MASTER NEGA TIVE NO. 92-80611 MICROFILMED 1992 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES/NEW YORK as part of the "Foundations of Western Civilization Preservation Project" Funded by the NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES Reproductions may not be made without permission from Columbia University Library COPYRIGHT STATEMENT The copyright law of the United States - Title 17, United states Code - concerns the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. . Columbia University Library reserves the right to refuse to accept a copy order if, in its judgement, fulfillment of the order would mvolve violation of the copyright law A UTHOR : WILKINSON, JAMES JOHN GARTH TITLE: EMANUEL SWEDENBORG; PLACE: LONDON DA TE : 1886 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES PRESERVATION DEPARTMENT BIBLIOGRAPHIC MICROFORM TARHFT Master Negative # Original Material as Filmed - Existing Bibliographic Record J i l l P' II i I ■ I f ■ " ill 938 .94 I SYr3348 Wilkinson, James John Garth, 1812-1899. Emanuel Swedenborg; a biographical sketch by James John Garth Vfil kins on .. , The 2d ed, London, James Speirs, 1886. XX, 296 pe 17^* Restrictions on Use: 4 l''!!l|;7 ^l||>|Lgy||||^j|r TECHNICAL MICROFORM DATA REDUCTION RATIO: //x FILM SlZF.:__J^^2!^f^rf^ __ IMAGE PLACEMENT: lA(Ufi^ IB im DATE FIL.vlED: ^AhjMS^ INITIALS,, fC^ HLMEDBY: RESEARCH PUBLIgATlDNS, INC VVOODDRIDGe7ct" BIBLIOGRAPHIC IRREGULARITIES MAIN ENTRY; yll.K/^So/\/_ 7/9/»£.5 TOMAJ Bibliographic Irregularities in the Original Document list volumes and pages affected; include name of institution if filnung borrowed text. Page(s) missing/not available: yolumes(s) missing/not available:. Illegible and/or damaged page(s):. Page(s) or voltunes(s) misnumbered:. Bound out of sequence: y^ Page(s) or illustration(s) filmed fr( Other: FILMED IN WHOLE OR PART FROM A COPY BORROWED FROM MIDDLEB UR Y COLLEGE c Association for Information and Image IManagement 1100 Wayne Avenue, Suite 1100 Silver Spring, Maryland 20910 301/587-8202 Centimeter 1 2 3 mi iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii I IT Inches Ml 4 iliiii 5 I 6 7 8 iliiiiliiiiliiiiliii 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 mm l''n'Vi''l1''l'l1''ftl'i'fi'fl'f?l'n'll'Tl'Tl'TfTiTfriTil'1''ii 1.0 I.I 1.25 1*5 ISA 143 It, 3.2 3.6 14.0 1.4 1 2.8 lllll 2.5 2.2 2.0 1.8 1.6 MRNUFRCTURED TO RUM STRNDRRDS BY RPPLIED IMRGE. INC. BORG *4l 5 ,J,r¥fl^>^- ^^y^ Wilkinson V L I H R A R V s.d ^/ /^J^, Jo. \ V EMANUEL SWEDENBORG A EMANUEL SWEDENBORG A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH JAMES JOHN GARTH WILKINSON MORRISON AND CUBE, EDINBURGH, PRINTERS TO HER MAJESTV's STATIONERY OFFICE. " What is this 'Gainst which I strive to shield the sight in vain," Cried I, " and which toward us moving seems ? " " Marvel not if the family of heaven," He answered, "yet with dazzling radiance dim Thy sense. It is a messenger who comes, Inviting man's ascent. Such sights ere long. Not grievous, shall impart to thee delight, As thy perception is by nature wrought Up to their pitch." Cary's Dante. rHE SECOiro EDI ''ION. JAM ES SPE I RS 36 BLQOMSBURY STREET, LONDON 1886 Sw 3 3^^ Mrs. Eby Apr. 5, ,1939 IT TO DR. P. E. SVEDBOM, FELLOW OF THE UKIVERSITY OF UPSALA, LIBRARIAN TO THE ROYAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF STOCKHOLM, THIS WORK IS DEDICATED, AS A SLIGHT BUT SINCERE TOKEN OF FRIENDSHIP, GRATITUDE, • • • • •••a , •• • • •••• • ••••• ••• • • • • • • •• • •• ••• •• • • • •■•••• • '• •• ••••• • • •• ■•••• • ' • • • • • • • • ••• •• *•• • • •••• ,••• • •••■• ••• • ••• ••••• • • • • AND ESTEEM, BV THE AUTHOR. PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. The present sketch of Swedenborg's Life and Works is a new book to the public though an old one to its Author, Thirty-six years have elapsed since it was written. The first edition has worn out of print, and my Publisher surprises me by the request to look over its pages with a view to a reprint. I have made some corrections; but concluded on the whole to let the pages stand as they were first conceived. Were I writing it now it would be a different work, of graver aim ; but its imperfection leans to the popular side ; and it is in its interest with the general reader that its use may lie. I do not therefore disparage it, but bid it God-speed for whatever service it can render ; know- ing well that it consists of slender tracings of great footsteps. Since my Sketch was written, abundant stores for a Biographical work on Swedenborg have been accumu- lated by the untiring labours of the Rev. Professor R. L. Tafel, and have been published by him in his three grand volumes of Documents concerning Swedenborg. These are an exhaustive documentary Biography. I have scarcely amplified my little work from this mine, but it has assisted me to accuracy in some details. Tii Vlll S'Kt/ACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION., IX Besides this great work, the general public has been presented with an elaborate Life of Stvedenborg by William White; in which the Author criticises Swedenborg, and his life, character, and opinions, with a trenchant pen. William White is a man of very unusual calibre,* and amply accomplished for what he means to carry out ; and his powerful individuality enables him to plead its temperament very forcibly against some of Swedenborg's teachings, and to arraign them on peculiar grounds. This is fairly within the liberty of the age. A counter-statement to Mr. White's views and allegations may be found in Professor Tafel's Documents. Mr. White is not an opponent of Swedenborg, but a free lance in some alliance with him. He has with him a following of objectors who are not biographers, and whom he would probably disown. We meet them among our humane friends. They remark that Swedenborg had no inkUng of the new questions of this age, which if he were specially illuminated he ought to have had. His Conjugial Love says nothing of the rights of woman. Though cognizant of sensual vice beyond any chief Hf a bureau des mamrs^ he makes no prospectus for a social purity alliance. His doctrine of regeneration is absolutely silent on the rights of man. He lets tlic terrible wars of his time pass on without founding a peace society. He never de- nounces Negro slavery as an institution, though the Negro is more prominent in no works than in his. * As witness his masterpiece, The Story of a Great Delusion^ pp. 677, 1885: a History which Adam Smith might have written in our time. He does not plead for, or foresee, the enfranchisement of the masses. He has no special leaning towards the poor as different from the rich, or as more spiritually worthy and innocent; no outward panacea against poverty \ and no prophecy of state-socialism. These and other criticisms are natural to those who are busily confined in the leagues and caucuses of the day. They do not apply to him who had another rank and platform of incessant work assigned to him. They may remind the reader who does not object to smile, of Swift's criticism upon the Poet Homer ; of whom that Sarkast says: "His failings are not less prominent in several parts of the Mechanics. For, having read his writings with the utmost application usual among modern wits, I could never yet discover the least direction about that useful instrument, a save-all ; for want of which, if the moderns had not lent their assistance, we might yet have wandered in the dark. But I have still behind a fault far more notorious to tax this Author with ; I mean, his gross ignorance in the common laws of this realm, and in the doctrine as well as discipline of the Church of England." This is a bag of banter into which a good deal of criticism on the Bible and on Swedenborg may conveniently go. We may however draw the serious conclusion that men must be taken as they are, in what they are good for, and best for; and that ages also must be so taken. A new mind, new causes and questions, and a new conscience, are providentially given for every age. In the reform of theological doctrine, however, Swedenborg was an anachronism in his own time, and I X PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. is more in keeping with the open mind of this age than with the Eighteenth Century. He is at one with all the spiritual-mindedness of our day, and with the increasing honesty, veracity and benevolence which thrive under it. As a divinely prepared agent of theological instruction and of human reformation, he is designed to be more and more important from epoch to epoch. For while the clock of social and political time is marked by seasons and sessions, the dial-plate of religious time is marked by centuries and aeons, Swedenborg is at present especially germane in this field to the many new forms and expressions of materialistic scientism and metaphysical infidelity: germane by an exact and happy opposition of in- exhaustible reasons and forces. As the Dragon stood strategically ready for the man child in the Apocalypse, to destroy him, so the Doctrine of Swedenborg, Divinely human in every part, is punctually at hand to meet and overcome the monstrous births of godless natural genius now. And clearly, the spirit of the age, the only *' modern thought" in all countries, is moving towards him. The politics tini consciences of the nations belong more and more to his "New Church." In literature especially we find a wide attestation of the words of II recent writer, that «• ti the great minds of the world are confluent towards Swedenborg." Thomas Carlyle himself, the most outspoken of the moderns, in his rough "veracities" enacted throughout a self- willed paraphrase of him glaring luridly downwards on mundane affairs. PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. XI It is, however, to be remarked that although Swedenborg dwelt in theological truths, the aim of each of these is the mind and soul of man ; every one of them is for ever in combat with the selfhood, with xkitproprium or selfishness of humanity. Swedenborg's declarations have no raison d'Hre except to conflict with this, in the interest of the regeneration of the individual and the race. And hence the truths he makes known are not philosophical abstractions, but are of universal application to life and practice. He has not himself applied them below the under- standing mind itself, and the life of the individual gathered up in the conscience, because that realm was given to him to address : but they cannot be received by the individual and the general intelligence without falling as divine light from that conscience upon the whole field of action and institution, public and private. Hence they do fall ultimately upon the questions of the age ; upon its passions, propositions and politics : upon its acts of peace and war : upon the rights of men and women, and upon their duties ; and this, urgently and immediately. And by this omnipresent token they are in full sympathy daily and hourly with every practical extension of justice and love. And they are never tolerant of human evil, and never cold to the good of man. This side of the subject is admirably treated in Mr. Benjamin Worcester's work recently published, The Life and Mission of Emanuel Swedenborg. Here we have indeed a considerable Biography set in a frame of contemporaneous European History. I recommend it to all who wish for a fuller acquaintance XII PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. XIU with the ' most remarkable Divine manifestation through a man that has been made since the First Advent : a manifestation so great that it is the Second Advent. My little book should be an advertisement towards this life and mission ; only holding its own by reason of its handiness and its smallness. And perhaps because it deals more with the outward than with the inward; and therefore may suit the limited wants of many in this age. I have for the most part stopped with Swedenborg himself, and have not extended my view to the proximate New Church which has arisen since his writings. I would indeed be a Swedenborgian according to his definition; for "Swedenborgianism," he says, " means the true worship of the Lord." Out of this comes « the New Church." " True doctrine constitutes the Church, and a life according to if constitutes religion:' Thus in proportion to the truth of their doctrine the New Church subsists in all religious bodies, and aims by its pressure upon the lives of their members to transform them all. It can exist pre-eminently in those assemblies which receive the doctrine in its purity, and are instructed in its light ; and commit it to daily life and action. The New Jerusalem descends from God out of heaven into this Church, and is and constitutes it ; and leads it on through all events to its predicted future. I am moved to record as a characteristic of Swedenborg, the absence of what is generally called humanitarianism from his Theological Writings. Though all compact of religious love and tenderness, I cannot but note him as the greatest unsentimentalist of known time. " A man," as Emerson said, " to whom Lycurgus would bow." For in all his teaching and experience one fact is predominant, that the whole chain and doom of every man's life depends upon his own good or evil career ; the good or evil, spiritual, moral, and natural; the one life under the other. Keeping God's Commandments, and shunning evils as sins against the Lord, in everyday life, is the way to heaven, and there is no other way. Charity also, in heaven, as on earth, lies in acting sincerely, rightly, justly, and faithfully, in your daily calling. This is Swedenborg's Doctrine of Uses, and extends from eternity. The Angels told him that in heaven, " when every one does the work of his own calling sincerely, rightly, justly, and faithfully, the community subsists and persists in its good." In this way the Use- principle is sovereign over the "greatest-happiness principle : " and Bentham is a sentimentalist of the unattainable unless the desire of happiness be an accompaniment and effluent of the love of use ; unless indeed it be entirely submitted to the latter love. In reviewing my Sketch, which has led me to refer again to Swedenborg's originals, I am astonished at the wealth of deep thought and pregnant experience everywhere visible in these ; at the amount of impor- tant things plain there which are totally unknown to and unheeded by the human race. I am amazed at the universal compass of these writings, the pillars of thought and insight in which appear to be co-extensive with the spiritual and natural universes. Every want of man as a soul and a mind is supplied by them • every want of man as living and acting upon the Word PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. of God given in the Bible. So that when I look at my little book, I find I have said almost nothing; that I have sampled for the gentle reader a few grains out of an immeasurable harvest; that I am but a sign-post to a city which is still seen in the distance, and not to be entered but through this Author himself as a Guide. His mind, I mean the Lord's mind in him, is as the ocean, as the earth and as the day ; inexhaustible here, and by all the links of life and death, eternal. Reader, regard him patiently until you see him as he is. What he says of a certain Tabernacle spoken of in this book may be said of himself, that he and his work appear indeed simple to the eye, but according to the influx of light from heaven become more and more magnifiq^t—magni' fimmj^im et plus. As a final duty I owe here, I desire to record, in contravention of anything to the contrary in these imperfect early pages, that I recognize to the full that Swedenborg's prepared mind, guided by the Lord, has given us imperishable doctrines of heaven and hell founded upon real experience; that God's creation from tie top to the bottom hails and attests them ; and that they will stand for ever, even as His Word and His world stand. Ntm, I, 1885. PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. -o- I HERE present to English readers a first attempt towards a connected Biography of Swedenborg, fully sensible of my own deficiencies for such an under taking. But my studies have seemed to require it of me at a period when the exchange of thought and learning is freer than heretofore, and when each man's wares are expected in the market My first end will be satisfied if it renders an author, hithefto unknown from his great peculiarity, and difficult of access from his bulk, an object of some knowledge to the literary and intelligent classes. ^ In fulfilling my design I have endeavoured to keep always in view, that I am writing a life and not pleading a cause. Still I have wriuen the life affirmatively, because I could not help it. The method has its advantages ; for as our Carlyle says, "sympathy is the first essential towards insight.'* Nothing however will better please me, than a fair biography by another, from an opposite point of view. ^ For whatever I have said, I alone am responsible. No body of persons is chargeable with my senti- IV XVl PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. ments in the work. While writing it, I have had no audience before me but the public. I have everywherj made use of the most authentic documents and sources. ^ The reader who desires a further elucidation of Swedenborg's philosophy, necessarily brief in a popular life, will find more on the subject in the Introduction tp taj translation of the Aniinai Kingdom^ and in my Introductory Remarks to Mr. Clissold's version of Economy: I would also refer him to Mr. Strutt's translation of Swedenborg's Chemical Specimens^ to Mr. Clissold's, of the Principia, and to my Popular Sketch of Swedenborg's Philosophical Works,* Hampstead, Oct. 5, 1849. * The concluding sentence of this Preface is omitted because it refers to a detail which has been abundantly disproved in the Rev. Professor Tafel's Documents. I take the opportunity of this note to mention that the only public notice I recollect of the following little Work was a generous review in the Unitarian organ, The Inquirer, then (1849) edited by Mr. CONTENTS. PART I. PAGE SWEDENBORG THE PHILOSOPHER OF NATURE . I Living interest in Swedenborg now more general — Reasons for Studying him — Birth and Parentage — Remarkable Childhood — Spiritual Proclivities — Aca- demical Attainments — Early Travels — He writes Poetry —His Choice of a Career— The Northern Dcedalus — First Love — CharlesXI L hisPatron — MilitaryEngineer- ing — Propounds various Practical Schemes— Estimate of his Abilities and Character — His Writings become Speculative — A first Doctrine of Forms— Chemical Architecture— Becomes Assessor of Mines — Goes to Germany— Publishes there his Principia and Mining Treatises— Scope of the /'n'^o^w— PubHshes an Argument on the Infinite— WsWs the Austrian and Hungarian Mines — Corresponds with Christopher Wolflf— Reflections on the Dutch Republic— Visits France and Italy— Writes The Economy of the Animal Kingdom — Its Scope — The Animal Kingdom — Siimmary of its Plan— Resolves to find the Soul— His Labours are for the Christian ization of Science — — Inspiration and Expiration — Thought and Breath — Swedenborg and the Reviewers of his Day — His Contentment — The Worship and Love of God—K Scientific Eden— His Literary Manner — His Scientific System — The Natural Theologian. PART IL Swedenborg the Seer, Theologian, and Philosopher of Spirit .... PAGB 73 The Lord appears to him — Introduction to the Spiritual World — His Respiration peculiarly ordered — Pre- b » xvni CONTENTS. CONTENTS. XIX liminary Spiritual Expectations — The Lights of Seer- ship — The Doctrine of Universal Correspondency — In two Worlds at once — A Spiritual Fisherman — He Resigns his Assessorship — Publishes the Arcana Coelestia — The Science of Correspondences — The Spiritual World — Spiritual and Natural Order — Resurrection from Natural Death — Scope of the Arcana Ccalestia — Eric Brahe post mortem — Publishes The Last Judgment — The Historic Validity of the Last Judgment — The Consummated Church — Its Judgment in the Spiritual World — Those who were judged — The first Heavens which passed away — The Spectacle of the Judgment — The Difference in the Order of Things since — Publishes Heaven and Hell — Constitution of Heaven and Hell — Heaven is Divinely human — Hell is in Man's Choice — He visits the Plane- tary Worlds : howand why — The Religion of the Universe — Publishes the Heavenly Doctrine — The Fire at Stock- holm — Kant's Account of it — General Interest created in his Supematuralism — The Incident of the Mislaid Receipt — A Message from the Dead — The Deceased deny their Death — His Memorials to the Diet — Opposed to Despotism and Papacy — Views on Swedish Finance— Tells of the Death of Peter III. of Russia — Publishes the Four Doctrines— Iht Godhead of Christ ^•The Successive Churches from Creation — Publishes the Divine Loi'e and IVisdom—Tht Doctrine of Dis- crete Degrees— The Devolution of living Forms — The various Styles of the Word — Its Inspiration— The Epistles of Paul— Use of the Apostolic Writings- Faith and Life — Swedenborg's Rules of Life — Publishes the Divine Providence — Nature of his Spiritual Diary— W nits the Apocalypse Explained— Dr. Beyer and his Index to Swedenborg's Writings —Publishes the Apocalypse Revealed— A. memorable Relation— Sweden borg's House and Garden in Stock- holm—Meets Bishop Hallenius— Visited by Rev. N. Collin— The Poet Atierbom's Narration- Makes the acquaintance of General Tuxen— Publishes the Con- jugial ZtfZ't^— Sex, of the soul— Conjugial Love in Heaven— Abuses and Permissions— Conjugial Love in the Golden Age— Publishes the Brief Exposition— l>x. Ekebom attacks him— Publishes the Intercourse between the Soul and the Z?^^— Friends in London— The Catholic and Protestant Churches— Creed-making in the Pit— The Universality of Spheres— His Sanity IS questioned— His Conjugial Love is interdicted in Sweden— He memorializes the King— The reason of his Mission— The True Object of Worship— Dr. Beyer's Declaration Respecting Swedenborg— The Gottenburg Consistory deliberates on his Writings- He offers to read the Egyptian Hieroglyphics— Last Words m Sweden— At General Tuxen's Party— Jung Stillmg's Relation— Publishes the True Christian A^//^^«— Visited by Ab I ndagine— Corresponds with the Landgrave of Hesse Darmstadt— Why Miracles are no longer given— Dr. Ernesti criticizes him— Swedenborg's Genius and Style— The five Classes who receive his W^orks— His last Illness— Correspondence with John Wesley— His Spiritual Sight withdrawn- Takes the Holy Supper— His Dying Affirmation— His Death— Sandels' Eulogium in the House of Nobles— Swedenborg's life-long Health— Prepared for his Special Work by the Lord. PART in. Personal Testimonies and Anecdotes By Sandels— Count H opken — Robsahm — Hartley— Ferelius«-Brockmer — Bergstrom — Shearsmith— Mrs. Hart— Argument against Spiritism— By the old Gar- dener and his Wife— Two English ship Captains- Springer s Relations with Count Ekeblad made known — Swedenborg's Disclosures of interior Character from the other Life — The Poet Klopstock — Advice to Bolander— Archbishop Troilius— Swedenborg never married— The Diary of Dreams— Bishop Swedberg's Autobiography— Swedenborg's Freedom from woridly r !r^r"~"*^ ^>e^— ^offee and Vegetarianism— Habits of Life— Swedenborg thinks in Latin— Personal Traits —Money Matters and Alms-giving— His Literary Immensity— The English Nation in both Worids— His Personal Character— Hi^ Heroism. XX CONTENTS. PART IV. PACE Spiritual Openings and Wants . . 267 Swedenborg's Answers to Children's Questions-All Truths hIrmonize-Swedenborg the Apostle of a New Religion-The Opening of the Spiritual World- Medium for proclaiming the Spirit of the Word-The Angels learn from him-AU receptive of Spiritual Communications, though not consciously--The World the first Word— Conception of the Grand Man- Views of Mahometanism-Some Lost Arts treated on the Spiritual Side-Scientific Obtuseness respecting Spiritual Science-Eden disclosed-Poetry connected with Reason and Science-Science heretofore severed from Literature-Marriage between the Reason and Imagination - Swedenborg's .Inseparable Life and Doctrine-His alleged Mysticism-The Philosophers are the Mystics-Swedenborg attested by Experience- by Science-by Art-by Philosophy-by Poetry-by Politics— by Morals— and by Religion— Are his Revela- tions final ? APPENDIX. Chemical Architecture, . . • The Firmament of the Natural Universes, Tablet to Swedenborg's Memory, . PAGE 296 t'^ PART I. Swedenborg the Philosopher of Nature. There is, in the present day, a constantly increasing enquiry among intelligent persons respecting the life and labours of Emanuel Swedenborg, whose name is whispered, with more or less respect, and with un- defined feelings, throughout Christendom ; and it is the intention of the following pages to give a short account of that author's career, to serve as a guide to those readers who are interested in the subject, and to facilitate them in pursuing it for themselves. We shall dogmatize but little in the narrative, but chiefly state facts, and accompany them with a few comments. We are not blind followers of Swedenborg, although we accept his views of Christianity, but not because he discovered them, but because they were there to be discovered, and are true. The truth, we believe, is not arrested or contained by any man, but as soon as found, the mind may pass from that level, and rise from it as a vantage ground to new truths. It is, therefore, in the service of the public, and not of Swedenborg as a person, that we write these pages ; for the time has come when every enlightened man and woman ought, for their own sakes, to know of Swedenborg and his pretensions. For consider the case. Here was an author, flourishing in the last century, whose principal works were written from 1721 to 1772, and who, enjoying swedenborg's life, REASONS FOR STUDYING IT. f|! at first a good reputation as a scientific and practical man, saw that reputation gradually expire as his own mind unfolded in his works, until at length he was only known as a visionary, and the fact of his early career was scarcely remembered by hjs few surviving contemporaries. There was every reason why his works died to that age. He had a firm faith, from the first, in the goodness of God, in the powers of the mind, in the wisdom and easiness of creation, and in the immoveable firmness of revelation ; later on, a belief too in spiritual existence in a sense intelligible to all mankind. In his case, there was a breaking of shell after shell, — a rolling away of delusion after delusion, until the truth was seen to be itself real — to be the true creation, the world above and before the world, of which mortal creatures are made. How could so substantial a personage — a man whose spirit and its relations were a body and a force — be seen at all in the last century, when the public wave ran in spring-tides towards materialism, frivolity, and all conventionalities? The savage might as easily value a telescope or a theodolite as Europe estimate a Swedenborg at such an era. Accordingly, in pro- portion as he transcended brute matter and dead facts, he vanished from its sight, and was only mentioned with ridicule as a ghost-seer — the next thing to a ghost. But how stands the matter now ? The majority, it is true, know nothing of Swedenborg ; and it is for them we write. But the vast majority of those who do know — and the number is considerable in all parts of the civilised world — regard him with respect and affectionate admiration ; many hailing him as the herald of a new church upon earth ; many as a gift of the same provident deity who has sent, as indirect messengers, the other secular leaders of the race — the great poets, the great philosophers, the guiding intellects of the sciences ; many also still looking towards his works in order to gain instruction from them, and to settle for themselves the author's place among the benefactors of his kind. We our- selves are in all these classes, allowing them to modify each other ; and perhaps, on that account, are suitable to address those who know less of the subject, for we have no position to maintain but the facts of the case. Now w^hence this change in public opinion? It has been the most silent of revolutions, a matter almost of signs and whispers. Swedenborg's admirers have simply kept his books before the public, and given them a good word when opportunity offered. The rest has been done over the heads of men, by the course of events, by the advance of the sciences, by our new liberties of thought, by whatever makes man from ignorant, enlightened, and from sensual, refined and spiritualized. In short, it is the world's progress under Providence which has brought it to Swedenborg's door. For where a new truth has been discovered, that truth has said a courteous word for Swedenborg ; where a new science has sprung up and entered upon its conquests, that science has pointed with silent-speaking finger to something friendly to, and suggestive of, itself in Swedenborg; where a new spirit has entered the world, that spirit has flown to its mate in Swedenborg ; where the age has felt its own darkness and confessed it, the students of Swedenborg have been convinced that there was in him much of the light which all hearts were seeking. And so forth. The fact then is, that an unbelieving century could see nothing in Swedenborg; that its successor, more trustful and truthful, sees more and more; and strong indications exist that in another five-and-twenty years the field occupied by this author must be visited by the leaders of opinion en masse, and whether they will or no; because it is not proselytism that will take them there, but the expan- sion and culmination of the truth, and the organic i BIRTH AND PARENTAGE. A.D. X688-I7CO.] REMARKABLE CHILDHOOD. !- i i I course of events. The following pages will have their end if they be one pioneer of this path which the learned and the rulers are to traverse. Emanuel Swedenborg was born at Stockholm in Sweden, on the 29th of January, 1688. Descended from a family of credit and respectability among the miners of Stora Kopparberg (the great copper mountain), he was the third child and second son of Dr. Jesper Swedberg, Bishop of Skara in West Goth- land, and of Sarah Behm, daughter of Albrecht Behm, Assessor of the Royal Board of Mines. His father, a man of talent and influence, and a voluminous author on many subjects both sacred and secular, held successively the appointments of Court Chaplain, Professor of Theology, and Provost at the Cathedral of Upsala, before he was made a bishop. The character of this prelate stood high in Sweden ; his voice was heard on great occasions, whether to reassure the people under the calamity of battle or pestilence, or to rebuke the vicious manners of the upper classes, or the faults of the king himself; he laboured with constant and vigorous patriotism to rouse the public spirit of the country for useful and Christian objects.* Swedenborg's parentage and home were, therefore, happy omens of his future life : he was brought up with strict but kindly care; was carefully educated by his father in all innocence and scientific learning; and enjoyed the opportunities afforded by the sphere and example of family virtues, accomplishments, and high station, with which he was surrounded. The only record we have of his childhood is in a letter which he wrote late in life to Dr. Beyer. " With regard to what passed in the earliest part of my life, about which you wish to be informed : from my fourth to iiiy tenth year, my thoughts were * For further particulars respecting this prelate, see our B'w^raphy of Jesper Swedberg in the Vcnuy Cyclopizdia. constantly engrossed by reflecting on God, on sal- vation, and on the spiritual affections of man. I often revealed things in my discourse which filled my parents with astonishment, and made them declare at times, that certainly the angels spoke through my mouth. *' From my sixth to my twelfth year, it was my greatest delight to converse with the clergy concerning faith ; to whom I often observed, that charity or love is the life of faith, and that this vivifying charity or love is no other than the love of one's neighbour ; that God vouchsafes this faith to every one ; but that it is adopted by those only who practise that charity. " I knew of no other faith or belief at that time, than that God is the creator and preserver of nature ; hat He endues man with understanding, good inclina tions, and other gifts derived from these. " I knew nothing at that time of the systematic or dogmatic kind of faith, that God the Father imputes the righteousness or merits of His Son to whomsoever, and at w^hatever times, He wills, even to the impenitent And had I heard of such a faith, it would have been then, as now, perfectly unintelligible to me." This information from Swedenborg himself shows at how early a period he was penetrated with that theological reform which is all in all in his latest writings ; and when to this it is added, that his sayings at the time were so extraordinary that his parents used to declare that " the angels spoke through his mouth," we see how deeply were the preparations laid for that spiritual and mental condition which his mature years were to present. Love as superior to faith, and spiritual intercourse as a way of information on spiritual things, were both shadowed forth in his very childhood ; were both carried through science in his adult life, furnishing the torch of so many intellectual discoveries ; and at length were completed in an unparalleled doctrinal system of theology on the one SPIRITUAL PROCLIVITIES. A.D. I709-T0.1 ACADEMICAL CAREER. 'III! hand, in a bodily * introduction to the spiritual world on the other. It may be answered that these con- fessions only prove the enthusiastic character of our author; but let us not beg the question which Swedenborg's life states. In the sequel we shall have to point out some psychological peculiarities that occurred at "his morning and evening prayers " during his tender years, but at present we only note how free his father had left his mind of Lutheran dogmas, and how much his future course was indebted to this early respect which the Bishop paid to his son's independence. Reared as he was under a strict ecclesiastic, it is surprising that up to his twelfth year he knew nothing of "the plan of salvation," whether it argues his own inability to learn it, or his father's disbelief in it, or the omission of the latter, from whatever motives, to teach it to his son. Dr. Swedberg, however, was a serious and earnest man, and under date of April 1729, he thus writes of the subject of our memoir: — " Emanuel, my son's name, signifies * God with us,' — a name which should constantly remind him of the nearness of God, and of that interior, holy and mysterious connection, in which, through faith, we stand with our good and gracious God. And blessed be the Lord's name ! God has to this hour indeed been with him ; and may God be still with him, until lie is eternally united with Him in His kingdom." Great care was bestowed by the Bishop on Sweden- borg's education, which he received principally at the University of Upsala. " A son of Bishop Swedberg," says Sandels, " could not fail to receive a good edu- cation . . . such as was suited to form his youth to virtue, industry and solid knowledge, particularly in those sciences that were to constitute his chi^f *By body we do not mean the material but the spiritual body ; foi all spkitual things are bodily, though not material. pursuit."* During his residence at Upsala, Swedenborg was assiduous in studying the learned languages, mathematics, mineralogy, and natural philosophy. In 1709, at the age of 22, he took his degree of Doctor of Philosophy, and his first publication was an edition of select Sentences of Seneca and Publius Syrus Mimus, with comments of his own, which he had written for the degree.t First the author gives parallel aphorisms and passages from other writers, and then appends remarks of his own. In the latter we have often to admire his precocious judgment in treating of subjects which commonly belong to more adult consideration. The moral tone of the com- mentary is particularly vigorous, and when he speaks of friendship, filial love, and the like, there is a genius in his words proceeding from the fountains of the heart. The -work was dedicated to his father, in a prelude full of gratitude and respectful love. At the same date he published, in a work of his father's, a Latin version X of the Twelfth Chapter of Ecclesiastes, which showed great command of the Latin language and poetical expression of a high order. Having completed his university education, in 17 10, according to the practice of the time, he commenced a course of travel, and first he came to London. In his brief diary of the voyage, he relates with much simplicity the adventures which befel him. After a severe storm, in which there was danger of foundering, the ship was mistaken for a Danish pirate by an armed English vessel, and fired into, but without damage ; * An Account of Emanuel Sioedenhorg^ as contained in a Euloi^um to his Memory^ by M. Sandels. t L. Anmri Seneca et Pub. Syri Minii forsan et aliorum sdcctcc Sententiit. Quas notis illustratas edidit EMANUEL Swedberg [Swedenborg]. Ad ficietn rarissitmi: editionis principis anni 1 709 denuo publici juris jecit et fragmenta nuper reperta adjecit Dr. J. F. I. Tafel. X Inserted in Tafel's Magazin^ Band III., 1844. I / II i 8 EARLY TRAVELS. and secondly, when he entered the port of London, some of his own countrymen came on board, and persuaded him to land at once, in ignorance of the quarantine regulations. The plague at the time was raging in his own country ; and Swedenborg records that it was with difficulty that he escaped hanging for his imprudence. He spent a twelvemonth at London and Oxford, from whence he passed to the continent, and lived for more than three years in France, Holland, and other countries. In 1 7 1 5, he published at Greifswalde an Oration* on the return of Charles XII. from Turkey, and a small volume of Latin prose fables,^ professedly after the manner of Ovid, but shadowing forth the virtues and exploits of certain modern Scandinavians; as he says, "kings and great people." In this work there is evidence of an acute faculty of observation, of considerable power of fancy and humour, and especially of a regard to the forms of mythological lore. In the latter respect it suggests the Worship and Love of God^ a work of thirty years' later date, which we shall have to notice presently. At this time Swedenborg wrote to his brother-in-law, that he was " alternating mathematics with poetry in his studies," an instance of his early flexibility, and which sheds light upon his future deeds. From Greifswalde he returned home in 17 15, through Stralsund, just as Charles XII. was about to be besieged in that city, and it was probably shortly after this that he put forth at Skara a little volume of poems J written for the most part on his travels. These poems display fancy, but a controlled imagina- * I do not know if this Oration is extant. t Camena Bona, cum hcroum et heroidum factis ludens^ sive Fabell^ Oz'idianis similes, ^c. Ab Emanuel Swedberg [Swedenborg]. Edidit Dr. J. F. I. Tafel. X Ludus HdiconiuSy sive Carmina Miscellanea, quce variis in locis cecinit ENf ANUEL SwEDBERG [Swedenborg]. Recensuit Dr. J. F. I. Tafel. A.D. 1710-15.] FABLES AND POEMS. tion. If we may convey to the English reader such a notion of Latin verses, they remind one of the Pope school, in which there is generally some theme or moral governing the flights of the muse. Under various forms, they hymn the praises of patriotism, love, friendship, and filial regard, and they love mythological clothing. It is notew^orthy that we find so methodical a philosopher as Swedenborg making courteous passes with the Muse, as though to acknowledge the truth and import of immortal song. Still his eftusioris were hardly more than a polite recognition of poetry, that sweeter and weaker sex of truth ; for to call Swedenborg himself a great poet, as Count Hopken has done, is blind and undiscriminat- ing. He did indeed weave great poetry at last, but it was by the order and machinery of a stupendous intel- ligence, and poetry so produced is not proper poetry but reason, — is not feminine but masculine truth. One of his poems has been spiritedly paraphrased in our own day by Francis Barham, who considers it by far the finest in the collection, and to give the reader some idea of the above volume, as well as to adorn our own pages, we insert his version. " Swedenborg," he premises, "was at this time twenty-two years of age. Charles XII., the glorious monarch of Sweden, after having reduced the Danes to obedience, had attacked the Russians ; and, after the disastrous battle of Pultow^a, was enclosed in Bender, the sport of Turkish intrigues. At this crisis of his fate, the King of Denmark determined to avenge his past disgraces on the Swedes. He made a descent on Skdne, and took the town of Helsingborg. The Swedes, however, remained firm, and the disasters of their king rather inflamed their loyalty and patriotism than dispirited them. An army, under Stenbock, partly consisting of undisciplined peasants, gave the Danes a bloody defeat, and forced the survivors to quit the country with precipitation. lO / MARTIAL ODE TO STENBOCK. 1 Ml I " Such was the occasion of Swedenborg's triumphal Ode to Stenbock on the defeat of the Danes." The following is Barham's paraphrase : — " Lulled be the dissonance of war — the crash Of blood-stained arms— and let us listen now To sweetest songs of jubilee. From harp And thrilling^ lyre, let melodies of joy Ring to the stars, and every sphere of space Glow with the inspiring soul of harmony. Phoebus applauds, and all the Muses swell Our glory on their far-resounding chords. Well may the youthful poet be abashed, Who sings such mighty enterprise, — his theme So great, so insignificant his strain ! — Let Europe boast of Sweden — in the North, South, East, and West, victorious.— Round the Pole The seven Triones dance exultingly, While Jove the Thunderer sanctions his decree, Never to let the hyperborean bear Sink in the all-o'erwhelming ocean stream ; For when in the wave he bathes his giant limbs, 'Tis but to rise more proudly. Even now The fertile Scandia wreaths her brow with flowers, And Victory's trophies glitter over Sweden. The God of battles smiles upon our race. And the fierce Dane sues for our mercy : — Yea, The troops insidious Cimbria sent against us Lie scattered by a warrior young in arms. Though Swedish Charles, our hero King's afar In Russian battles— his bright valour fills The heart of Stenbock— the victorious one ; — These names of Charles and Stenbock like a spell Created armaments, and hurled pale fear Among our foes.- Stenbock ! thy red right hand Hath smitten down the spoiler ; and in thee Another Charles we honour, — and rejoice To hail thee, hero of thy grateful country. Bind the triumphal laurel round thy brow, Such chