent truth regarding God, the spiritual world, and the 
 eternal life. And because these truths are real rather 
 than phenomenal, therefore they will abide. Eecognised 
 as from God and not from any man, they constitute the 
 abiding presence of God with man ; resting on the letter, 
 contained within the letter, shaped, held fast, unalterably 
 fixed in the grasp of these Divine symbols and parables, 
 chosen by Him who made the whole universe to be but 
 a parable of His creative Love and Wisdom, thus fixed 
 in the letter of the written Word, these revelations of 
 spiritual truth must remain like the earth established 
 for ever in the belief of men. They will form not a new 
 Church alone, but new Churches innumerable on the face 
 of the earth. For it is a new beginning in which the 
 Word, as with God and as God Himself in His second 
 coming to man, is making anew the heavens and the earth. 
 In this coming the apparent gives place to the real ; faith 
 looks through the symbol to the things symbolized ; the 
 authority of tradition, of man, of dogma imposed from 
 
ii 4 THE WORD: IN CREATION, ETC. 
 
 without, gives place to the authority of truth speaking 
 from within, but speaking out of the Word of God. The 
 spiritual sense of the Word, hitherto unknown, is at 
 this day revealed. This opening of the Scriptures is the 
 Second Coming of the Lord, the beginning of a new uni- 
 versal Church, and a new age of the world. Its coming is 
 like every beginning, a separation of light from darkness ; 
 it brings into being forms of beauty, and reveals as clearly 
 by contrast that which is hideous and revolting. Its 
 coming is for ultimate peace and joy ; but for the present 
 it can only bring an apparent increase of conflict ; for this 
 is the " hour of temptation which must come upon all the 
 world ! " It is for judgment that the Lord is again come 
 into the world, and it is the Word which He hath spoken, 
 that is everywhere judging the world in this last day. 
 
 " Behold, He cometh with clouds; and every eye shall 
 see Him, and they who pierced Him . . . ." 
 
 "And His name is called The WORD OF GOD." 
 
 
THE 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF SWEDENBORG. 
 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SWEDEKBORG. 
 
 rpHERE are two ways in which our subject may be treated ; 
 J- one the historical, the other the psychological. The 
 one would treat of Swedenborg in the light of comparison 
 with other philosophers, ancient and modern, and describe 
 his relation to these. The other would treat of Sweden- 
 borg's philosophy in its relation to the development of 
 his own mind, and thus to what he achieved in science 
 on the one hand, and in theology on the other. 
 
 It would be a pleasant, and not unprofitable, study to 
 compare Swedenborg, in his character as a philosopher, 
 with some of those few illustrious minds which alone in 
 ancient or modern times can bear comparison with him. 
 We might dwell at length on his striking resemblance to 
 Socrates and Plato, in their representations of the Deity 
 as the Good (compare Plato, Republic, vi. 505) ; of the 
 life after death as an unbroken continuance of the present 
 (Phcedo, 106) ; of the spiritual world as a substantial 
 world and that which gives birth to all that exists here 
 (Timceus) \ and of the future life as deriving its happiness 
 or misery from the character of the life led upon earth 
 (Phcedo, 106). We might compare him with Aristotle in 
 the vastness and variety of his information, in his reverence 
 for nature and the facts of experience, but especially in 
 his recognition of the spiritual faculty which, descending 
 from above, meets in man the ascending degrees of natural 
 
n8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF SWEDENBORG. 
 
 life, and thus constitutes man an immortal and divinely 
 gifted creature, distinguished from brutes and all merely 
 physical productions. (Compare Aristotle, De Generatione 
 Animdlium, ii. 3.) Coming down to later times, we find 
 Swedenborg in the eighteenth century what Bacon was in 
 the sixteenth, the great exponent of the inductive method 
 in science, content to study and draw conclusions from 
 not theories of things but the things themselves; only 
 where Bacon laid down the method, with comparatively 
 barren illustration, Swedenborg used it, applying it to a 
 vast field of observations, covering almost every depart- 
 ment of human learning, and bringing to its test every 
 a priori principle, or speculation, which he presents for 
 our adoption. (Compare Bacon's Preface to the Great 
 Instauration, and Swedenborg's Preface to the Principia.) 
 Again, in Descartes, we find that which reminds us of 
 Swedenborg, in the search for the substantial points and 
 the successive formation of the physical universe (compare 
 Principia Philosophice) ; his denial of a vacuum, his 
 belief in a vortex and in three kinds of matter, the 
 vortical, or first, being the finer which constitutes the 
 interior of the vortex and forms the sun or stars; the 
 second being the atmospheric, or light-bearing matter; 
 the third being the planetary matter or the gross incrus- 
 tations originally forming around the first vortex, and 
 ultimately breaking into wandering bodies. In Locke 
 (compare essay on The Human Understanding, Book II.), 
 we find the history of ideas as not inborn, but produced 
 by impressions on and through the senses ; very similar to 
 Swedenborg's analysis in his work on The Soul (comp. 
 Swed. De Anima, p. 55) ; and likewise the admission 
 that in compound ideas the soul has, nevertheless, con- 
 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SWEDENBORG. 119 
 
 tributed something (essay Book II. chap, xxiv.) which 
 the mere senses cannot produce. Finally, in Leibnitz 
 (Principes de la Nature, etc.) we have the idea of the 
 monads, the rising scale of perceiving substances, or the 
 particles which make up all being, differing only in their 
 reflecting more or less clearly and consciously the other 
 monads, the soul, being the most perfect, reflecting in itself 
 and consciously as a microcosm the whole macrocosm, 
 and vibrating in its state of integrity in response to the 
 great harmony of the universe, and thus to the Divine 
 proceedings or inspirations of the Creator ; in which 
 sublime theory we see something of Swedenborg's doctrine 
 of the image of creation in the greatest and the least forms 
 of nature (Divine Love and Wisdom, 313, 319) ; and the 
 reflection in all the universe of a certain harmony of 
 uses, or of the human form ; while in Wolf, the distin- 
 guished disciple of Leibnitz, we would constantly be 
 reminded of Swedenborg in the philosophic definitions 
 of terms common to both. (See Swedenborg's Ontology.) 
 Again, Descartes, while devoutly accepting the Bible as 
 authority, nevertheless held that its purpose was not 
 to teach physical science, and among his followers arose 
 an allegorical school of Scripture interpretation (Meyer, 
 Philosophia Scriptures Interpres, 1666). Leibnitz and 
 Newton, in the later period of their respective careers, 
 devoted themselves largely to pure theology; Newton even 
 elaborating an extensive system of Bible interpretation, 
 according to an internal sense, so called, or what we might 
 more properly name a kind of political historical sense. 
 
 From a careful examination of these and similar points 
 of resemblance between Swedenborg and other philo- 
 sophers, we might derive profit not only in learning how to 
 
120 THE PHILOSOPHY OF SWEDENBORG. 
 
 relatively value Swedenborg's own philosophical theories, 
 but also in discovering that these occupations of his mind 
 were similar to those of other men of his day, and that in 
 the form of his philosophizing he was not wholly unlike 
 other great thinkers who preceded or accompanied him. 
 Such a study of contemporary philosophy affords us an 
 atmosphere through which to view the man, and by which 
 to depict him. But the medium through which the man 
 is seen is not the man himself. Where, in the form of 
 philosophizing, there may seem to be a resemblance to 
 others, how vastly different is the substance or the content ! 
 Wolf, whose philosophy Swedenborg admired, and whom 
 he so much resembles in his definitions, as we learn from 
 his Ontologia, was in heart a materialist, believing that 
 nature was the only God. Swedenborg, in his Principia, 
 quotes a sentence from Wolf, in which he claims " full 
 liberty for all who philosophize in a philosophical manner," 
 and declares that " from such a liberty no danger need 
 be apprehended to religion, to virtue, and the State." 
 Yet for this very quotation he is called to account by 
 one of his contemporaries, John Christian Cuno (Tafel's 
 Documents Concerning Swedenborg, vol. ii. p. 478), not 
 because as a philosopher he dares think independently of 
 revelation, but rather because he dares subordinate his 
 philosophy to revelation, and to make the theological 
 content of the philosophy the main thing. Says Cuno : 
 " Mr. Swedenborg as a philosopher is quite modest and 
 unassuming, but as a theologian more than arrogant." 
 How strangely these words sound to us ! How clearly 
 they reveal the manner in which Swedenborg was in his 
 day misapprehended, as though these truths which he 
 disclosed as Divine were his own, and he were claiming 
 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SWEDENBORG. 121 
 
 some excellence and merit for promulgating them. The 
 philosophers, who, like Wolf, rested in mere philosophy, 
 in " merely mechanical intelligence," were applauded and 
 called great; the man who stole their splendid armour 
 wherewith to fight the war of faith, and to set forward the 
 ramparts of revealed truth, is derided and ignored. The 
 Prelate Oetinger, of Wurtemberg, who had translated 
 portions of the Arcana Ccelestia, vol. i., writing to the 
 Duke Charles, says : " Thirty years before reading Sweden- 
 borg's Arcana Ccelestia, I had studied his Principia, which 
 I much preferred to Wolfs on account of its leading to 
 the sacred Scriptures. It is wonderful how a philosopher 
 u'ho was accustomed to think according to the rules of 
 
 mechanics should have become a prophet I did 
 
 not take counsel with flesh and blood, but translated the 
 work in the sight of God, thinking that the foolishness of 
 God is wiser than the mechanical intelligence of man." 
 
 "I was once asked," 1 says Swedenborg, "how from 
 being a philosopher I became a theologian, and I answered, 
 
 * In the same manner that fishermen became the disciples 
 and apostles of the Lord, and that I also had from early 
 youth been a spiritual fisherman.' On this he asked, 
 
 * What is a spiritual fisherman 1 ' I replied, ' A fisherman 
 in the spiritual sense of the word, signifies a man who 
 investigates and teaches natural truths, and afterward 
 spiritual truths in a rational manner.' " 
 
 In Oetinger's expressions we see clearly defined the 
 real relation of Swedenborg to the philosophy of his time. 
 He was, namely, a man who was accustomed " to think 
 according to the rules of mechanics," and who instead of 
 
 1 This question was put by Oetiuger in his letter to Swedenborg, 
 Doc., vol. ii. p. 1033. 
 
122 THE PHILOSOPHY OF SWEDENBORG. 
 
 arriving at a denial of God or the supernatural, as did so 
 many of his contemporaries, made this very mechanical 
 form of thought the vehicle of bringing before the world 
 a vast scheme of spiritual science, amounting to a new 
 revelation of God and of the Bible, veritably a new heaven 
 and a new earth. 
 
 It has been customary among the religious followers of 
 Swedenborg, to divide his life and works into two periods, 
 the scientific and the theological, including in the former 
 all that preceded the date of his spiritual illumination, 
 and his beginning the exposition of the spiritual sense 
 of the Scriptures in the Arcana Ccdestia. Those, too, 
 whose reading of Swedenborg has been confined exclusively 
 to his theological writings, have perhaps not unnaturally 
 embraced the notion that not only the subject-matter 
 therein treated of, the "things heard and seen" there 
 related, were revealed to Swedenborg, and thus of super- 
 natural origin, but that the "rational manner," or the 
 form of thought and expression in which these higher 
 realities found their receptacles and their means of 
 expression, were also matters of revelation. 
 
 It will help to our attaining a more accurate view on the 
 subject if we now glance for a moment at Swedenborg the 
 philosopher, as distinguished from both the scientist on 
 the one hand, and the theologian on the other. "We must 
 look at the philosophy of Swedenborg, not only in its 
 relation to other philosophical systems, whether ancient 
 or contemporary, but in its relation to Swedenborg's own 
 mental development, to what he had before achieved in 
 pure science, and what he afterwards was instrumental in 
 revealing in pure theology. 
 
 In this psychological study of Swedenborg's philosophy 
 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SWEDENBORG. 123 
 
 we shall be best guided by his own analysis of the human 
 mind and of the corresponding degrees or kinds of know- 
 ledge of which the mind is capable. The mind, in its 
 organization, reflects the form and order of all being, 
 which is, namely, that of three planes or degrees, to be 
 named end, cause, and effect. These three exist in every 
 created thing. And these three degrees have their origin 
 in a corresponding trine of degrees in God, namely, 
 the Divine love, which is the end ; the Divine wisdom, 
 which is the cause; and the Divine operation, or use, 
 which is the effect. The whole universe of being, includ- 
 ing God the Creator, may be regarded as a One, embracing 
 God as its end, the spiritual world as its cause, the natural 
 world as its effect. The human mind has its three planes, 
 called by Swedenborg the celestial, the spiritual, and the 
 natural. To the highest plane of the mind is given 
 wisdom, or the perception of ends ; to the middle plane 
 of the mind is given intelligence, or an understanding of 
 causes ; to the natural plane of the mind is given science, 
 or a knowledge of effects. We have therefore three 
 faculties in ascending order : 
 
 I. The senses, by which experience of nature is pos- 
 sible, and which gives us scientific ideas or facts, and in 
 which we are conscious of the effects of creation. 
 
 II. The reason or intelligence, which arranges, subor- 
 dinates, and interprets these facts according to the direc- 
 tion of an underlying law or cause. 
 
 III. The soul, or wisdom, to which is given to perceive 
 the end itself, and thence to understand the cause of 
 things, and to truly know effects. 
 
 Hence we see the relative positions of science, philo- 
 sophy, and theology ; science being the knowledge of 
 
i2 4 THE PHILOSOPHY OF SWEDENBORG. 
 
 effects, or of the natural world; philosophy, the intelli- 
 gence of causes or of laws underlying all nature and all 
 supernatural operations ; and theology, the knowledge of 
 God, the Creator and Source, and of the Divine ends in 
 creating the universe. 
 
 We may arrive at this distinction between science, 
 philosophy, and theology in another way. Man, says 
 Swedenborg, is not life, but a form recipient of life. All 
 life is sustained in two ways : by what is received from 
 without and from within. This is true of minds as well 
 as bodies. The mind receives from without the impres- 
 sions of the senses ; from within, its affections or animating 
 motives and desires which come from the spiritual world. 
 Between the two is the receptacle of the mind or intellect 
 itself, the mould which fashions, the instrument which 
 uses, these two supplies of life. Philosophy, or the higher 
 exercise of the reason, is what stands thus midway between' 
 nature and the supernatural, between sensuous impressions 
 and the intuitions of the soul, subordinating and moulding 
 the one into conformity with the law imposed by the 
 other. This is in accordance with Swedenborg's own 
 statement in his Preface to the Principia, where he treats 
 of the means conducive to a true philosophy. These, he 
 says, are three in number experience, geometry, and the 
 rational faculty. By experience he means " the know- 
 ledge of everything in the world of nature which is 
 capable of being received through the medium of the 
 senses " (Principia, i. 4). It is not wisdom, but the 
 medium that leads to it. Experience is science ; it is the 
 threshold by which wisdom may be approached. He 
 who is possessed of scientific knowledge, and is merely 
 skilled in experiment, has only taken the first step to 
 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SWEDENBORG. 125 
 
 wisdom ; such a person is only acquainted with what is 
 posterior; he is ignorant of what is prior; his wisdom 
 does not extend beyond the organs of his senses, and is 
 unconnected with reason; when, nevertheless, true wis- 
 dom embraces both (p. 12). The second medium leading 
 to wisdom is geometry and rational philosophy, by which 
 we are enabled to compare our experiments, and reduce 
 them to laws, rules, and analogies (p. 14). Under the 
 empire of geometry we may rank the whole mineral and 
 vegetable kingdoms, and also the animal too, in respect 
 to mechanical organs, or in respect to its anatomical, 
 vegetable, and organic relations. But in respect to the 
 soul, we cannot think it possible that its emotions or 
 actions can be explained or comprehended by any of the 
 known laws of motion (p. 3). The whole world itself, as 
 consisting of the elements and of the mineral and vege- 
 table kingdoms, is a pure system of mechanism, and so 
 also is the animal kingdom as to its anatomical organiza- 
 tion (p. 15). But there are innumerable things which 
 are not mechanical, nor even geometrical, and which 
 therefore do not fall under the empire of geometry. 
 Such is the infinite which is prior to geometry, being its 
 cause, and which cannot be explored by geometry ; such 
 is the intelligent principle which exists in animals, the 
 soul ; such is a Providence in the Infinite respecting all 
 things, and hence a connection or series of consequents 
 according to which all circumstances are determined and 
 arranged by causes and the causes of causes toward a 
 certain end ; such is love, to which the ancients attributed 
 the production of the universe. But since intelligence in 
 the soul is not mechanical, but the mode in which the 
 soul operates, in what does the essential, rational, and 
 
126 THE PHILOSOPHY OF SWEDENBORG. 
 
 intelligent principle consist 1 ? It does not consist in 
 knowing many things which the world naturally exhibits 
 to the senses, for this knowledge refers itself to experi- 
 ence ; it does not consist in knowing the figures and 
 spaces in which motion terminates ; this is the province 
 of geometry ; it does not consist in knowing the propor- 
 tions and rules of figures and motions by which the world 
 produces its phenomena, for these belong to nature, 
 science, mechanics, and philosophy. But the rational 
 principle consists in knowing how to arrange into such 
 order and connection the reasons and proportional facts 
 known from the world as to view their analogy. This 
 presupposes an active principle, or certain force, impelling 
 into motion all those things which inhere, as it were, 
 scientifically in its organs, that is, it presupposes a soul. 
 The rational principle in the soul, therefore, is the con- 
 tinual analysis of those things which are scientifically, as 
 it were, inherent in its organs (pp. 27, 28, 29). 
 
 In these definitions, it is to be observed, Swedenborg 
 does not claim to have arrived at the highest knowledge, 
 that of the soul, or of the infinite, nor that philosophy 
 can attain thus far. The most that he aspires to in the 
 Principia, indeed, is to attain to certain hidden things 
 in the elemental world invisible and remote from our 
 senses, and from things known and seen, to arrive at 
 conclusions by analytical reason regarding things unknown. 
 " These, however, unless they be principles to which 
 experiment, observation, and geometry agree, are to be 
 regarded," he says, " as the mere figments and dreams of 
 a delirious mind " (p. 32). 
 
 The content of that higher faculty, the wisdom or per- 
 ception of the soul, must come from some other source 
 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SWEDENBORG. 127 
 
 than merely analytical reasoning or philosophy. " The 
 philosopher," he says, " sees indeed that God governs His 
 creation hy rules and mechanical laws, and that the soul 
 governs the body in like manner; he may even know 
 what those rules and mechanical laws are ; but to know 
 the nature of that Infinite Being, from whom, as from 
 their fountain, all things in the world derive their exist- 
 ence and subsistence, to know the nature of that supreme 
 intelligence, with its infinite arcana, this is an attainment 
 beyond the sphere of his limited capacity. When, there- 
 fore, the philosopher has arrived at the end of his studies, 
 even supposing him to have acquired so complete a know- 
 ledge of all mundane things that nothing more remains 
 for him to learn, he must then stop; for he can never 
 know the nature of the Infinite Being, of His supreme 
 intelligence, supreme providence, supreme love, supreme 
 justice, and other infinite attributes. He will therefore 
 acknowledge that in respect to this supremely intelligent 
 and wise Being his knowledge is as nothing ; he will hence 
 most profoundly venerate Him with the utmost devotion 
 of soul " (p. 35). This language, though in some places 
 reminding one of the agnosticism of our day, yet is as far 
 removed as possible from the agnostic position as now 
 held. By man's incapacity to know God, Swedenborg 
 does not surely mean an absolute incapacity ; since if man 
 cannot know God by some means, how can he know that 
 He is intelligence and love, and how can man adore that 
 of which he knows nothing ? Swedenborg evidently 
 means man's inability to know God from pure philosophy, 
 or apart from the revelation which God, or the Infinite, 
 makes of Himself. 
 
 "As by the grace of God," says Swedenborg, in his 
 
128 THE PHILOSOPHY OF SWEDENBORG. 
 
 work On the Infinite (p. 85), " we have all these matters 
 revealed in Holy Scripture, so where reason is hindered 
 in its apprehensions we must at once have recourse to 
 revelation ; and when we cannot discover from revelation 
 either what we should adopt, or in what sense we should 
 understand its declarations, we must then fly to this 
 oracle of reason. In this way natural theology must 
 proffer her hand to revealed, where the meaning of 
 revelation seems doubtful, and revealed theology must 
 lend her guidance in turn to rational theology when 
 reason is in straits; for revealed and rational theology 
 can never be contrary to each other; if the latter be 
 truly rational and does not attempt to penetrate into 
 the mysteries of infinity. In which case it is not truly 
 rational." 
 
 A further illustration of the true relation of philosophy 
 to science and to revelation, we shall find in Swedenborg's 
 description, in the posthumous work De Anima, of the 
 manner in which the images of sight are converted into 
 sensations of the brain, and into ideas of the imagination. 
 Here we shall see again the meeting of two forces or 
 influences, the one from without, or below, the other 
 from above, and a consequent direction, arrangement, and 
 subordination of the lower to the higher, by means of an 
 intermediately intellectual or rational faculty. In this 
 work (De Anima, p. 55), in the chapter on Perception, 
 Imagination, and Memory, our author says : " There can 
 be no idea in the imagination which is not in the memory, 
 and no idea in the memory which has not been in the 
 sense ; hence all parts of the imagination are insinuated 
 through the senses alone. But inasmuch as the order of 
 similars, their harmony, their form, does not depend on 
 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SWEDENBORG. 129 
 
 this sensory but on a higher and purer intellect, it follows 
 that something more than memory alone is required for 
 the imagination. For it is not owing to the memory that 
 those ideas called forth are rightly put together. This is 
 rather the result of the pure intellect itself, or of the soul, 
 whose nature it is to understand the harmonies and the 
 orders of things. Hence the imagination exists in pro- 
 portion to the communication existing between the pure 
 intellect and the ideas of the memory. The orderly 
 arrangement of the parts of the memory does not come 
 from the senses but from the pure intellect, and thus 
 from the soul, which is the order, the love, the truth, the 
 light, the ruler of its own system. Eut we confound this 
 order with the ideas, or the determination or order of 
 parts with the parts themselves. And from our observing 
 that the order is natural or innate, we believe also that 
 the ideas are innate also." 
 
 This beautiful analysis shows distinctly how far 
 Swedenborg as a philosopher stands removed from the 
 materialists of our day, even when in part adopting their 
 language and asserting emphatically their strongest posi- 
 tions. Thus our ideas, he says, come through the sen- 
 sations, or are, properly speaking, interior sensations of 
 the brain ; and yet no thought and no reasoning, no 
 classification nor comparison of ideas, exists apart from 
 the intellect, or the faculty of the soul. In the same 
 line of reasoning he says further (p. 56), " No speech can 
 originate from imagination alone. Both intellect and 
 thought are requisite to speech, for in mere composition 
 of words there is something intellectual, analytical, and 
 philosophical, yea, spiritual." 
 
 From this examination of Swedenborg's own definitions, 
 
130 THE PHILOSOPHY OF SWEDENBORG. 
 
 I have endeavoured to show what relation his philo- 
 sophical thinking and writing holds to his scientific and 
 theological works. Do we not find here the " rational 
 manner of investigating truths " (Intercourse of Soul and 
 Body, No. 20) ; " the pure intellect which arranges in 
 order the ideas of sense " (De Anima, p. 56) ; " the 
 analytic, philosophical, and distinct rationality which is 
 the immediate effluence and minister of the soul "1 (On the 
 Infinite, p. 87). Have we not in Swedenhorg's philo- 
 sophy, viewed in itself, a form of reasoning rather than a 
 content, a faculty of arranging into harmony and order 
 the facts and experiments furnished rather than the facts 
 and experiments themselves 1 As a philosopher, Sweden- 
 borg did not create ideas, but he sought them, arranged 
 them, and made them serve the high purposes of the soul. 
 It would be difficult by any merely chronological divisions 
 to distinguish the scientific and the philosophical works.' 
 We might with some propriety designate those works 
 more eminently scientific which preceded the year 1734, 
 including the Prindpia. The treatise On the Infinite, 
 published also in that year, seems to begin the great philo- 
 sophical series, which includes the Economy of the Animal 
 Kingdom (1740), the Animal Kingdom (1744), in its several 
 parts, and the only recently translated treatise, De Anima. 
 Looking upon the work, On the Worship and Love of God 1 
 (1745), as a kind of nexus or transition, we come to the 
 beginning of the theological period with the first volume of 
 the Arcana Ccelestia, published in 1749. In the works of 
 the first period, which I have called scientific, our author 
 treats of the objective physical world exclusively, even in 
 his Prindpia his highest aim being to arrive at the occult 
 1 See the concluding essay of this volume. 
 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SWEDENBORG. 131 
 
 things of the elementary world. In his philosophical 
 works, especially the Animal Kingdom and the Economy, 
 he treats of the occult things of the human body, and 
 aims at a knowledge of the soul itself. It is the king- 
 dom of the soul J that he here investigates, in distinction 
 from the kingdoms of nature that have hitherto occupied 
 his studies. But in his search for the soul in her 
 inmost principles he both succeeded and failed. He 
 succeeded so far as by the closest analogical reasoning it 
 is possible to infer from the known and visible to the 
 unknown and hidden, and thus carried far beyond sight 
 and experiment the train of thought which defines the 
 soul in her mechanical relations to the body and to 
 nature. But as to the essence the content of the soul 
 itself this remains still immeasurably above the philo- 
 sopher's grasp. It is true, he defines it as a natural 
 subject accommodated at once to the beginning of motion 
 and to the reception of life. He further calls it the 
 spirituous fluid, whose office it is to represent the uni- 
 verse, not only naturally but intellectually. But this 
 spirituous fluid, this exalted essence which eludes our 
 finest physical sense and exhibits itself only to our highest 
 imagination, is still a form and receptacle rather than life 
 itself, for " life is to the soul what the soul is to mind or 
 to sensations " (Economy, ii. p. 277). Of the spirituous 
 fluid which he sometimes identifies with the soul (ii. p. 249), 
 sometimes calls " the other self of the soul " (p. 286), he 
 says, "It enters the blood as the first, highest, inmost, 
 remotest, and most perfect substance and force of the 
 body, the sole and proper animal force and the deter- 
 mining principle of all things" (p. 214). "It derives its 
 1 Regnum Animale in the sense of soul-kingdom. 
 
132 THE PHILOSOPHY OF SWEDENBORG. 
 
 being from a still higher substance, and proximately from 
 those things in which the principles of natural things are 
 impressed by the Deity, and in which the most perfect 
 forces of nature are involved. To the body it is the form 
 of forms ; to the microcosm it is what the aura is to the 
 macrocosm" (p. 219). "It is the formative substance" 
 (p. 220). " On account of the influx of the Divine life, 
 which is the principal cause of the animate kingdom, this 
 purest fluid, which is the instrumental cause, is the spirit 
 and soul of the body, hence we call it the spirituous 
 fluid "(pp. 232-234). 
 
 Thus the search for the soul has ended, after all, only 
 in the discovery of a mode or form of existence rather 
 than the living thing itself. The soul thus discovered by 
 this rational " analysis of the things scientifically inherent 
 in its organs," is at the last but a " formative substance," 
 an instrumental and not a first cause. Thus far, whether 
 in science or philosophy, we have been climbing by suc- 
 cessive rounds of the ladder up toward the goal of real, 
 Divine substance and life ; here on the highest round we 
 stop, unable to climb further, and yet the veil is not lifted, 
 the boundless gaze into infinity is not opened to us. We 
 can see the steps by which we have risen, we can describe 
 them, we have learned how to climb further, but no 
 higher step is visible ; the utmost of natural knowledge 
 and natural philosophy has been attained. 
 
 What shall reveal to us that which is still higher, still 
 beyond 1 What shall reveal to us the nature of the soul 
 itself ; the nature of Deity ; the Divine laws of spiritual 
 life ; the moral government of the universe ; the laws of 
 the soul's relations to other souls in the society of the 
 city of God, and of its relations to God as its heavenly 
 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SWEDENBORG. 133 
 
 Father and Lawgiver? Here is where philosophy and 
 natural science are both silent, and where Divine theology 
 with revelation as its new continent opens anew a higher 
 world to the soul's reason, and invites the reverent scien- 
 tist and philosopher into novel and delightful fields of 
 exploration and study. 
 
 All science is but the study of effects ; all philosophy 
 but the study of means and laws, while true theology is 
 the study of ends and the Being in whom these ends 
 reside. " The universe," says Swedenborg, " is nothing 
 but a complex of means to a universal end. To what 
 purpose are the auras but to minister to corresponding 
 sensations in the animal kingdom *? for what purpose are 
 sensations but to produce intellectual ideas in human 
 minds 1 For what purpose are intellectual ideas unless 
 to subserve the supreme life or wisdom 1 These are in 
 themselves only mediate or instrumental causes and 
 aspirations to the ideas of wisdom, but not until they 
 enter the supreme sphere do they begin to be wise. 
 Thus one thing is the instrumental cause and means of 
 the other : modification of sensation, sensation of intelli- 
 gence, intelligence of wisdom, and by wisdom all are 
 made into something, because by wisdom they exist for 
 the sake of something, and they are made into essences 
 by Him who is essential being and wisdom " (Economy, 
 p. 356). 
 
 So does the philosopher express the truth thus divinely 
 worded : " All things were made by Him " (the Logos or 
 Wisdom), "and without Him was not anything made 
 that was made." 
 
 If philosophy, then, is the study of the form and 
 order of things, while science is the study of the material 
 
134 THE PHILOSOPHY OF SWEDENBORG. 
 
 of things, and theology the study of the soul and essential 
 being of all things and their end or purpose in creation, 
 we shall here find a method of classification to which the 
 writings of Swedenhorg will more satisfactorily yield 
 themselves than to any other. It would he indeed 
 absurd to say that in his scientific writings distinctly so 
 recognised, those in which he treats of pure physics 
 or the elementary world without any regard to the soul 
 or a spiritual organizing principle, there is no exercise 
 of that higher rational faculty which is essential to 
 philosophy. Swedenborg himself calls his Principia, 
 which is eminently a work of physical science, a philo- 
 sophic search after the occult things in nature. The 
 subject-matter being, however, that which belongs to the 
 plane of effects enables us to truly designate this whole 
 field of labour, however philosophically treated, as belong- 
 ing to the domain of science. So it would be equally 
 unreasonable to say that in the philosophical treatises on 
 the Animal Kingdom and on the Infinite, there is nothing 
 of science, when these great works are nothing but induc- 
 tions from the data of science, a reasoning by analogies 
 from the known to the unknown. Still, as the object of 
 search is rather the world of causes, the laws by which 
 the soul rules in her empire this again, we may say, is 
 what characterizes this whole division of Swedenborg's 
 productions as philosophical. Finally, in the unfolding 
 of the internal sense of the Scriptures, in the treatises 
 on the Divine Love and Wisdom, on the Divine Provi- 
 dence, and the descriptions of the spiritual world, it would 
 be quite erroneous to say that both science and philosophy, 
 or the most careful rational analysis and inductions, have 
 here given way to mere ecstatic vision and rhapsody. 
 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SWEDENBORG. 135 
 
 On the contrary, the same great mental instrument is 
 here used as on the lower field of observation, only a 
 new, a higher kind of vision and of sense is opened to 
 its investigations. The philosophy is still the same, the 
 " same rational manner of investigating truths," the same 
 " mechanical reasoning," indeed, now employed by the 
 prophet that was formerly employed by the " fisherman." 
 Yea, even science itself does not retire from these new 
 elysian fields, but quickened with a brighter vision sees 
 a world of wonders opening wider out beyond its familiar 
 and well-pondered forms of matter, and testifies, to our 
 senses, of that wonderful law of correspondences or 
 analogies between the spiritual and natural worlds, which 
 revelation has declared to the soul. Nevertheless, while 
 both science and philosophy are embodied in an eminent 
 sense in his theology, still the subject-matter being the 
 Divine life and love itself, its ends in creating the uni- 
 verse, and its proceeding in the accomplishment of these 
 ends even to the regeneration of the human soul and its 
 elevation into the life of an angel in heaven this dis- 
 tinctly sets off the theological from both the philosophical 
 and scientific portions of his writings. 
 
 Just here it is interesting to note that subtle and far- 
 reaching distinction traceable even in the terms Sweden- 
 borg uses in the philosophical and theological works 
 respectively regarding both the object of study and the 
 kind of knowledge attainable in each. The highest 
 conception of God in the mind of the philosopher is a 
 Being of infinite wisdom ; but to the theologian God is 
 no longer wisdom primarily, but love. In the rational 
 investigation of the order of nature or of the mechanical 
 universe, philosophy is invoked. In the spiritual world, 
 
136 THE PHILOSOPHY OF SWEDENBORG. 
 
 when the essence of things is revealed to the soul's vision, 
 it is no longer human philosophy that is our teacher, but 
 the " wisdom of angels." 
 
 Here the question will not unnaturally arise : Since, 
 then, it was rather the new content or substance of truth 
 that was afforded Swedenborg in his illumination, and 
 not any essentially new rational faculty or way of think- 
 ing or of investigating truth, what shall we say of those 
 great laws of the new or spiritual science which form so 
 conspicuous and so imposing a part of his whole theo- 
 logical system especially the laws of correspondences, 
 and of the three discrete degrees 1 Are these, then, not 
 a part of the revelation, or did they belong to that 
 splendid accoutrement of a philosophic reasoning power 
 learned and developed during the earlier and preparatory 
 career of Swedenborg's life 1 The latter would seem to 
 be the true statement, and indeed to be most in harmony 
 with the laws of mental action which the author lays 
 down. In the passage already quoted from the De 
 Anima, he has warned us not to confound the determina- 
 tion or order of the parts with the parts themselves, or 
 the order of ideas with the ideas themselves. The order 
 of ideas, or what we would call the laws of thought, are 
 innate in the mind ; the substances of the thought, the 
 ideas themselves, these come into the mind from without, 
 " from things heard and seen," whether in the spiritual 
 or natural world. As a matter of fact, the law of corre- 
 spondences is clearly outlined in Swedenborg's work 
 entitled the Hieroglyphic Key, which, according to 
 Wilkinson, belongs to the same period w r ith the Economy 
 of the Animal Kingdom (1740), and in this work there 
 is an allusion to " correspondences and their application ; " 
 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SWEDENBORG. 137 
 
 while in the work on the Animal Kingdom, vol. i. p. 10, 
 the author enumerates certain new doctrines which are 
 to constitute an introduction to rational psychology, 
 amongst which are the doctrine of forms, the doctrine of 
 order and degrees, the doctrine of series and societies, the 
 doctrine of influx, the doctrine of correspondence and 
 representation. 
 
 The doctrine of degrees is treated at length in the 
 Economy of the Animal Kingdom (vol. ii. p. 204). He 
 calls it a principal part of the natural sciences, and in 
 its higher applications he declares it to be the science of 
 sciences by which we arrive at a true judgment of things 
 by separating, namely, from things simultaneous, things 
 successively involved in them, or by which we abstract 
 causes, and causes of causes (ends), from the effects in 
 which these causes appear (p. 205). 
 
 It is true, indeed, that the doctrine of discrete degrees 
 forms the entire contents of Part III. of the Wisdom of 
 Angels concerning the Divine Love and Wisdom, and that 
 Swedenborg declares in!S T o. 188 of that work that nothing 
 has hitherto been known, as far as he is aware, of the 
 discrete degrees or degrees of altitude, but only of con- 
 tinuous degrees. While the degrees alluded to in the 
 passages quoted from in the Economy of the Animal 
 Kingdom would seem to belong to the order of discrete 
 degrees, yet it is true that this term is not there used, 
 and the doctrine itself in its clear and wonderful form 
 does not anywhere appear until it is presented in the 
 splendour of a heavenly light, illustrated as it there is 
 with wonderful examples drawn from the constitution of 
 that world of causes. The same may be said of corre- 
 spondences ; while these peculiar forms of comparing and 
 
138 THE PHILOSOPHY OF SWEDENBORG, 
 
 judging of things seem to have been conceived in the 
 philosophic mind of Swedenborg, all the illustrations and 
 applications of them presented in the scientific and philo- 
 sophic works seem tame and gross as compared with 
 their celestial beauty as exhibited in the spiritual world 
 and in the spiritual sense of the Scriptures, and are thus 
 embodied in the theological works. The instrument 
 remains the same, but the matter treated exalts and 
 glorifies the instrument so that we hardly recognise it as 
 the same. 
 
 I have thus endeavoured to show in what real manner 
 Swedenborg the Philosopher stands between the Man of 
 Science and the Theologian, and that his philosophy as a 
 "rational manner of investigating truth" stands similarly 
 between the merely mechanical science of the senses and 
 the wisdom of angels. That it was a purely human 
 rationality, and thus a human philosophy in its method, 
 and indeed in its content up to the time of our author's 
 illumination, there can be no question ; but it is the 
 rational faculty that makes man capable of being a 
 spiritual creature in distinction from the animal, and that 
 can make all human science to be but the magnificent 
 clothing of divinity ; and it is not too bold an asser- 
 tion that probably, viewed in its historical connection, 
 the philosophy of Swedenborg represents the highest 
 attainment the human reason has ever reached. This 
 philosophy was simply that perfectly adequate, rational 
 equipment of a human mind now divinely called to 
 lead human thought and faith up to a higher plane 
 of truth than any hitherto revealed. The world may 
 attach the notions of " folly " and " madness " to the 
 supernatural content of that system of reasoning when 
 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SWEDENBORG. 139 
 
 applied to Divine and supernatural things. We know 
 how to translate the term " madness " as thus used, having 
 seen what Plato says of the ancient identity of the words 
 madness and prophecy, and what "foolishness" the 
 Apostle chose to preach to the Greeks to save them from 
 the " wisdom of this world ; " but the man who thinks 
 soundly will hardly find a flaw in the rational system 
 itself ; this still appeals with all the old vigour of exact 
 logical argument and strict analogy, and even of the 
 " mechanical intelligence " of the most unimaginative and 
 practical common sense. We will leave the " madness " 
 to justify itself ; the reason in it, however, we have to 
 acknowledge as our own in kind, and as a lofty and splendid 
 exhibition of what this our distinctively human faculty is 
 capable, at its best, of achieving. Not that the reason 
 was henceforth to act, as heretofore, in the function of a 
 discoverer or inventor. Henceforth it was not in laborious 
 deductions from hidden a priori principles that the 
 reason is to be employed, but rather in the field of 
 supernatural intuitions, in the delightful studies of 
 "things heard and seen," of a truly objective and tangible 
 world of spiritual substance. But the reason that enters 
 upon this lofty flight, this career amid the eternal realities 
 of the upper world, is not an untrained charioteer likely 
 to become giddy. The reins of those noble steeds, the 
 intelligences, are in safe and steady hands ; the philosopher 
 may gaze with clear, undazzled vision upon what to the 
 feebler mind would bring blindness or confusion. The 
 " science of order and of degrees " had not been learned 
 in vain now that a world was opened to view where 
 principles are no longer abstract from things, but exhibited 
 in the very things themselves. 
 
140 THE PHILOSOPHY OF SWEDENBORG. 
 
 How wonderful and how adorable, to conclude, is that 
 Providence which in furthering the progress of human 
 society prepared such an instrument for such a work ! 
 On what a wonderful science was that philosophy 
 matured ; and what a sublime philosophy was that which, 
 entering the worlds hitherto invisible save to the eye of 
 faith or of ecstasy, now clad in the armour of a disciplined 
 reason, with the cold glance of the intellect surveyed 
 unmoved both its glories and its terrors, and embodied 
 those things heard and seen in a system of theology which 
 in its rational consistency and symmetry is unparalleled 
 in the theologies of the world ; of which it may be truly 
 said, even in this day of rationalistic doubt and unbelief, 
 nunc licet intelledualiter intrare in mysteria fidei. [ Vera 
 Clir. Rel., No. 508, Swedenborg.] And what a philosopher 
 is this to contemplate, whom at the close of his ambitious 
 and splendid conquests in tbe realm of natural knowledge 
 we leave, not defiant, proud, and confident, seeking other 
 heights to scale, but, rather, on his knees before the gates 
 of paradise, waiting for their opening ! Listen to the 
 conclusion of his treatise on the Human Soul in the second 
 part of the Economy of the Animal Kingdom. 
 
 " Is there not an ascent from the created universe 
 through human intelligences or souls to Him as the last 
 end who was the first, through that which was the all in 
 the means 1 And do not those souls exist for an end 
 beyond nature an end that they penetrate into by in- 
 tuition, and which is no other than the existence of a 
 society of souls in which the end of creation may be 
 regarded by God, and by which God may be regarded as 
 the end of ends ? 
 
 "If there be a society of souls, must not the city of 
 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SWEDENBORG. 141 
 
 God on the universal earth be the seminary of it 1 The 
 most universal law of its citizens is, that they love their 
 neighbour as themselves, and God more than themselves. 
 All other things are means, and are good in proportion as 
 they lead directly to this end. Now as everything in 
 the universe is created as a means to this end, it follows 
 that the application of the means, and a true regard of 
 the end in the means, are the sole constituents of a 
 citizen. The Holy Scripture is the code of rules for 
 obtaining the end by the means. These rules are not so 
 dark or obscure as the philosophy of the mind and the 
 love of self and of the world would make them ; nor so 
 deep and hidden but that any sincere soul which permits 
 the Spirit of God to govern it, may draw them from this 
 pure fountain, pure enough for the use and service of the 
 members of the city of God all over the world, without 
 violating any form of ecclesiastical government. It is 
 foretold that the kingdom of God shall come ; that at last 
 the guests shall be assembled to the marriage supper ; that 
 the wolf shall lie down with the lamb, the leopard with 
 the kid, the lion with the ox ; that the young child shall 
 play with the asp ; that the mountain of God shall rise 
 above all other mountains, and that the Gentile and the 
 stranger shall come to it to pay their worship." (See 
 Second Epistle of Paul to Timothy iii. 1-10 ; Acts of 
 the Apostles xvii. 18-24.) 
 
THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. 
 
THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. 
 
 SAYS Professor Goldwin Smith, in a magazine article 
 which appeared a few years ago : " On the progress 
 of science we may count ; and this is so important as to 
 make us feel that humanity altogether has struck into the 
 right path. Yet if we shut our ears for a moment to the 
 paeans which are being sung over telegraphs and tele- 
 phones, we become conscious that while science has been 
 making miraculous strides, the masses have not yet 
 made strides equally miraculous, either in character or in 
 happiness." 
 
 The tendency of the age is to the secularizing of all 
 knowledge and all aims. Eeligion, as far as it involves 
 the idea of a supernatural law and a revealed system 
 of truth, is to give place to a system of morals based 
 upon the industrial arts and the science of social living. 
 No stronger proof need be desired of Swedenborg's de- 
 claration that we are come to the end of the world, 
 than that in the highest places in Christendom people 
 speak in a kind of awe and veneration of men who 
 clearly and frankly make it their aim in science to prove 
 the sufficiency of nature without God, and the suffi- 
 ciency of social science for the data of ethics without a 
 revelation. 
 
 The strides made in natural science have indeed been 
 so stupendous, that were there no corresponding new 
 
 K 
 
146 THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. 
 
 worlds of spiritual truth opened to our knowledge at this 
 day, the preponderance of physical studies and interests 
 would be so great that the spiritual exercise of the human 
 reason would almost be at a standstill. But it is a 
 noticeable part of Divine prophecy that, at the time when 
 the stars of heaven shall have fallen to the earth, at that 
 very time a new glory shall be seen coming in the clouds. 
 The vast accumulation of sensuous and physical know- 
 ledge has not come about without a Divine purpose 
 behind it. God has a use for these heaps of dust atoms, 
 even though the fact-gatherers think to bury deep in them 
 the fallen stars so that men shall not look up any more ; still 
 there is a glory coming from above which shall find its 
 reflection in every little shining facet, and make the whole 
 earth blaze again with its confession of a Divine Creator. 
 
 To the orthodox religionists of to-day science is indeed 
 an uncomfortable intruder. Tolerated as a body-servant, 
 it cannot be endured as a spiritual adviser, and is accord- 
 ingly shown the door. Outside it begins naturally 
 enough to throw stones at the windows. But what 
 the continued advance of science may become as a house- 
 mate of the secular or mechanical system of morals 
 remains to be seen, and some dim outlines of the pro- 
 spective substitute for religion are not reassuring. May 
 not this new Prometheus yet become a fearful, monstrous 
 power, which even the gods of science may tremble 
 to look at ? 
 
 The physical, or, at most, the industrial sciences are 
 looked to by the scientist for the future redemption of 
 society. " Everything is justifiable that advances physical 
 knowledge " seems to be an accepted law of the new 
 religion, and the reason given is, that this tends to 
 
THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. 147 
 
 relieve man's body of pain or to increase the amount of 
 physical pleasure in the world; in the same way the 
 industrial arts are elevated above the intellectual sciences 
 because they tend to relieve man of the necessity of 
 bodily labour, or at least to allow a greater number of 
 men to live without labour, while at the same time the 
 remainder who do labour are reduced as far as possible to 
 the level of unintelligent machines. If we may call the 
 second commandment of the new religion of science to 
 live without labour, then we can see how the progress of 
 industrial arts will assuredly promote the new virtues 
 into which our morality is to be evolved. In fact, we 
 may say that we have already some uncomfortable know- 
 ledge of that new virtue as we come in contact with it in 
 some of the industries which concern our everyday wants. 
 But what will society become when entirely regenerated 1 
 The less cunning, or shall we say the less virtuous ? at 
 all events the weakest will go down to drive the machines ; 
 while the virtuous, or the richer, or the stronger, now in 
 so vast a predominance as to embrace all the race (barring 
 the merest remnant of the servile class necessary for the 
 mechanical uses, which, like dregs, only serve to clarify 
 the wine), will devote themselves to what well, shall 
 we say it at last 1 to the promotion of the industrial arts 
 as the highest and last yea, the religious and true aim 
 of man. Surely it will not do at that high stage of re- 
 generation to change signals and begin now to talk of such 
 things as natural, moral, and spiritual culture that is, as 
 things separate from the steam engine and the electric light. 
 If the industrial arts or the bettering of our bodily con- 
 dition is the highest good, if that man is the best reformer 
 of society who relieves his fellow-men of the most labour 
 
148 THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. 
 
 or the most pain, then what virtuous employment is left 
 when all labour is performed by the utilized forces of 
 nature, and all men live luxuriously \ Even now some of 
 our modern improvements seem almost too much improved, 
 or at least we do not seem to have grown up to such a 
 plane of humanity as to truly enjoy some of the great 
 facilities science has afforded us to-day ; we are not sure 
 that we are either happier or better with them than our 
 fathers were without them ; but what shall we think of 
 that kind of humanity which, having perfected man's 
 bodily existence on earth, having no belief in a spiritual 
 world, and no expectation of living after the body dies, can 
 only find its moral incentive in inventing new and more 
 exquisite conditions of bodily existence, and cultivating in 
 society a more exquisite sense of these sublimated delights, 
 and finding in all natural science ever new and deeper 
 confirmations of this survival of the physically best as the 
 true revelation and the true religion. 
 
 It may be urged that utilitarian morals do not aim to 
 the diminishing of industries, but to their increase, and 
 that in a proper " division of labour " lies a highway to 
 the reformation of society. But this again seems to be 
 an assumption which, while it sounds well, does not 
 stand the light of either history or common experience. 
 Goldwin Smith instances not only the familiar domestic 
 examples of the way industry promotes industry, as the 
 plumber's happy way of making work for the carpenters, 
 and the servant girl's thoughtful destruction of crockery 
 to encourage that useful and ornamental manufacture, but, 
 what is more significant, he calls to the witness-stand the 
 Chinese nation, which for industry and the division of 
 labour has been an example for centuries before our 
 
THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. 149 
 
 modern civilisation had dawned, and yet the answer this 
 nation gives as to the effect produced on the morals or the 
 happiness of the race by this religion of industrial science 
 is not a cheering one. 
 
 Again, we are aware that Herbert Spencer in his 
 anxious search for a new basis of ethics, asks whether 
 the moral ideas and sentiments may not be certain modes 
 of feeling and thinking caused naturally in men by experi- 
 ence of the conditions of happiness, and whether the 
 authority of such moral ideas will not be just as peremp- 
 tory in man as would be that of supernaturally caused 
 modes of thinking and feeling, which tend to make men 
 fulfil the conditions of happiness? (Art. Contemporary 
 Review, March 1882). This, when reduced to scientific 
 phrase and stripped of its semi-religious sanctimony, means, 
 I suppose, that not onty man, but the savage, the ape, the 
 mollusc, the moner, the atom, had always for their highest 
 ideal and highest law of conduct certain conditions of 
 happiness already experienced ; that is, our moral law lies 
 always in what is behind and below us in the order of 
 life, and not in what is beyond and above us. Man's 
 highest motive to do right is the accumulation of happy 
 experiences of savage and ape in repeating the former 
 happy experiences of mollusc, moner, and atom. Not 
 only is it backward and downward, but it is essentially 
 dustward that all this morality looks for its la\\ T s. And 
 here we may fitly recall the simple but great words great 
 because simple and true, words of a poet whom all the 
 world loved, and who will speak to the hearts of the world 
 for generations to come : 
 
 " Dust thou art : to dust return est, 
 Was not spoken of the soul." 
 
150 THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. 
 
 And so in whatever fine words this religion of industrial 
 art may air itself, and whatever pious tears it may shed, 
 its soul, for all its highest and noblest incentives, must go 
 back to the body and some old savage or atomic pleasure 
 or pain after all, and its highest worship, when analysed 
 faithfully and fearlessly, turns out to be the worship of 
 matter and of nothing beyond. 
 
 Is there, then, no higher use of science than the 
 industrial use ? Or, in other words, is there no higher 
 use than the promotion of the happiness or excellence 
 of a bodily life, meaning a life that begins and ends 
 with the earthly body, and which is only a certain 
 coincidence of material atoms and their appropriate 
 forces ? 
 
 We answer that there is such higher use for science, 
 and we call it its human in place of its mechanical use. 
 It is its use to the human soul as an immortal creature, 
 and as one above and distinct from matter, and as moved 
 by forces entirely distinct from any physical or mechanical 
 force. It is its use, in one word, and that the word 
 as defined by Swedenborg, its use to the rational mind; 
 and this, be it borne in mind, means something world- 
 widely different from the repetition of past conditions of 
 happiness. The water may love to run down hill for 
 aught we know, and the cow find a high degree of satis- 
 faction in chewing her cud, but they will neither of 
 them learn the rule of three by doing so, even if they 
 wait a thousand aeons. By a soul, therefore, we mean 
 something different from the atom and its force, and 
 different from all the constructions of many atoms and 
 their forces and conditions. And the use of science for 
 the soul can only be seen and can only be experienced by 
 
THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. 151 
 
 those who acknowledge the existence of a soul in this its 
 own distinct and elevated plane. 
 
 The service which science renders the soul is in fur- 
 nishing and cultivating the rational, and through the 
 rational the spiritual, plane of the mind. In a lower 
 sense, and one which we have already considered, science 
 furnishes and cultivates the body ; this is its industrial 
 use ; but its service to the rational part of man is its 
 educational use ; and, finally, its service to the spiritual 
 plane is its highest or religious use. 
 
 The educational use of science is like the use of all form 
 to its substance, and all matter to spirit. Scientific facts 
 are not truths, but the vessels of truth ; they are the shell 
 which may have good or bad meat within. The rational 
 principle is what, under Divine influence, makes all 
 scientific knowledge subservient to the spiritual or inner 
 man, and puts sound meat in the shell, first by enabling 
 man to think that is, to analyse, reflect upon, and draw 
 conclusions from mere isolated facts second, to apply 
 these thoughts or conclusions to useful living, to the 
 benefit, first of his own body as his chief instrument of 
 use ; then to the perfecting of his mind as the agent of 
 a higher use ; then to the communication of good to 
 others. The rational makes a man capable of thus using 
 his mind, his body, and all knowledge derived through the 
 senses for these higher purposes ; but whether a man do 
 so or not depends upon the still interior motive of his will. 
 If he be in the acknowledgment of a Divine being and a 
 desire to shun evils of life as sins against Him, his applying 
 of science to mental and bodily uses will be done from the 
 genuine love of use, and his whole natural mind will thus 
 be made to serve the spiritual, and the rational will be the 
 
1 5 2 THE CHUR CH AND SCIENCE. 
 
 instrument or medium of this. Thus science, in furnishing 
 material of thought and reflection for the rational, will 
 also be enabling man to live a more essentially rational 
 life, and by its myriads of facts will be furnishing illustra- 
 tion and corroboration of spiritual or revealed truth to the 
 believing soul. The sciences themselves become thus 
 capable of a threefold classification, namely, into strictly 
 natural sciences so far as applied to industrial arts, and 
 as serving the bodily wants, and thus forming the basis of 
 the mind ; the civil and moral sciences, which have to do 
 with man's relation to his fellow-man in society ; and the 
 spiritual sciences, or those revealed truths which relate to 
 things of heaven and the Church in general, to the good 
 of charity and the truth of faith. A man does not become 
 rational by merely knowing these several orders of truth, 
 but by living according to them, or by loving them 
 from a spiritual affection, which is to love what is just 
 and good and true because they are just and good and true. 
 A man can esteem these same principles also from a 
 bodily affection, which is to love them for the sake of self, 
 or reputation, or honour, or gain ; so far as a man loves 
 truths from such bodily affection, he does not become 
 rational, for he does not love the principles themselves, 
 but himself. The reason then becomes itself unsound. 
 (See D. L. W., 23.) What, then, shall we say of a science 
 whose frankly-avowed purpose is to reason God out of 
 science, or to show that all physics and ethics are as in- 
 telligible, as truthful, and as useful without the recognition 
 and worship of a supreme intelligence and love as with it ? 
 Again, any science is useful so far as it answers useful 
 questions, and a science is useful to the soul as far as it 
 answers the soul's questions. But what questions can a 
 
THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. 153 
 
 science answer which knows, and professes to know, effects 
 and effects only ? Truly, many useful questions in the 
 arts and their application, for these are only the arrange- 
 ment and adjustment of effects ; but these sciences which 
 thus keep up a busy race around and around the foot of the 
 hill of human intelligence never rise to a higher plane, but 
 rather deepen the level of this well-worn footpath. 
 
 What shall we conclude, therefore, of the use of any 
 system of science based on the ignoring of any affection 
 above that of the body, and of any motive except that of 
 personal gain or advantage over one's neighbours'? for 
 such, reduced to first principles, is necessarily the ethics 
 of evolution and the survival of the strongest. 
 
 Again, the faculty of thinking rationally is not of man, 
 but of God in man, and hence the common tendency of 
 all sound reason to acknowledge that there is a God, and 
 that God is one. By means of this God-given faculty a 
 man's mind thinks in the very light of heaven or of 
 spiritual truth, and even while he is unaware he draws 
 the common tendency of his thoughts from this inner 
 spiritual intuition, which is a universal one, that there is 
 a God, and that He is one ; and if a man twists or in- 
 verts the lower or sensuous plane of the mind so that it 
 shall deny God or exclude such a being from His universe, 
 lie does it in violation of a normal and healthy reason. 
 The soul's question has always been the question of cause 
 and, behind that, of motive : how comes the world to be 
 as it is, and why? These are the very questions that 
 science, unaided by revelation, has never and can never 
 answer \ and yet the very science that denies the possi- 
 bility of a cause being known or revealed, and that con- 
 tents itself with repeating the truism that " things are 
 
154 THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. 
 
 what they are, and because they are " even this aspires 
 to be an educator of the human rnind. Can the reason of 
 man be cultivated by contemplating in nature a law so 
 preposterous that it came into being only after the things 
 evolved by means of it ; or a reason and an intelligence 
 which exists only as the late outcoming of things and 
 forces neither rational nor intelligent, but merely 
 mechanical and material 1 Says Swedenborg : "Effects 
 teach nothing but effects, and, when considered alone, do 
 not explain a single cause ; but causes explain effects, and 
 to know effects from causes is to be wise, while to inquire 
 into causes from effects is not to be wise, since those 
 fallacies present themselves which the examiner calls causes, 
 and this is confounding wisdom." (See D. L. W., 119.) 
 What shall we say as to the capacity to make men wise of 
 that science which not only " considers effects alone," but 
 declares it to be folly and nonsense for men to seek to 
 know any cause above the plane of these effects ? 
 
 But how, finally, are causes to be known, and from 
 causes a true or rational knowledge of effects to be had 1 
 Holding securely on to the precious stones or atoms of 
 natural knowledge which the investigations of modern 
 science are bringing in, rejecting the spurious and the coun- 
 terfeits and not pretending to make bread of them, but 
 regarding them meanwhile only as so much elementary 
 material out of which genuine uses can be built up, not 
 for body only, but for thinking mind and for the soul, 
 how are we to classify, arrange, and apply this scientific 
 material to real human education, or the development of 
 the soul into heavenly living, which is its destiny ? How, 
 let me repeat it, are we to know causes, and thus get 
 wisdom out of our science *? 
 
THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. 155 
 
 Swedenborg says in D. L. W., ]S T o. 186, "Without 
 a knowledge of both continuous and discrete degrees, 
 nothing of cause can be truly known. We shall there- 
 fore treat of them (the discrete degrees) ; for the end of 
 this treatise is that causes may be discovered and effects 
 seen from them, and that thereby the darkness in which 
 the man of the Church is involved with respect to God 
 and the Lord, and in general with respect to Divine things, 
 which are called spiritual, may be dispelled." 
 
 The rightful connection of the Church with science 
 will consist, therefore, in this, the ability of its theology 
 to utilize rather than reject the vast accumulation of 
 scientific facts, to employ them for the development 
 of the sound reason of man and the promotion of 
 human uses and of spiritual life. The theology of a 
 true Church will utilize science, and make it subserve 
 the rational and spiritual mind 1. By its revelation of 
 the being and true nature of God and of His providence, 
 in uncovering the spiritual or internal sense of the sacred 
 Scriptures, and thus revealing anew the old revelation. 
 2. By its doctrine of the three discrete degrees, showing 
 the logical and necessary relation between God, spirit, 
 and matter, and their procession as the universal end, 
 cause, and effect. 3. By its restored science of corre- 
 spondence, by which the relation of the three discrete 
 degrees to each other is known, and accordingly the 
 relation of soul to body, of the spiritual world to the 
 natural, and of the spiritual or internal sense to the 
 letter or parable of Holy Scripture. By these means 
 a true Church may make the sciences not merely 
 subserve an industrial but also an educational and a 
 religious use. This, be it repeated, no science can do 
 
156 THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. 
 
 which cannot intelligently acknowledge God and read in 
 nature the revelation of God. The human soul cannot 
 be educated by a science whose object is to confirm it in 
 favour of nature and against God. Man is not developed 
 by being made to go again on all fours. To look down- 
 ward and backward is not the way to train a child to 
 hold his head erect and his eyes open. Man cannot be 
 lifted by any weight of moral habit which is weaker than 
 himself, and such must always be the morality of the 
 past or lower orders of being as compared with the 
 present; and this gradually developing morality of the 
 past and the lower orders of being is all that evolution 
 has to give us as a standard ; instead of " a just and 
 good " which we are to love, " because it is just and 
 good," we have only the knowledge that certain material 
 or bodily forces are stronger in us than others, and will 
 have sway because they must, with no more virtue 
 thereby than water is virtuous in running down hill. 
 Evolution can at most say to us, " Look behind you, and 
 behold in yourselves the highest outcome of atom and 
 slime and tadpole and ape ! " It cannot bid us look 
 forward and upward, for there is nothing beyond what 
 is thus far developed, and what is behind us is only 
 beneath us if, indeed, we can speak of degrees of moral 
 elevation amid purely mechanical activities. 
 
 Religion, on the contrary, bids us in clear and certain 
 tones look upward and forward. It reveals to us the 
 Word or the eternal Logos or wisdom of creation, which in 
 the beginning was with God and was God, which is the 
 source of humanity, and therefore the legitimate aspira- 
 tion of humanity ; the source of man, and the legitimate 
 object of his adoration; the source of its highest love, 
 
THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. 157 
 
 and therefore the object of it. "Be ye perfect" is its 
 bidding, u not as this ascidian, or the oyster or the slime 
 is perfect," but rather, "Be ye perfect, as your Father in 
 heaven is perfect ! " 
 
 This being the mission of the Church in relation to 
 science, what is the duty of the Christian believer, and 
 how may he perform his duty 3 Certainly not by sit- 
 ting still and holding up his hands in blank horror at 
 the way the world plunges onward in its ever darkening 
 course of infidelity and denial. He must lend his sym- 
 pathy and his help; first, in drawing a broad line of 
 division between the two classes of scientists of to-day, 
 the class who investigate nature for the purpose of finding 
 God there, and the class who investigate nature for the 
 purpose of proving that God is not there. This is no 
 arbitrary, fanciful judgment he will have to form ; he will 
 take men at their word. The facts they bring forward 
 are to-day almost universally labelled by their discoverers, 
 for God or against God. Having drawn this dividing- 
 line, he will, as regards the latter class, accept such facts 
 furnished by them as are facts, but he will reject 
 in toto the conclusions they draw from them; he will 
 reject them as conclusions which in the very nature of 
 things must be untrue, unsafe, and unhealthy; and he 
 will not only refuse to these, their bold advocates, the 
 worship which has become, at this day, the fashionable 
 idolatry of the highest ranks of so-called Christian 
 society, but he must be willing to declare and exhibit 
 his contempt and his abhorrence of them even at the 
 risk of being called superstitious, blind, bigoted, illiberal, 
 and unprogressive. 
 
 On the other hand, every attempt made to interpret 
 
158 THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. 
 
 nature's facts in favour of God, Providence, a spiritual 
 world, and immortality, he is to gladly welcome and 
 encourage, from whatever source it comes. Here, as in 
 the case of atheistic science, he will be careful to distin- 
 guish real from spurious facts, but he will regard that 
 science as alone rational, which, besides accumulating the 
 new materials of facts, statistics, details, records, so puts 
 these together that they may be vessels in which spiritual 
 truth can find shape and be visible to men, and by which 
 the reason can ever be more and more confirmed in a 
 belief in a rational Creator. 
 
 Finally, shall the Church stop here with only com- 
 menting on the researches and reflections of others? 
 Ought she not actively and aggressively to enter the field 
 of scientific research and scientific discussion by bringing 
 to the notice of leading investigators and writers in every 
 possible way the principles of her theology as bearing 
 directly upon these themes 1 Ought she not to hold up 
 to the abhorrence and rejection of her young minds the 
 very philosophy that is taught in our most popular and 
 wealthy colleges ; and in sending her young men to these 
 institutions to be educated, ought she not plainly to tell 
 them with what purpose she sends them, namely, that 
 they may collect and preserve a good supply of husks, 
 but cast the meat away as corrupt and poisonous ? Better 
 than all, should she not dare to establish schools of her 
 own, where the truth need not be spoken in whispers, 
 and where the substance with the form, the meat with 
 the shell, may be given, and men educated with the 
 prospect of eternity and of heaven before them, and not 
 of the grave and only another evolution of its dust and 
 its motions ? 
 
THE PERSONALITY OF DEITY 
 A LOGICAL NECESSITY. 
 
THE PERSONALITY OF DEITY A LOGICAL 
 NECESSITY. 
 
 THE most interesting phase of the present revival of 
 metaphysics is the new attitude which reason is 
 assuming in relation to religion and revealed truth. Erom 
 the time of the introduction of the Aristotelian Logic into 
 the theology of the Schoolmen, and especially after the new 
 impetus to free research imparted by the Renaissance, the 
 intellect of Christendom grew restive and rebellious under 
 the constraint of dogma, until in the last century, in the 
 influences that led to such results, religions and political, 
 as were exhibited in the French Revolution the reason, 
 which had at first been trained to draw in harness with 
 the authoritative teaching of the Church, at last broke 
 loose from fastening and rein alike, and plunged onward 
 unchecked and unguided except by its own self-imposed 
 limitations. That the world ere long stood aghast at the 
 awful spectacle of religion and the Church not only 
 ignored but trampled on in the name of liberty and 
 rationality, is not to be wondered at, and that therefore 
 Voltaire declared that, " If there were no God, the reason 
 would be compelled to make one ; " and that the French 
 Revolutionists solemnly decreed the restoration of religion 
 to the altars desecrated but shortly before in the name 
 of reason, may be regarded as hardly more than the eco- 
 nomical and political need of the hour. The Christian 
 
1 62 THE PERSONALITY OF DEITY 
 
 apologists of that day or of the period that immediately 
 followed built, it is true, upon a basis of reason only, and 
 addressed themselves supposably to minds as devoid of 
 faith as if Christian revelation had never been. But we 
 feel, in reading, as if this were again an attempt to make 
 the reason conform to a great moral necessity, rather than 
 the voluntary seeking of reason itself for the proper 
 gratification of its own longings, a poise where it should 
 finally and freely rest in its unhindered flight. 
 
 If its strivings in the past had been to free itself from 
 the fetters of dogma, that struggle was now over. The 
 age of ecclesiastical domination of the intellect was past. 
 What would the free untrammelled reason of a people 
 trained in fourteen centuries of Christian doctrine and 
 discipline do of its own accord when the doctrine and 
 the discipline are now alike removed, and the age of 
 spiritual and rational manhood with its accompanying 
 liberty has been entered upon 1 As we have just said, 
 the attempt on the part of reason to wear again, in the 
 arguments of Butler and Paley, the humble garb of a 
 menial serving the needs of society in keeping the world 
 from moral shipwreck, while commendable enough as good 
 behaviour, was not the free ultimation of the instincts of 
 developed manhood felt within. The period of licence, 
 of utter negation, of chaos, had not been endured for any 
 trivial end. If the reason had of its accord plunged 
 forward even into that world where it should hear uttered 
 the words, " There is no God," it was to the end that it 
 should even as freely turn back and seek, if not the old 
 world it had left, then at least a " new heaven and a new 
 earth " wherein the former things shall have passed away 
 and all things are made new. It is here, in this voluntary 
 
A LOGICAL NECESSITY. 163 
 
 search for God, exhibited in the more enlightened philo- 
 sophy of our day, that we find a wholly new meaning 
 and importance attaching to contemporary metaphysics. 
 Far from fleeing from an authoritative religion, we behold 
 the minds of men absorbed everywhere in an inquiry in 
 which no object is more earnestly sought than a God for 
 the reason to acknowledge and to adore, if not the God of 
 dogma, yet none the less a God which shall be something 
 more than a Deus ex machina, something better and 
 higher than any idol of man's making, even though it be 
 the creation of the reason itself. 
 
 It is just here that we find a deep significance in Mr. 
 Fiske's most interesting essay. 1 After a careful survey of 
 the history of religious ideas from the standpoint of the 
 evolutionist, our author arrives at the problem of God as 
 it is met by the thoughts of our own time. Agnosticism 
 he rejects as " the impossible alternative." After arriving 
 at that most sensible and simple of all truths, that " in 
 the deepest sense all that we really know is mind," Mr. 
 Fiske continues : 
 
 " We are bound to conceive of tlie Eternal Reality in terms of 
 the only reality that ice know, or else refrain from conceiving it 
 under any form whatever. Bui the latter alternative is impossible. 
 "We might as well try to escape from the air in which we breathe as 
 to expel from consciousness the Power which is manifested through- 
 out what we call the material universe. But the only conclusion 
 we can consistently hold is that this is the very same power which 
 in ourselves wells up under the form of consciousness." 
 
 In knowing ourselves as thinking and willing beings, 
 therefore, we in a manner, at least, know God the one 
 great reality. In knowing ourselves as moral beings we 
 
 1 On the Idea of God. Houghton, Mifflin, & Co., Boston. 
 
1 64 THE PERSONALITY OF DEITY 
 
 might as confidently go on and say we know God as the 
 great moral reality, as the Good. This is indeed but the 
 putting of Descartes' beautiful argument in a new form. 
 It is like saying : I know myself most surely as a thinking 
 being ; the esse that thinks is the most real esse : but God 
 is the most real Esse, and therefore God is a thinking 
 being, and as such is the most certain object of knowledge 
 that man possesses. 
 
 It is clear that after this admission Mr. Fiske must be 
 moderate in his criticism of anthropomorphism. Indeed 
 he is so to such an extent, that on the same page he seems 
 to reject and accept this element in forming the idea of 
 God. The anthropomorphism, otherwise called the argu- 
 ment from design which is found in Sokrates, Paley, and 
 Sir Charles Bell, he seems to regard as outgrown or 
 rendered worthless by the results of the Darwinian theory. 
 " The knell of anthropomorphic or Augustinian theism is 
 already sounded." And yet in the very next paragraph 
 he says : 
 
 "To every form of theism an anthropomorphic element is indis- 
 pensable. . . . The total elimination of anthropomorphism from 
 the idea of God abolishes the idea itself." 
 
 Most surely, if that idea is the idea of power or of 
 being which " wells up in ourselves under the form of 
 consciousness." It would have been better, it seems to 
 us, had Mr. Fiske not even affected, if we may use 
 the term, the evolutionists' dislike of anthropomorphism, 
 but had frankly and consistently held to this as the most 
 substantial element in our purely rational conception of 
 Deity. For in reality the argument by which Mr. Fiske 
 arrives at his idea of the " living God " is far more 
 
A LOGICAL NECESSITY. 165 
 
 anthropomorphic than he himself seems to be aware. 
 Even if we reject the comparatively short-sighted argu- 
 ment of Paley, and substitute for it that which is presented 
 by the magnificent drama of evolution itself, what is it 
 that constructs the argument, after all, but the reason, 
 and what is the reason itself but the distinctly human 
 outcome the last and highest form of being reached in 
 the wonderful progress of evolution 1 
 
 "The glorious consummation toward which organic 
 evolution is tending is the production of the highest and 
 most perfect psychical life." According to this progress 
 the idea of God has advanced, as we understand Mr. 
 Fiske, and consequently the idea is wholly the outgrowth 
 of the psychical evolution : it is the creature of reason ; 
 it is man-produced, and therefore must necessarily be man- 
 like. It is anthropomorphism fashioned after the man 
 of advanced psychical development, instead of after the 
 savage, but it is none the less anthropomorphism. 
 
 And in this lofty conception we find the strength and 
 at the same time the fatal weakness of the position assumed 
 by the writer at the conclusion of this essay. The soul 
 has indeed cried out not only for God in the old theistic 
 or mechanical sense, but for the " living God " and in 
 this idea, the creature of the psychical evolution, Mr. 
 Fiske would fain find Him. By rejecting the old anthro- 
 pomorphism which he better designates as Augustinian 
 theism, he means to reject the old notion of God as of a 
 being that exists out of and apart from nature, and he 
 would substitute therefore the far truer and more helpful 
 one of the immanence of the Divine in all the planes of 
 natural being, such that the laws of nature are verily the 
 laws of God, and the evolution of nature is naught else 
 
1 66 THE PERSONALITY OF DEITY 
 
 than the evolution of the Divine Love and Wisdom, 
 which are the essentials of Deity, upon the plane of 
 uses, material, moral, and spiritual. Unquestionably this 
 doctrine of the Immanence of God in nature is revolu- 
 tionary, and one that forms an epoch in theology as truly 
 as in science, provided we mean by "God" something 
 which is indeed supernatural, that is, spiritual. It is in 
 this recognition alone that that reconciliation will ever be 
 found between science and religion which, according to 
 Mr. Fiske, "will be one of the greatest benefits ever 
 conferred upon the human race." 
 
 But it requires but little logical insight to see that the 
 assertion of the Immanence of God in nature is a step in 
 the process which transforms Deity into a subjective idea, 
 and as such leaves it exposed to the most fatal objections 
 which have assailed anthropomorphism in any form. If 
 God is but the creature of human reason, He can never be 
 made more adorable by all the refinements or adornments 
 which psychical analysis can lend. The idol remains an 
 idol, whether it be the rude fetich of the savage or the 
 latest evolved psychical conception, if this be all ; with 
 this fatal difference, that the savage may from the blunt- 
 ness of his religious perceptions be brought to attribute 
 something of a supernatural and truly Divine power to 
 his tinsel-decked image of wood, while the highly developed 
 intellect will feel an inevitable aversion to anything like 
 a devout or religious attitude toward that which it is 
 conscious of having evolved out of its own reason alone. 
 In Mr. Fiske's argument reason seems to have found its 
 God, only to become confused and powerless at the vision 
 at last attained. "While seeming to sympathize all along 
 with the evolutionists in rejecting anthropomorphism, his 
 
A LOGICAL NECESSITY. 167 
 
 God at last attained is in a deep and true sense the most 
 anthropomorphic, the most human of all, and so only 
 confounds at last the mind all ready to adore with the 
 terrible and soul-sickening question " Can this, thy 
 creature, he God after all 1 " 
 
 Where then shall we find in theology the answer to 
 that cry, which is the cry of religion, for the " living God" ? 
 Mr. Fiske has taken a great step in making God again a 
 conception subjective to man and immanent in nature. 
 But the subjective alone is not sufficient to answer the 
 real demand of either reason or the religious instinct, and 
 probably, although he does not say so in words, no one is 
 better aware of this than Mr. Fiske himself. We will 
 not suppose our author to be guilty of that absurd manner 
 of reasoning exhibited by some recent scientists who, after 
 having evolved reason itself and moral instinct out of 
 senseless matter and purposeless force, find no difficulty in 
 talking quite as reverently as any, when charged with 
 atheism, about the infinite wisdom of a creator who could 
 have foreseen and provided for such an evolution ! 
 
 Granting that the God whom reason recognises must be 
 the author of that reason, and hence that Something more 
 than matter and force, which was before all, and has been 
 secretly working in all, creation ; nay, granting further 
 that only on the assumption that reason is in a sense a 
 Divine instinct in man, dare we assume that its conclusions 
 have any universal and lasting validity, still we cannot 
 place our limitation here and say, "In so far and so far 
 only is the God of reason anthropomorphic, or vested with 
 human properties as that we may attribute to His being 
 consciousness and rationality." The conception of God 
 begun on this line of argument will not stop short of the 
 
1 68 THE PERSONALITY OF DEITY 
 
 " full measure of a man, that is, of an angel." Not only 
 must that Being who is the author of the law, the order, 
 and the evolution of nature be a being of Love and of 
 Wisdom, but He must be subject to the requirements of 
 His own Divine attributes. The God who from love and 
 by wisdom has become the creator of rational beings 
 becomes thereby the Father of men : and the Father of 
 men may with as rigid a necessity be asserted to love 
 them and to desire their love in return as the former 
 of the human reason may be declared to be an object 
 cognizable to the reason. 
 
 With this postulate admitted, the solution of the diffi- 
 culty which was caused by our fear of anthropomorphism 
 is at once dispelled, and by Him who foresaw the difficulty 
 from the beginning, and who put it into the mouth of His 
 prophet to say, " Can man by searching find out God 1 " 
 The Father of the world is not content that His children 
 should go on blindly groping after Him, and at best, after 
 countless ages, only find Him as a fiction of their imagina- 
 tion or the cold deduction of their reason. The Father 
 of love will reveal Himself to those of His creatures who 
 alone are endowed with the power of knowing Him and 
 of reciprocating His love. 
 
 Revelation is therefore necessary if we are to conceive 
 of God reasonably; for that God should create men 
 with faculties for believing in, loving, and adoring their 
 Creator, and yet should not reveal Himself to them, is a 
 position not consistent with reason. What the nature of 
 that revelation is it is not important here to inquire ; -only 
 it is not subjective in the sense of being merely the voice 
 of man's rational intuitions; rather is it the objective 
 presentation of Deity corresponding to these intuitions, 
 
A LOGICAL NECESSITY. 169 
 
 the answer to the demand of the reason for a God not of 
 its own making, the response of the Creator to that cry of 
 the religious nature of man which only the " living God " 
 can satisfy. Revelation lifts the idea of God out of its 
 powerless subjectivity, and gives to man a God that speaks 
 to him from without. It is the gracious answer of Divine 
 goodness made alike to the first and crudest as it will be 
 to the last and highest cravings of human nature. With- 
 out it the idea of God is incomplete and inconsistent with 
 itself, and therefore fails to satisfy either the religious or 
 the rational instinct. It is the mightiest of all evidences 
 of the Divine indwelling in the world, for it alone brings 
 God from the isolation and awful remoteness of Infinity 
 down into the close contact with the souls that He has 
 made. What though the form of His revealings be crude, 
 gross, and so adapted to the coarse conceptions of men % 
 it is none the less revelation, nay, it is the more powerful 
 and real by virtue of this adaptation. "Behold, He 
 cometh with clouds ! " has been the cry of the prophet, 
 but none the less significant and true is the declaration of 
 the Gospel that " Ye shall see the Son of man coming in 
 the clouds of heaven with power and great glory." The 
 clouds of revelation may have belonged to the past, while 
 the power and great glory are still in store for the present 
 and future. But so essential is revelation to our attaining 
 to an idea of God as an objective reality, that in the pages 
 of Scripture the idea of Deity as Being is almost identified 
 with the idea of Deity as Self-revealing. For " in the 
 Beginning was the WORD, and the Word was with God, 
 and the Word was God." The only step that remains 
 for metaphysics to take in order to reach its goal in a 
 final and satisfying idea of God, is that which ascends 
 
170 THE PERSONALITY OF DEITY, ETC. 
 
 from the comprehension of God as Being to God as the 
 WORD or as Self-revealing. For it is pertinent to this 
 discussion, even though it be Revelation that puts the words 
 upon our lips, to say : " No man hath seen God at any 
 time ; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the 
 Father, He hath brought Him forth to view." " And the 
 WORD was made flesh, and dwelt among us : and we 
 beheld His Glory, as of the only begotten of the Father, 
 full of grace and truth." 
 
A DRAMA OF CREATION. 
 
A DRAMA OF CREATION. 
 
 BEING A STUDY OF SWEDENBORO'S WORK ENTITLED " DE 
 CULTU ET AMORE DEI." 1 
 
 THE several stages of Swedenborg's writings appear dis- 
 tinct according to very discrete or clearly determined 
 divisions, and yet we find between them those remark- 
 able transitional works covering in a peculiar manner the 
 border lands of thought and study of which they respec- 
 tively treat. Of these transitional works I think it will 
 be found that none is so* remarkable, under whatever 
 aspect it is viewed, as the work before us. Like all of 
 Swedenborg's maturer writings, it h marvellous in its 
 retrospective embrace of principles before announced, 
 and its intimations of deeper ones yet to be developed ; 
 but it occupies a place peculiarly its own, being written 
 in a style unlike anything before or after it, and constitut- 
 ing in itself, even in the fragmentary form in which 
 it was left by its author, one of the most perfect and 
 complete conceptions, and in its scheme and treatment 
 one of the most nearly approaching the sublime of all the 
 creations of human imagination or prophetic inspiration. 
 Indeed, studied in a merely poetic and literary light, one 
 begins to find in the author of this work a man unfamiliar 
 to his ken in all other studies of Swedenborg. 
 
 1 De Cultu et Amore Dei [On the Worship and Love of God]. 
 Edited by the Rev. Thomas Murray Gorman, M.A. Pp. 200. 
 
 London : Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co. 1883. 
 
 173 
 
174 A DRAMA OF CREATION. 
 
 Where else do we find a second Plato, speaking in the 
 language and figures and sublime enthusiasm of the 
 Phcedrus, as here in the Fifth Canto or Day, where the 
 evil principle in our nature is depicted under the character 
 of the " Charioteer of the World," who " directs human 
 minds by his reins, and drives them like horses foaming 
 at the mouth into such a variety of downward courses " ? 
 
 Where else do we find a Milton, describing in purest 
 and most noble figures the vernal beauty, glory, and 
 order of our earth in creation's morn, and the joy of 
 all the heavenly powers at this completion of the Divine 
 plan 1 Where else do we find the harmonies of those 
 choirs of angels and archangels, faintly echoed by Goethe 
 in the Faust, in the Prologue in Heaven, wherein the 
 heavenly essences and spheres in their wonderful gyrations 
 and involutions celebrate in intensest joy the birth of the 
 first-born, and afterward the marriage of the first human 
 pair 1 How identical in sentiment the wrapt language 
 of the philosopher, lost in adoration before the perfec- 
 tions of the Supreme Love and its completed ultimation 
 in the creation of a human pair and the foundation of 
 a celestial society, with the sublime hymn of the arch- 
 angels as conceived in Goethe's loftiest imagination : 
 
 RAPHAEL. 
 
 The sun-orb sings in emulation, 
 
 'Mid brother spheres, his ancient round ; 
 
 His path, predestined through creation, 
 He ends with step of thunder sound. 
 
 The angels from his visage splendid 
 
 Draw power whose measure none can say ; 
 
 The lofty works, uncomprehended, 
 Are bright as in the earliest day. 
 
A DRAMA OF CREATION. 175 
 
 GABRIEL. 
 
 And swift and swift beyond conceiving, 
 
 The splendour of the world goes round, 
 Day's Eden brightness still relieving 
 
 The awful night's intense profound. 
 
 The rival storms abroad are surging 
 
 From sea to land, from land to sea ; 
 A chain of deepest action forging 
 
 Round all in wrathful energy. 
 
 Yet, Lord, Thy messengers are praising 
 The gentle movement of Thy Day. 
 
 THE THREE. 
 
 Though still by them uncomprehended, 
 From these the angels draw their power ; 
 
 And all Thy works, sublime and splendid, 
 Are bright as in creation's hour ! 
 
 Faust ; Taylor's Translation. 
 
 Compare with this scene which Goethe seems to have 
 gained in some border- land of the Infinite to which 
 his poetic soul had access, the description given by 
 Swedenborg of the festival in which the godlike essences 
 or celestial images "celebrated the last day of creation 
 and the first of the human race " : 
 
 ''They devised a new kind of sport called paradisiacal, never 
 before sported in the heavens, but not by tripping and dancing, 
 such as terrestrial nymphs adopt in their amusements, but such as 
 celestial intelligences indulge in whilst they are desirous to return 
 into a state of innocence, and, as it were, into infancy. For they 
 so initiated it by revolutions and mutual influxes, as it were, into 
 itself from things ultimate, that from innumerable sports they 
 
176 A DRAMA OF CREATION. 
 
 formed one perpetual and continued ; which end was secured by 
 such circular spheres and spiral windings, like so many labyrinths 
 to our sight, but still more distinct in themselves, that not even 
 one number in the rhythms gave an ambiguous harmony. For 
 they insinuated themselves from the circumferences by continual 
 circuitions and involutions toward the center, by a rapid and con- 
 tinual flexure, so that they all concentered themselves by measures 
 mutually succeeding each other, and so united that there was not 
 even one which did not see itself as it were concentered in the 
 very center ; for thus by the advantage of the harmony and form 
 alone, from being discrete they could unite together in one con- 
 tinual sport Commencing from this center, as it were a 
 
 common one, because diffused equally among all, the crowning 
 choir of celestial beings from more interior goals, and a more 
 universal rotation, thus still more perfectly, began new orbs, which 
 in like manner concentrated themselves, that they might again, 
 from the former unity, continued distinctly into each and all, 
 introduce themselves into a more intimate and thus prior concen- 
 tration And so until they no longer emulated what is 
 
 perpetual but what is infinite, and saw themselves so closely con- 
 joined to the idea of super-celestial harmony, and, as it were, 
 initiated into it, that they sensibly perceived that they were no 
 longer many, but as one, and in the inmost principles of centers ; 
 for, in like manner as they united themselves, they united also 
 their minds and their minds' delights. They translated also the 
 mind of our infant (the first-born of the human race) from the 
 ultimate rotation in which he was constituted, toward inmost prin- 
 ciples along with themselves, by these insinuations, and being thus 
 united with it, they presented him conjointly as one and a divine 
 spirit from unanimity itself to the SUPREME DEITY, who, being 
 delighted with the end of His works both first and last, represented 
 in him, hailed his coming with grace and favour ; then bursting 
 forth under the influence of this divine honour from this inmost 
 and most sacred of centers, they again extricated and unfolded 
 themselves by similar circuits and concentrated orbs, but now roll- 
 ing back in the same order toward the circumferences, and unfold- 
 ing themselves from one again into several, they reposed the 
 infant again in his ultimate circle." (No. 42.) 
 
A DRAMA OF CREATION. 177 
 
 TThere else in all our author's writings shall we find 
 these clear-cut, statuesque pictures, worthy to have been 
 taken entire from the pages of a Greek tragedy, like, for 
 instance, that in which Swedenborg represents the Soul 
 as descending from her celestial palace, or her " inmost 
 principles," into the body of the first-begotten, in order to 
 elevate him from his reptile and bestial state into the 
 upright form in which he might walk with his eyes 
 directed toward the starry heavens ; and her meeting 
 subsequently the beautiful forms which, as objects of 
 vision, became introduced into the chambers of the mind 1 
 
 " The Soul from the sanctuaries or centers of her Olympus, that 
 she might continually meet those beautiful forms, which, like new 
 guests, insinuated themselves through the doors and chambers of 
 vision, attenuated by degrees her most splendid light, and girded 
 herself with a less shining mantle, and at length descended to the 
 lowest door-posts, clothed herself in a shadowy but still pellucid 
 robe, adding also gems but crystalline. Thus she always com- 
 pounded herself anew, even to the meeting of images which borrow 
 their form from the rays of the solar light ; which having seen, 
 she received them with friendly kisses and embraces, under the 
 very threshold, about the last step of her ladder ; but these images, 
 when they had returned the salutation, instantly felt themselves 
 reformed, so that when they looked at each other, they could no 
 longer distinguish themselves as sisters. For that goddess or queen 
 by her kiss and embrace infused life into them from her own life, 
 so that they no longer appeared as images, but as ideas." (No. 47.) 
 
 And what classic purity of form and restrained pathos 
 we find in this picture of the Soul resigning her conscious 
 or voluntary powers to the intelligent Mind, while she 
 withdraws again into her sanctuary or heavenly Olympus, 
 leaving for ever the body and the mental powers which 
 she has brought forth, the conscious usurpers of her place 
 a sacrifice as necessary to her own divinely-created end 
 
 M 
 
178 A DRAMA OF CREATION. 
 
 or purpose as it is to their or man's happiness as a 
 free rational being ! Was ever philosophy clothed in so 
 translucent and heavenly a garb before or since 1 
 
 " At length this mother seemed to herself most happy, having 
 called together her daughters, and at the same time out of the 
 chambers of the court, their slaves and servants, who arranged 
 themselves about the wisdoms, now their mistresses, into the form 
 of a most beautiful crown ; and whilst with acute discernment she 
 fixed her attention upon all and each of them in the assembly, she 
 thus began to speak : 
 
 " 'My most beloved daughters ! The time is at hand that we 
 must depart, you to your sacred offices, I into my sanctuary ; re- 
 member, daughters, that I am your parent, and that the life which 
 you derive from mine is so devoted to you by essential love, that 
 by mind I am in you. Thus, although we part, ye still can do 
 nothing but under my auspices ; the light from which ye view ends 
 is from mine, because by me ; yours is only to be circumspect, and 
 
 to arrange means that our ends may exist in effect and use 
 
 Again and again, I pray and beseech you not to look up to or covet 
 any other end than the best, that is the love of the Supreme, 
 breathed into you with life and with milk, for He is the End of 
 Ends, the First of the Last and the Last of the First. From Him 
 
 are all things, because He is the All of All On account 
 
 of His and your love I abdicate my kingdom, and I deliver up 
 the key to your care, for my great concern is only about you. 
 Behold me, therefore, no longer as your lawful mother, but as 
 your companion and your minister. But I entreat you, my most 
 beloved and most dear, with the most earnest prayer, remember my 
 salvation, whilst you remember your own, for my salvation and 
 my happiness are at your disposal since I have delivered up to you 
 my soul. ' 
 
 " At these words tears flowed from both the parties ; they sunk 
 into each other's bosoms and remained in close embrace. . . . But 
 it was time for them mutually to recede, and for the intelligences 
 to take into their hands the reins committed to them. The sun 
 also began to appear with his upper border to the east, and the 
 sensations began to awake." 
 
A DRAMA OF CREATION. 179 
 
 Where else, save perhaps in our author's own Memora- 
 bilia, shall we find these great shadows, cast by a second 
 Dante, as it were, walking along the infernal abyss, such 
 as are given in the Fifth Canto, where is described the 
 perverted natural man, or the prince of this world in 
 rebellion against the order of heaven and of the pristine 
 creation ? The loves of his mind, when reflected in the 
 mirrors held before them by the sacred wisdoms, appear 
 instantly as snakes, twining and hissing around their 
 heads and pouring poison into the veins of their bodies 
 through every pore by biting \ and they seem to them- 
 selves to be so many Gorgon faces ; being terrified they 
 desire to run away, but from the motion of their bodies 
 those infernal snake-like locks beat their bosoms and faces ; 
 hence they become as it were frozen, and their blood ceases 
 to flow. 
 
 " Then said the wisdoms, ' Behold now your loves and your 
 hates ; believe us that the spiritual life which awaits you will be 
 like this ; ... in proportion to the number of snakes is that of 
 the fires and of the furies of your spiritual life. . . . Begone, now, 
 beautiful flowers ! together with that venom so sweet which ye 
 concealed in your fibres ! ' " 
 
 And finally, to conclude this hunting for parallels, 
 where shall we find in any converse of the great Italian 
 with the heaven-wrapt Beatrice, a more beautiful vision 
 of the soul's grateful and adoring rest in the protective 
 sphere of divine love, than in the passage where Swedenborg 
 describes the first-begotten as having listened to the story 
 of the world being saved from destruction through the 
 interposition of the Supreme love of the Only-Begotten : 
 
 "On hearing these things, our first -begotten, being at first 
 astonished at the great danger to which the universe was exposed, 
 
i8o A DRAMA OF CREATION. 
 
 was, as it were, struck dumb ; but presently being melted by so 
 stupendous an instance of love, a secret delight was communicated 
 to the inmost principles of his being ; and therefore sinking into 
 the bosom of his wisdom he remained there a long time dissolved 
 in tears, being made thoroughly sensible in himself of what true love 
 is, and what is its essence ; but after that he had fed with tears of 
 joy on that very tender affection bursting forth from love, reclining 
 on his wisdom, he earnestly entreated her to retrace her footsteps 
 a little to the point from whence she had digressed, and to explain 
 to him in what manner a full opportunity might be given him of 
 enjoying this his love. He said that now he had a perception of 
 this truth, he had no other desire than that he might become not 
 his own but His" (who thus had loved him). (No. 79.) 
 
 That as a literary production this work has a character 
 all its own, one might he led to infer from the report of 
 the author's own judgment of its merits in this respect, as 
 given us in the words of Christian Johansen, who is stated 
 in the Documents Concerning Swedenborg, Vol. ii. p. 710, J 
 to have interrogated Swedenhorg himself as to the truth- 
 fulness of this the work before us. " It was certainly 
 founded in truth, but somewhat of egotism had intro- 
 duced itself into it, as he had made a playful use in 
 it of the Latin language on account of his having been 
 ridiculed for the simplicity of his Latin style in later 
 years. For this reason he did not regard it as equal to 
 his other works." 
 
 Leaving for the present the matter of its style, and 
 returning to its contents as constituting a nexus between 
 successive stages of Swedenborg development, we shall find 
 of service in arriving at a true estimate of the work in this 
 respect, the very able treatise on Science on Philosophy, 
 Part III. in No. VI. of Words for the New Church. 1 The 
 
 1 Philadelphia : Lippincott & Co., Publishers. 
 
A DRAMA OF CREATION. 181 
 
 writer of this admirable paper gives us the very helpful 
 classification of Swedenborg's works prior to his illumina- 
 tion as those devoted to the study of the macrocosm and 
 of the microcosm or as we might also name them, those 
 devoted to the objective and those devoted to the sub- 
 jective world. Prior to 1734, or the production of the 
 Prindpi&i the author's attention was mainly given to 
 the material or outer world ; these works constitute the 
 distinctively scientific stage of his writings : the animal 
 kingdom as considered anatomically, physically, and 
 philosophically, is a study of the world within, the "soul's 
 kingdom ; " and the Principia, treating as it does of the 
 elementary world and that process of creation or of evolu- 
 tion from the first invisible element through the sun and 
 the atmospheres to the earthly paradise, while it would 
 seem at first glance to belong to the objective stage, yet 
 really forms the transition from the macrocosmic to the 
 microcosmic studies of our author. Of this we may be 
 assured by his own assertion in the Animal Kingdom, 
 Part III. : 
 
 "The sensations cannot be explored without examining the 
 atmospheres, for the one subject is most intimately connected with 
 the other." ..." These things have been discussed in my Philo- 
 sophic Principia, where the forms of the particles of each atmosphere 
 are treated of and delineated. (1) These things were written for 
 our present purpose [viz. the analysis of the mechanism of the 
 eye]. (2) Now conies the application." 
 
 These few words throw a wonderful light on the whole 
 tendency and method of the Principia, as, namely, being 
 fundamental to the study of the organic and the spiritual 
 or intelligent world. Consequently while in form dealing 
 with the macrocosm, in purpose and end we see it all sub- 
 
1 82 A DRAMA OF CREATION. 
 
 servient to the microcosm, the kingdom of the soul, or as 
 forming that great highway to a knowledge of the soul 
 itself, which was the avowed object of our author's searcli 
 during his whole career as a philosopher. 
 
 A further classification of our author's writings, as ana- 
 lytic and synthetic, on which point we are also indebted 
 for much valuable light to the writer in the Words for 
 the New Church in the number above cited, leads us to 
 the more immediate consideration of the relative position 
 of the work which constitutes our present study. 
 
 Following the commonly accepted division of our 
 author's writing into the three classes, the scientific, the 
 philosophic, and the theological, or as they might be 
 termed, the macrocosmic, the microcosmic, and those 
 devoted to the science of the spiritual, we shall find, 
 it is believed, this general law or order pervading the 
 whole series, viz. : First, the analytic study, pursued in 
 each division; then a synthetic summary or declaration 
 of CL priori principles, which while it sums up all the 
 facts of the analytic study preceding, at the same time 
 forms a transition and introduction into a new analytic 
 study in the period next succeeding. Thus the scien- 
 tific works, mainly analytic in form, are succeeded by 
 the Principia, which work is entirely synthetic in 
 method, and while in a measure based upon all the 
 principles of elementary science preceding, itself affords 
 a kind of a priori basis for the study of the soul and 
 its kingdom, as pursued analytically in the treatises of the 
 Animal Kingdom. The knowledge of the sensations arid 
 the whole science of the fibrous organization and of the 
 cerebral formation and functions, would be wholly 
 visionary and fanciful were it not for the wondrous 
 
A DRAMA OF CREATION. 183 
 
 correspondence shown to exist between these interior 
 operations of the soul through her organs, and the 
 surrounding atmospheres as the media of impressions. 
 Again, after the analytic researches in the Animal 
 Kingdom, we approach the goal of our author's ambi- 
 tion, the knowledge of the Soul; and to our mind we 
 find the real culmination of all our author's studies of 
 the microcosm in the work De Anima, 1 entitled by Dr. 
 Immanuel Tafel the Seventh Part of the Animal 
 Kingdom. The body in all its great organs having been 
 surveyed, the author proceeds now to the skin and touch, 
 and the organs of the senses, and through these mounts 
 to the imagination, to the sensory, thence to the intel- 
 lectory \intellectorium\, and finally to the Soul itself. 
 This treatise On the Soul commences with the description 
 of the simple fiber from which as a celestial form the 
 whole body derives its structure, as in the Principia 
 the universe is developed from the first simple or the 
 natural point. While not analytic in form, like the 
 Economy, the Animal Kingdom, and the work On the 
 Brain, it is yet full of experimental illustrations, and 
 rests entirely for its scientific basis on the elementary 
 and atmospheric data of the Principia. We would 
 classify the De Anima, therefore, with the analytic 
 writings of the inicrocosmic stage, forming it is true 
 the highest and most interior and subtle order of in- 
 vestigations of which natural philosophy is capable, but 
 still ranking as a part of those inductive studies which 
 
 1 The, Soid, or Rational Psychology. By Emanuel Swedenborg. 
 Translated from the Latin edition of 1849, and edited with notes 
 and appendix, by Frank Sewall, A.M., 1887. Pp. 350. London : 
 sold by James Speirs, 36 Bloomsbury Street, W.C. 
 
1 84 A DRAMA OF CREATION. 
 
 our author pursued without the direct illumination of 
 that spiritual light of angelic wisdom, which he after- 
 ward enjoyed. 
 
 The true synthesis of all this philosophical stage of 
 writing we shall therefore not look for in either of the 
 treatises on the Soul as such, but rather in the interesting 
 and marvellous work before us at this time, On the Wor- 
 ship and Love of God. In this work every trace of the 
 analytic method disappears. Here all is fresh, spon- 
 taneous creation, glowing and palpitating with the life 
 and ardour of a new-born world, a paradise so intensely 
 alive that we seem to feel its reality too sensibly to 
 be fit for critically discussing it. The language is that 
 of a description of realities, of a panorama of actual 
 events, neither source nor authority nor explanation of 
 any kind being given, and yet accompanying all these 
 dramatic and animated scenes of life and action there 
 runs a commentary, or glossary, showing the relation 
 of all these natural figures and persons to the intricate 
 and subtle structures and operations of the human 
 body, especially of the finer sensory organs and the 
 brain. That Swedenborg did not regard it as belonging 
 to his analytic or strictly scientific studies, has been 
 inferred from his statement in his diary, May 1st, 
 1744: "Thenceforth speculation which has hitherto 
 been h posteriori will change into a priori." Also in 
 April of the same year he interprets a dream as illus- 
 trating the unwillingness he felt to abandon his philo- 
 sophic for spiritual studies. In October he describes 
 further in his private diary the conflict in his mind 
 between the Regnum Animale, which he was just pre- 
 paring for the press, and a new work of which he 
 
A DRAMA OF CREATION. 185 
 
 received frequent intimations in his dreams. He writes 
 under date of October 7, 1744 : "I was further informed 
 respecting my book upon the Worship and Love of God, 
 which was said to be a Divine Book. I believe it was 
 to contain something about spirits. My book on the 
 infinite I thought treated of something similar; but I 
 did not receive an answer to this suggestion." Docu- 
 ments Concerning Swedenborg. Tafel. London. No. 209 : 
 182. 
 
 October 10, he writes : " There was signified to me 
 by a representation, that, on the day before, I was 
 engaged with my work, which was entirely different 
 from the other, and proceeded from an entirely different 
 love, and I was in doubt whether the former should 
 prevail." By further representations he " was confirmed 
 to go on with his work." On October 27 he writes : 
 "It was foretold that the twenty-seventh of October 
 would come again, when I undertook the Worship and 
 Love of God" By a further representation at the same 
 time, he says : " By this is signified the whole of that 
 work upon which I am now entering in God's name ; 
 in front, before me is the part on 'The Worship of 
 God ; ' at the sides that treating on ' The Love ; ' there 
 is also signified by this representation that I must not 
 take of the articles manufactured by others, .... 
 but that I must use my own. May God lead me in the 
 right way ! " Documents : 209 : 203. 
 
 About this time, October 9, 1744, our author records 
 a dream which is of more than ordinary significance 
 considered in its relation to this transition-period in his 
 philosophic career, when he was, as it were, to be stripped 
 of all intellectual pride, and in the simplicity of a child to 
 
1 86 A DRAMA OF CREATION. 
 
 be led as if by the spirit of God back into a paradise of 
 primitive innocence and worship. 
 
 "This night," he says, "was the most delightful of 
 all ; since I saw the kingdom of Innocence. Below my 
 feet I saw the most beautiful garden which could possibly 
 be seen. On every tree in the garden there gradually 
 appeared white roses. Afterward I came into a long 
 room where beautiful white cups were standing, which 
 were filled with milk and bread, and which looked so 
 inviting that nothing could be imagined more so. I 
 was in company with a lady, of whom I have no 
 personal recollection. I then went back where a dear 
 little innocent child came to me and told me that the 
 lady had gone without taking leave. She begged me to 
 buy her a book which she wished to take with her, but 
 which she did not show me. I then awoke. Besides 
 this, it seemed to me as if I entertained in a house or 
 palace which stood apart, a large company of people who 
 were my acquaintances. . . . This signifies that I was in 
 the Kingdom of Innocence, treating the worldly-minded 
 people there without seeing them. It means that either 
 my work is not like theirs, although I treat them with 
 it, or something else. The child was Innocence itself, 
 and I wished that I might be in a kingdom where all 
 is innocence. I regretted that on awakening I had to 
 leave it. ... On the next day, the 9th, my eyesight 
 was so strong that I could read the Bible w r ith the small 
 print without the least difficulty." 
 
 The writer in the Words for the New CJiurch thus 
 alludes to the work before us : 
 
 " On entering upon his work Swedenborg turned his back upon 
 his former analytic studies, and more in the style of a seer and 
 
A DRAMA OF CREATION. 187 
 
 poet he described the creation of the universe, and of the first-born 
 among men. In inspired, glowing terms, he descanted upon the 
 sojourn of the first-born in Paradise, detailing the gradual unfold- 
 ing of his mind. Afterward he treated of the creation of woman, 
 of the wooing of the first-born, and of their married life. All is 
 filled with the fervent, exuberant life of first creation ; yet his 
 rhapsody goes over ground which had been carefully surveyed 
 and measured out by his rational thought. His flight is that 
 of an eagle, but it is determined and directed by the principles 
 and results at which he had arrived by his previous analytic 
 studies. " 
 
 William White, in liis larger work on Swedenborg, 
 after giving a graphic outline of the work, continues : 
 
 " 'Of course Swedenborg wrote all this confessedly as fiction,' 
 says the reader. There is no sign that he did ; nay, my own con- 
 viction is that he believed every word of it as sincerely as he ever 
 believed anything. . . . Many who will read with composure and 
 admiration his account of the manufacture of the elements from 
 Points of Force, and of Earth from Water, will start appalled at 
 the notion that he was in earnest in describing the creation of 
 Planets, Insects, Birds, Beasts, and Fishes, and above all, Adam 
 and Eve ; but there is no reason why the intuition which could 
 evolve the story of the former should hesitate about the latter." 
 
 Elsewhere the same author remarks : 
 
 "The structural affinity of this work, The Worship and Love 
 of God, is closer to the Principle*, of 1734 than to the Animal 
 Kingdom of 1744, though annotated with his later thought. In 
 the Principia, Swedenborg worked out the creation as far as the 
 Paradise, and in the Worship and Love of God he takes up the 
 thread of his story, and tells us how plants and animals and Adam 
 and Eve were made." 
 
 Dr. Beyer, in his letter to Nordenskold, in 1776 (Docu- 
 ments, vol. ii. p. 427), remarks : 
 
1 88 A DRAMA OF CREATION. 
 
 "The work De Cultu, etc., is not of importance in respect to 
 theological doctrine ; but in respect to natural truths, it contains 
 many beautiful and profound thoughts. On the subject of God 
 and love and wisdom, on the Son, the person of Adam, the sources 
 of life and imputation, he expressed himself quite differently after 
 he had received instruction from the Lord : wherefore the above 
 work is never cited in his other works. " 
 
 Dr. Garth Wilkinson thus alludes to the work, in his 
 biography of Swedenborg : 
 
 "The Worship and Love of God is a centering of all that he 
 had previously elicited from his studies, and an attempt, more- 
 over, to carry them into another field. As the title prepares the 
 reader to expect, it is an end to his scientific search. He began 
 from God, or the foundation of sciences ; the wisdom of creation 
 was the desire and wisdom of his labours, and here he ended with 
 his beginning, carrying God's harvest to God. Apparently he did 
 not know that his literary life was closed, but stood among the 
 sheaves, contemplating the tillage of future years in the old 
 domain, although trembling nevertheless in the presence of an 
 undisclosed event." 
 
 Here, while dwelling upon the judgments passed upon 
 this work by others, we may refer again to its reputed 
 estimate by Swedenborg himself, as related by Christian 
 Johansen (see Documents, ii. 710), 1 and only in order to 
 remark, that with all deference to so respectable an 
 authority, we feel a strong inclination to reject the whole 
 statement, as one bearing intrinsic evidence of having no 
 foundation in fact, or else of having been vastly changed 
 from its original form. Swedenborg was not the man, 
 least of all at this time of life, to be driven by the 
 ridicule of others into the adoption of a new style of 
 writing. The style itself is indeed elegant and ornate, 
 such as would entitle the work to be placed by the side 
 1 Quoted on page 180. 
 
A DRAMA OF CREATION. 189 
 
 of any of our greatest modern epics, including the Commedia 
 and the Paradise Lost, but it is, at the same time, the 
 one alone adequate and perfectly adapted to the matter 
 in hand. Moreover, Swedenborg was not, so far as we 
 are aware, in the habit of passing judgment on his own 
 writings, asserting that one was not the equal of others, etc. 
 The relation which the work before us sustains to the 
 Prindpia, as indicated by White in the passage above 
 quoted, gives us perhaps the best clue to its true position 
 in the series of the author's writings. It is not only like 
 the Prindpia, namely, synthetic in form, consisting of a 
 declaration of principles and the narration of the creation 
 of the world in its process, rather than an investigation 
 of facts furnished by others, but it continues in an orderly 
 series the great narrative which the Prindpia had begun. 
 The Prindpia conducts the reader from the first natural 
 point, the beginning of the finite world or nature, to the 
 formation of the earth, and concludes with a chapter 
 devoted to the "Paradise formed upon our earth, and the 
 First Man." Says Swedenborg : 
 
 ""We have explained how the earth's gyrations were at the 
 commencement more rapid, then in process of time slower, till, on 
 arriving at the orbit it now annually describes, it reached its 
 utmost limit of slowness. Here we left it, surrounded with water 
 without a shore. Not, however, to leave it to the lawless fury 
 of a flood, we here resume the subject, and explain in a few words 
 in what manner shores were now added ; that is to say how it was 
 that dry land was acquired, how the waters superinduced upon 
 themselves a crust, which not only coerced them within given 
 limits, and kept them within an enclosure, but also how all that 
 we now find in the vegetable and mineral worlds was enabled to 
 enter into the crust ; how heaven also not only deposited its seeds 
 in this crust, but also gave them germination and expansion." 
 
190 A DRAMA OF CREATION. 
 
 Thence he goes on to describe the formation of the 
 crust, the origin of the mineral and vegetable kingdoms, 
 and the perpetual spring as the effectual means by which 
 the germination of things could be promoted : " And 
 when, therefore, this globe had been enriched in its 
 various vegetable productions, and animals of all kinds 
 had come into being, then was the first man introduced 
 into Paradise, having been created into all the harmony 
 of the visible world." 
 
 After writing these words an interval of ten years 
 follows before we find our author again taking up the 
 story of creation, now in the form of the sublime drama 
 described in the seven days or scenes of the " Worship 
 and Love of God." What does this interval of time 
 signify in connection with this work, thus interrupted 
 and resumed *? We have seen that the Prineipia was of 
 the nature of a synthesis of the principles of natural or ' 
 elementary philosophy, serving at once as a conclusion of 
 the macrocosmic studies and an introduction to the micro- 
 cosmic. The study of the microcosm is pursued in the 
 study of the soul in her kingdom, the body the human 
 form, as the form of the Divine economy of uses, or of a 
 heavenly society. This study is strictly analytic, consist- 
 ing of citations from authorities and inductions therefrom. 
 The whole, nevertheless, rests for its real basis in the 
 doctrines of the Principia, which have been synthetically 
 declared at the beginning of this period. The inner 
 world, or microcosm, which forms the object of the 
 researches in the Animal Kingdom, is the world of man 
 considered anatomically, physically, and philosophically ; 
 it is the human form as the great model form of use, or 
 Divine society but studied in its natural formations as 
 
A DRAMA OF CREATION. 191 
 
 exhibited in the natural body, and not as the form of the 
 spiritual man. There is still another world, neither great 
 nor little, a world having naught of space in it, which is 
 still to be explored the world not of mechanical nature 
 or geometry, nor of the soul's operations in the body, but 
 the world of spirit. 
 
 As the analytic studies of the macrocosm led to the 
 Principia as their synthesis and transition to the next 
 higher stage, so shall we not now say the analytic studies 
 of the microcosm or the animal kingdom lead to the work 
 on the Worship and Love of God as their true synthesis 
 and their bridge to the concluding stage of our author's 
 career that of the seer of spiritual truths. The history 
 of creation, dropped in the Principia at the comple- 
 tion of the elementary or universal world, is taken up 
 again now in this a priori description of the origin of 
 organic living forms, of man or the human soul, and of 
 the beginning of human society. The birth of the first 
 man and the education of the first human soul could not 
 be treated on the basis of the Principia or elementary 
 science only ; it needed the science of the whole animal 
 economy, and of the adaptation of the soul to its surround- 
 ings, the science of the atmospheres, of forms, series, and 
 modifications, of the senses, and the sensations. These 
 sciences form the solid analytic basis on which the 
 account of the birth, the education, and the marriage of 
 the first-begotten are built up. These materials at hand, 
 the story of the creation can now be completed ; the 
 glimpse of Paradise, barely gained at the close of the 
 Principia, now broadens into a wide, lovely view of our 
 virgin earth, in its luxuriance and perfection, and of man 
 in his primitive innocence, integrity, and beauty 
 
192 A DRAMA OF CREATION. 
 
 Regarding the work, then, as a continuation of the 
 Principia in a higher plane, inasmuch as it gives us the 
 further stages or development of creation, let us glance 
 very briefly at the wonderful scenes now unrolled before 
 us in these glowing pages. 
 
 The work is divided by its author into three parts : 
 Part First describes, according to the author's title, " The 
 Birth of the Earth, of Paradise, and of Living Creatures ; 
 also the Nativity, Infancy, and the Love of the First- 
 begotten or Adam." The Second Part treats of " The 
 Marriage of the First-begotten or Adam, and in connec- 
 tion icith it, of the Soul, the Intellectual Mind, the State 
 of Integrity, and the Image of God." The Third Part, as 
 yet untranslated but accessible in the Latin, partly in 
 print, partly in MS., in vol. vii. of the photo-lithographed 
 MSS. of Swedenborg, is headed " De Vita Conjugii paris 
 primogeniti " " The Life of the Marriage of the First- 
 born Pair" Notwithstanding these divisions, however, 
 the work forms a single consecutive narration, embracing 
 the creative acts of seven successive days, that of the last, 
 with a more than artistic significance to our minds, being 
 left incomplete. These several parts, or chapters, may 
 not unfitly be termed successive Cantos of a great poem 
 or the acts of a sublime Drama. 
 
 The First section treats of the Birth of the Earth, the 
 Orbits and Gyrations of the Planets, the complex of 
 universes called the Firmament, the series of Forms, 
 angular, circular, vortical, and the perpetually vortical or 
 celestial Forms. The great Egg of the Universe, the sun, 
 primitively overspread with efftuvias, which ultimately 
 formed a crust or shell, is represented as bursting with 
 the sun's own heat or energy, and thus hatching as a 
 
A DRAMA OF CREATION. 193 
 
 numerous offspring all the globes of the universe, which 
 look to him as their parent. Hence the planets and their 
 satellites. And at length the earth, smooth, clean, and 
 round, whirling in its comparatively narrow orbit, now 
 represented a kind of new egg, laden with many small 
 eggs collected at its surface, or small seeds of its future 
 triple kingdom, viz. the mineral, vegetable, and animal. 
 The seeds or beginnings lay as yet unseparated in their 
 rudiments, one folded up in another, viz. the vegetable 
 kingdom in the mineral kingdom, which was the matrix ; 
 and in the vegetable kingdom which was to serve as a 
 nurse, or nourisher, the animal kingdom ; for each after- 
 ward was to come forth distinctly from its coverings. 
 Thus the present contained the past, and what was to 
 come lay concealed in each, for one thing involved 
 another in a continual series ; by which means the 
 earth, from its continued auspices, was perpetually in 
 a kind of birth, and, as it were, in the view of something 
 to follow, whilst it was in the end, and, as it were, 
 forgetf ulness of what was gone before ; and according 
 to progression in its orbit receding from the center, 
 it involved continually new powers, by virtue of which 
 were successively unfolded uses. (No. 15.) 
 
 The Second section treats of Paradise " when the earth 
 still naked and unadorned advanced towards its maturity, 
 and, like a young damsel as yet unmarried, hastened to 
 the flower of its first age." 
 
 "The quickly revolving days and nights, the even temperature, 
 the blending of eve and day in all things relating to space and 
 time, both greatest and least, conspired to one end, that our globe 
 might enter into the flower of its age, or perpetual spring." 
 
 Then follows the account of the origin of Living 
 
 N 
 
194 A DRAMA OF CREATION. 
 
 creatures, their birth from eggs produced respectively 
 by the shruls or little leaves, which produced the worms 
 and insects; the "violet beds and groves of Paradise," 
 from which are produced the birds ; the viviparous forests 
 which produced the quadrupeds, or larger and more 
 destructive -beasts, only safely after the lower shrubs have 
 brought forth their vital progeny ! (See Nos. 25, 26, 27.) 
 
 "The vegetables, themselves, in imitation of their great mother, 
 were primitively, as it were, mere seminaries and ovaries, but 
 which produced not only after their own kind, but also after a kind 
 different from themselves ; for one thing lay so folded up in 
 another that the other did not come forth till all things were ready 
 prepared which might serve for the exercises and necessities of its 
 life. From the series itself of production, it may be manifest 
 whence came the soul of brutes, which are said to have been 
 ingenerated in the seeds of the vegetable kingdom ; for as all the 
 seeds of vegetables arose from the conjunction of the active powers 
 of nature with the inert powers of the earth, through the medium, 
 of the radiation of the sun of the world, so their seeds, which are 
 animated, arose from that form or spiritual essence, infused into 
 the forms or active powers of nature through the medium of the 
 radiation of the sun of life, which is spiritual and living ; where- 
 fore these lives went forth in the same subordinate series as those 
 powers of nature themselves which constituted the atmospheres, 
 consequently the same as the seeds of the vegetables themselves, 
 from which they finally were hatched. And since that life from 
 its fountain breathes nothing but uses, and nature is nothing but 
 an effort for the sake of uses, it is evident that it was so foreseen 
 and provided, that uses themselves as effects might unfold them- 
 selves ; he is totally blind and in the grossest darkness who in 
 these things does not discover what is DIVINE." 
 
 The Third scene is that of the Birth of the First- 
 begotten, or Adarn, where the novel representation is 
 introduced of man as being produced from an egg, borne 
 on a noble tree called the Tree of Life, which grew in a 
 
A DRAMA OF CREATION. 195 
 
 beautiful grove, described as a " Paradise within a Para- 
 dise." The wonderful account is as follows : 
 
 "In the midst of this Paradise within a Paradise was again a 
 fruit tree which bore a small egg, the most precious of all others, 
 in which, as in a jewel, nature concealed herself with her highest 
 powers and stores, to become the initiaments of the most consiim- 
 matebody ; this fruit tree was from hence called the THEE OF LIFE. 
 
 "But this little egg was not yet fecundated, only nature 
 collected into it as into a sort of sacred little ark, her most 
 distinguished treasures and valuables, and provided it with such 
 noble furniture as a bride prepares for her bed-chamber when she 
 expects the coming of the bridegroom and the offerings of a new 
 covenant. When nature had thus in every respect completed her 
 work, and collected as it were her circumferences into this egg, as 
 a center, then the Supreme mind came to meet her ; and from 
 itself as the sun of essential life, with concentrated rays, conceived 
 the super-essential form, or soul, which was life, and capable of 
 containing what is infinite by the Self-infinite. This form or Soul 
 the Supreme mind infused into this treasure or little egg. This 
 was the first happy token of connubial intercourse of spiritual 
 essence with the supreme aura of nature, for the purpose that the 
 fluent orb of causes, conceived by the Infinite in the grand egg of 
 the world, and brought down to this least egg, might be completed 
 within nature, but afterward, by connection with the Infinite, 
 might be rendered infinite ; and that by such conjunction a 
 terrestrial court might be annexed to a celestial palace." . . . 
 
 "The Tree of Life itself unfolded its branches, which bare this 
 golden and vital apple, into a soft and easy womb, and covering it 
 with a thin bark and soft leaves, drew off the nourishing juice 
 from the neighbouring leaves, and consulted only its life ; the 
 neighbouring trees also contributed their juice by instilling it into 
 the roots of this tree, which crowned the center of the grove, 
 rejoicing that they were allowed from their vegetable store to 
 impart something of life to the same." 
 
 "Nor was nature alone at hand and urgent to supply all her 
 aids, but Heaven was also favourable in its presence ; for its 
 inhabitants or spiritual minds were let down for this purpose, that 
 
196 A DRAMA OF CREATION. 
 
 they might second and direct all the offices of nature ; also that 
 they might drive away whatsoever should infest this sacred grove ; 
 for instantly when any fierce animals overleaped the boundary 
 assigned them, being struck with a sudden terror, they fled far 
 away into their forests, or, with a faltering step, fell down on their 
 knees to worship their Prince and Lord ; part also kept watch and 
 guarded the passage itself at a distance. For pure spiritual 
 essences, by virtue of the power and force alone which issue from 
 them, so affect and astonish minds enslaved to nature, that these 
 ignorantly and impotently forget themselves and adopt habits even 
 contrary to their own nature. 
 
 "All things were now prepared. The parturient branch, 
 according to the times of gestation, declining' itself by degrees 
 toward the ground, at length deposited its burden commodiously 
 on the couch underneath. The celestial living beings, clothed with 
 a bright cloud, were also at hand, and found that nothing was 
 neglected, but that all things were prepared obsequiously by 
 nature in conformity to their provisions. Hence, when the many 
 months were completed, at that time so many years, the foetus, 
 perfectly conscious of what was decreed, himself broke through the 
 bands and bars of his inclosure, and raised himself by his own 
 exertions into this world and its Paradise, desired from the first 
 moments of his life ; and immediately drew in with his nostrils 
 and breath the air, which he saluted with a slight kiss, and which 
 pressed in by its force as a new vital guest or spirit, for which 
 interior chambers were now provided ; and by its aid opening a 
 field for exertions he excited to their respective offices all the 
 powers of his body, which were now in the ability to exert them- 
 selves. The choicest flowers encompassing this bed-chamber now 
 exhaled their odours from their winding ducts, that by these 
 infused into the attracted air, they might also penetrate and 
 exhilarate all the blood of the infant flowing from the heart and 
 now meeting the air, with rich and delicious gifts. Whatsoever 
 was iii the kingdom of nature, as if it was gifted with conscious- 
 ness (for all celestial stores were at this moment effulgent, and by 
 their influx, as it were, announced their presence), excited by a 
 kind of festivity, favoured and in their manner greeted this birth- 
 day. Choirs of celestial inhabitants concluded this scene, which 
 
A DRAMA OF CREATION. 197 
 
 was the third, with the delicate vibrations of their lights, as so 
 many tokens of gladness and approbation." (Xos. 32-38.) 
 
 The Fourth scene describes the Infancy of the First- 
 begotten. It opens with a picture of a peaceful night in 
 this primitive earth, on whose bosom lay this its first, 
 most noble fruit. 
 
 "It was midnight, and the constellations of heaven, as if also 
 about to applaud, now not only shone with brightness, but 
 glittered with a kind of naming beam. They were also ardent to 
 prevent their setting, but the day dawn hastening to its rising 
 dimmed their luster and instantly opened the gates of day for the 
 rising sun. The inhabitants of heaven, as was observed, took 
 their stations around, and by their flaming light prevented the 
 rays of any other lumen from kindling the first spark of the light 
 of his life, rejoicing also at the sight of an infant, the first-begotten 
 and the hope of the whole human race, lying with his breast 
 and face upward, and his tender hands folded and lifted up to 
 heaven, moving also his little lips, as if he would venerate the 
 Supreme Builder and his Parent, not in mind only, but by a 
 certain posture and corresponding gesture of the body, under a 
 species of the purest thanksgiving that the workmanship of the 
 world was now complete in himself. He was naked, but encom- 
 passed with the mildest spring, as with a bath ; so fair and of 
 a countenance so beautiful, as if he were a Deity not born to 
 mortal life." 
 
 A festival is celebrated by the celestial essences in 
 celebration of this last day of creation. The infant's 
 sensuous life and education is portrayed in detail and in 
 wonderful language. He is described as living wholly as 
 soul under the image of an infant clothed with a body ; 
 "for the soul saw the beauties of Paradise pellucid, 
 through, as it were, her own eyes, not his ; she delighted 
 herself not from the harmonies of effects but from the 
 delight of uses, and of the goodness contemplated in 
 
1 98 A DRAMA OF CREATION. 
 
 them." The mystic company of the Intelligences and 
 the Wisdoms are here introduced, and the infant is 
 represented as conversing with them. The soul's 
 Olympus and the Helicon of the senses are also most 
 vividly portrayed, and an animated society is here depicted 
 as if the world were peopled with myriads instead of a 
 single human soul. 
 
 The Fifth scene treats of the love of the First-begotten ; 
 and here the first idea of evil is introduced in the 
 description of the two loves between which the soul 
 is balanced. Here, too, is introduced the knowledge of 
 the other or celestial paradise, the spiritual world and its 
 celestial sun. The evil love is described as a kind of 
 fallen Lucifer, afterward taking on, now the form of a 
 Gorgon's head, and now of a fearful Cerberus, from 
 which the First-begotten shrinks with fear. Consoled . 
 and protected by his accompanying wisdom, his fears are 
 allayed. At length the wisdoms enter the Olympus, as 
 brides the bride-chamber. " Lo ! Love himself holds the 
 torch, and his wisdoms utter applause." Thus ends the 
 Fifth scene. 
 
 The Sixth scene treats of the marriage of the First- 
 begotten (No. 87), describing first the birth of the first 
 woman and her education by the celestial intelligences, 
 before her meeting with Adam. The origin of the first 
 woman is not less remarkable than that of the first man ; 
 her first creation seems to have been a beautiful concep- 
 tion in the mind of Adam, a dream and vision of beauty 
 which causes a longing to clasp the fair but vanishing 
 form to his bosom. 
 
 " The vehement agitation of his frame thus caused the distend- 
 ing of the nerves by the operation of the mind, and the blood in 
 
A DRAMA OF CREATION. 199 
 
 the breast being set by the heart into violent commotion, all 
 conduced to create the feeling that one of his ribs leaped out of its 
 place. On awaking he finds this to have indeed been a dream, but 
 in fact, the apple tree under which he was reposing carried, like 
 his own maternal tree, a similar egg from which his future conjugal 
 partner was to be born, and she it was whose image he had so 
 eagerly courted in his sleep ; the branch at his breast lying in his 
 bosom was what he embraced in his arms ; and the very egg itself 
 was pressed with his lips and his kisses, and thus infused with a 
 vital soul from his own. " 
 
 The meeting of the first human pair is thus described 
 (No. 110): 
 
 " Whilst the first-begotten led a solitary paradisiacal life, and 
 fed his mind at ease with the delights of the visible world, he 
 recollected a thousand times that most beautiful nymph who, 
 during his sleep, was seen by him in this grove ; wherefore 
 a thousand times he turned his step thither, but always in vain. 
 
 "The idea of her, which was in consequence exalted, kindled 
 such a fire as to inflame the inmost principles of his life, and thus 
 to turn its tranquillity into care and anxiety. This ardour 
 increased, even unto this day, on which it was appointed by the 
 Divine Providence that this wound which lurked in his inmost 
 veins, should be healed by enjoyment ; wherefore, whilst he now 
 again meditated on the same path, he came even to the entrance of 
 this grove, which was the only entrance, without mistaking his 
 way. Rejoicing intensely at this circumstance, he hastened 
 instantly to the midst of it, to the very tree under which he had 
 so deliciously rested ; and seeing the couch there, the idea of his 
 sleep so revived that he spied as with his eyes her very face. And 
 whilst he was wholly intent on her image, and extended his sight 
 a little further, lo ! he saw and acknowledged the very nymph 
 herself, in the midst of the choir of intelligences ; at this sight he 
 was in such emotion and so filled with love that he doubted a long 
 time whether his sight did not deceive him ; but presently when 
 the crowd of his thoughts was a little dispersed, it occurred to his 
 mind that he was brought hither by the Divine Providence, and 
 that this was the event of which previous notice was given him in 
 
200 A DRAMA OF CREATION. 
 
 his sleep ; and that she it was whom heaven had marked out for 
 him as a bride and a conjugal partner. I see clearly, said he, that 
 she is mine, for she is from my own bosom, and from my own 
 life. . . . The celestial intelligences beckoned to him with a nod 
 to make his approach, and whilst he was leading the bride in his 
 hand this scene was ended, which was the sixth in the theatre of 
 this orb.". 
 
 The Seventh scene is what is comprised in the unpub- 
 lished and untranslated Part III. It treats, as we have 
 said, of the conjugal life of the first pair. It is, in other 
 words, a wonderful portrayal of forms, spheres and 
 fluxions, orbits, fires, colours and planets and clouds, used 
 as types of the various loves and intelligences ; also as 
 types of the various planes of the mind, the super-celestial 
 or the soul, the celestial or internal mind, the infra- 
 celestial or the animus. By their gyrations and fluxions 
 are represented in a marvellous manner the heavenly life 
 and the heaven of the Beloved, or of the Supreme Only- 
 Begotten. The explanations of these representations 
 constitute the discourse of Adam and Eve the first day 
 after their nuptials. The book opens with a single 
 number descriptive of the wooing and union of the first- 
 begotten pair, beginning with these beautiful words which, 
 it seems to us, were never surpassed in human writing in 
 their lofty dignity combined with tenderness and grace : 
 
 " Cum jam Sola soli relictafuit " 
 
 " When now she alone was left to her only one." 
 
 In the morning as they awake from a most sweet sleep 
 upon the marriage bed, there appears in the mid-heaven a 
 kind of effigy of the universe, consisting of a shining center 
 of light from which radiate solar flames, shading off into 
 a beautiful purple nimbus glittering with beauty and 
 
A DRAMA OF CREATION. 201 
 
 splendour, transparent, tinged with Tyrian hues, a circle of 
 gems. The description follows of the motions of these rays 
 and spheres, and the first-begotten declares to his beloved 
 the hidden meaning of this wonderful representation : 
 
 " The ends of ends is to be explained. The earth, with its triple 
 kingdom, lives, not of or for its self, but for a prior end, namely, 
 for a heaven and thus for the glory of the most wise Creator. 
 Therefore all the orders of the universe conspire with this crown of 
 all ends, that is with the Glory of God ; wherefore there is nothing 
 in heaven or in the worlds, which does not bear an image of His 
 Glory, for all mediate ends, regard and proclaim the ultimate. 
 But for declaring most sacredly His Glory, all things and creation 
 itself were ordained that there might be formed from human 
 minds a celestial kingdom or a sacred society, of which as of one 
 body, the Creator Himself should be the soul, and his First-born 
 or his Only Love should actuate the mind, which in our bodies 
 from the intellect and will is named the rational. The human 
 body represented to us as produced from the great egg signified this. " 
 
 The discourse explanatory of this representative vision 
 concludes the Seventh or last scene of this wonderful 
 drama, breaking off, however, abruptly as in the middle 
 of a number, and thus lacking any fitting conclusion 
 except indeed it were thus providentially left unfinished, 
 as if to indicate that the vision of the poet and seer is 
 now lifted to a higher scene still, where not in mystic 
 figures but in tilings heard and seen in all spiritual 
 reality, he was to witness, at last, the true end of creation, 
 a heaven of angels from the human race. 
 
 Kegarding this wonderful production as a synthesis of 
 the philosophical writings of Swedenborg, are we not 
 entitled to carry our plans of division still further, and 
 therefore, even in the fields of theology, or the revelations 
 of angelic wisdom, look to find here again a period of 
 
202 A DRAMA OF CREATION. 
 
 analytic studies followed by a grand final synthesis of 
 spiritual principles 1 This expectation we believe is 
 realized in the substantial classification of Swedenborg's 
 theological writings, if not into the two successive 
 chronological periods, at least into two kinds of teaching. 
 The one, which we may call the analytic, consists of, 
 first, the study of the particulars of the internal sense of 
 the Word, and second, the record of "things heard and 
 seen " in the spiritual world. These two are the sources 
 which furnish the facts, or the material, so to speak, of 
 which the great fabric of a genuine spiritual theology is 
 subsequently built. 
 
 Belonging to the first division of the analytic class, we 
 would therefore name the writings in which the internal 
 sense of the Word is given the Arcana, the Summary 
 Exposition, and the Apocalypse Explained to the second, 
 the work on Heaven and Hell, on the Last Judgment, the 
 Earths in the Universe, and the Memorable Relations. 
 These two divisions we would embrace in the analytic 
 class, and in fact we find them practically so treated by 
 the author, the memorable relations and the descriptions 
 of the spiritual world being actually inserted between the 
 successive chapters of the Word in the exposition of the 
 internal sense. 
 
 The other class, the synthetic, would embrace the 
 works in which the principles are stated in a more general 
 and abstract manner. These are the works entitled the 
 Doctrine of the Lord, of Life, of the Sacred Scriptures, 
 and of Faith; Divine Love and Wisdom, the Divine 
 Providence, Conjugal Love, the True Cliristian Religion. 
 These are all subsequent in their appearing to the 
 analytic works above mentioned. As a nexus or a brief 
 
A DRAMA OF CREATION. 203 
 
 synthesis of the analytic division leading into the more 
 purely doctrinal series, we may regard the work entitled 
 the New Jerusalem and Its Heavenly Doctrine, the 
 chapters of which, as is known, are interspersed through 
 the later volumes of the Arcana. The Apocalypse 
 Revealed does indeed fall, according to its date, 1766, 
 into the later or synthetic period, while its contents, 
 according to our plan of classification, should place it in 
 the analytic class. Its late appearing may, however, be 
 accounted for on two grounds, viz., that it could only be 
 written after the accomplishment of the Last Judgment 
 (1757), and that it is, to a certain extent, a reproduction 
 of the Apocalypse Explained, which was written, but 
 not published, during the earlier or analytic period. 
 
 Having now examined the work before us in its 
 relation to the other writings of the author, let us finally 
 endeavour to arrive at a correct estimate of its actual 
 scientific and theological import, and the degree of 
 authority which is to be attached to the statements here 
 made as to the mode of the origin of the earth and of man. 
 
 A writer in the Words for the New Clmrcli, in a passage 
 quoted above, seems to regard the work as being synthetic, 
 not in a scientific but in a spiritual or theological sense, 
 namely, as containing something of the authority of a 
 revelation. In support of this view, his quotations were 
 made from the Private Diary of Swedenborg, or his Book 
 Dreams. While we admit that these quotations throw a 
 very interesting light on the character of the work, we 
 think there is room for doubt as to the real intent of 
 some of the passages quoted. 
 
 A much more significant testimony as to the real cha- 
 racter of this work, is that which Swedenborg gives in his 
 
204 A DRAMA OF CREATION. 
 
 introduction to his History of Creation as Related by 
 Moses, commonly known as the Adversaria, Vol. i., written 
 in 1745, thus after the full opening of his spiritual sight. 
 Here he says : " The origin of the earth, Paradise, the 
 nursery of the living, and the birth of Adam, were dis- 
 cussed in Part First of my treatise on the Worship and 
 Love of God. That work, however, was written under 
 the leadership of the understanding, or according to the 
 thread of reason. As human intelligence, however, cannot 
 be trusted in any respect unless it be inspired by God, 
 therefore it becomes necessary, in the interest of truth, to 
 compare what has been laid down in the above-named 
 work, with the revelation in the Sacred Scriptures, and 
 in the present case with the history of creation as re- 
 vealed by God to Moses, and thus to examine carefully 
 how far they agree ; for whatever does not harmonize 
 thoroughly with revelation must be declared to be alto- 
 gether false, or the insane product of our rational mind." 
 Two most interesting and remarkable conclusions follow 
 from these statements, viz. : That Swedenborg does not 
 here class the work as coming under the domain of revela- 
 tion, but emphatically states the necessity of comparing 
 it as a product of the understanding alone, with the true 
 standard of the revealed Word ; secondly, that the account 
 of creation in his own work is not represented as being 
 suggested by, or derived from, the account in Genesis, but 
 that having been first written by the " thread of reason," it 
 is now brought to the test of comparison with that account. 
 What now is the result of the comparison as actually 
 made by Swedenborg? After a brief exposition of the 
 meaning of Genesis i. as scientifically viewed, according 
 to Swedenborg's insight at that period, he says : 
 
A DRAMA OF CREATION. 205 
 
 "When now I have carefully compared these accounts [meaning 
 the account in Genesis and his own in the Worship and Love of 
 God]. I have wondered at their agreement (miratus sum concorden- 
 tiain) ; for first in that little work I have treated of a universal 
 chaos, or the grand egg of the universe, which contained in itself 
 heaven and earth, according to Gen. i. 23. Then of the planets 
 and the earth, that in their beginnings they were likewise unformed 
 bodies, or crude masses, and that the ethereal atmosphere had not 
 yet begun to exist, which transmits the solar rays, consequently 
 that there was no universe, but mere vacuity and emptiness, and 
 thence mere darkness. Then the true ether arising, which in 
 Scripture is everywhere called the Divine Spirit, these circumfused 
 masses were converted into a globe according to verse 2. That 
 they began to rotate about axes, and thus to produce days with their 
 evenings and mornings, according to verses 3, 4, 5 ; then that the 
 aerial atmosphere was produced, according to verses 6, 7, 8. That 
 this primitive globe was at first fluid, but clothed itself with a crust 
 and so became an earth, according to verses 9, 10 ; and that this 
 terrestrial surface first produced grass, then trees, smaller and larger, 
 according to verses 9-13 ; that times originated in the annual revo- 
 lutions of the earth about the sun, according to verses 14-19 ; 
 afterward, that insects or worms were produced, that is, the smaller 
 animalcula, and afterward the birds and fishes, according to verses 
 21-23 ; then the various kinds of animals, according to verses 24, 
 25. At length man is created into the Divine Image, according to 
 verses 26, 27 ; and many other facts are adduced which are con- 
 tained in the premised history of creation and the commentary 
 thereon." Adversaria, Part I. Vol. i. p. 7. 
 
 Further on, in comementing on the 7th verse, "Jehovah 
 God formed man, dust from the earth," Swedenborg says : 
 
 " That is his body, his flesh and bones, with the corporeal part of 
 the blood, or whatever does not possess life, but rather is actuated 
 by life, for the soul is derived from heaven. Whether he was 
 formed immediately from the earth, and thus did not pass through 
 the states from infancy to youth, or whether immediately from an 
 egg, and thus onward, the reader may conclude at his option ; since 
 indeed one day means an entire space of time or the lapse of many 
 
206 A DRAMA OF CREATION. 
 
 years, man could also have been born from an egg, and this egg not 
 formed immediately from the ground, but mediately through the 
 fibers of some vegetable object or tree by which the essences which 
 were to enter into his blood might be purified. If this were the 
 process, man was none the less formed from the dust of the earth, 
 for whatever comes through the roots and fibers of vegetables is 
 from the earth." Adversaria, Part i. Vol. i. p. 40. 
 
 Again, in regard to the creation of woman, Swedenborg 
 thus comments on Gen. ii. verses 21, 23 : 
 
 " ' Wherefore Jehovah God caused a deep sleep to fall upon 
 Adam, and he slept, and He took one of his ribs and closed up the 
 flesh instead thereof. And the rib which Jehovah God had taken 
 from man made He a woman, and brought her to man. ' That the 
 taking out of the rib and the closing up of the flesh in its place 
 was only a kind of dream, or that it seemed to take place in a dream, 
 that one of his ribs leaped forth and that the flesh was supplied in 
 the place, is not so unreasonable a supposition : for that the woman 
 was taken from him is sufficiently evident from the sacred words > 
 and from verse 23, ' This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my 
 flesh ; she shall be called woman because she was taken out of 
 man.' That is, sprung from his blood, from his spirit and soul. 
 Then also it may be demonstrated that this did not take place in 
 the garden of Adam himself, but elsewhere, because it is said that 
 ' the woman was brought to him. ' " 
 
 From these quotations it is evident that Swedenborg, 
 while holding that his theory of man's being originally 
 produced from an egg, borne on a tree, is neither incon- 
 sistent with the Scriptures nor with reason, was still very 
 careful not to declare this as a statement carrying any 
 more authority with it than its own reasonableness. "Fides 
 sit penes lectorem," " Let the reader believe as he chooses" 
 in deciding between the production of man instantaneously 
 from the ground, or mediately by the forces of the 
 vegetable egg. Whether he would have extended this 
 
A DRAMA OF CREATION. 207 
 
 option to the modern evolutionists' theory of the birth 
 from the ape-mother is seriously to be doubted. That 
 such an alternative as another possible mode of man's 
 origin is never mentioned by Swedenborg, is a strong 
 presumption against any attempt to reconcile such a theory 
 with either his philosophical or theological teachings. 
 
 To pronounce upon the precise scientific value of the 
 account of creation, particularly of the extraordinary 
 account of the origin of man and woman as given in the 
 work before us, was not the purpose, were it in the 
 province of the present writer. Without entering into 
 discussion of this vast theme, suffice it to say, that, granted 
 any evolution proceeding from Divine origin and cause, 
 and especially one which evolves from the mineral the 
 vegetable, and from the vegetable the animal, there is at 
 least nothing contrary to sound reason and analogy in the 
 birth of the first man directly from the vegetable egg, 
 impregnated by the Divine Spirit, any more than in his 
 gradual development from a lower order of animated 
 being, which was, however, so produced in the beginning. 
 While, on the other hand, there is much, both in analogy 
 and in reason, not to speak of the moral instincts of the 
 human soul, that will find the theory here broached by 
 Swedenborg much more satisfactory and more helpful 
 in a study of nature from a truly human standpoint than 
 that which derives man from a lower animal. 
 
 That the theory has at present hardly come to be whis- 
 pered abroad, and then perhaps only to be laughed at by 
 the leaders in present science, is not a consideration so 
 much against it, as perhaps in its favour, since any con- 
 clusion formed by a science whose chief boast is that it 
 has eliminated God from nature, may be safely entertained 
 
208 A DRAMA OF CREATION. 
 
 only with the gravest suspicions; whereas Swedenborg 
 and his theory can well afford to wait a few hundred, or a 
 thousand years, if need be, confident that his foundations 
 are sound at least, and that the light of more extended re- 
 search may elucidate, but can hardly obliterate, the lines 
 of an argument so logical, so exact, and so comprehensive 
 as is that of his philosophical system. 
 
 As to his own estimate of his work, we cannot see 
 wherein it differs in the least from that of the other works 
 which preceded it in the great series. It is, as he says, 
 " a work of the understanding constructed by the thread 
 of reason." Such was the Principle^ such were the 
 Economy and the Animal Kindgom. In the same cate- 
 gory with these must we place this wonderful work which 
 crowns the whole, as the creation of Man and Paradise 
 crowns the creative week. In this, the Drama of Creation, 
 which began with the " First Natural Point " in the 
 Principia, reaches its majestic close. If the language is 
 more poetic, and the thought more imaginative, the grand 
 outline of the unique, logical plan, the magnificent scheme 
 of orders, series, degrees, ends, means, and uses, is still 
 everywhere distinctly seen. The philosopher becomes a 
 poet in creating a world hitherto unknown, but it is a 
 world which has in its structure all we know or perhaps ever 
 shall know of the laws of Divine order and harmony and 
 perfect adaptation of means to ends, and a world which 
 the more we study the more we shall come to find not 
 a temporary, transient structure of fancy, but a creation 
 as eternal as the Logos itself, from which it derives its 
 being. 
 
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
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 Return to desk from which borrowed. 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
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 THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY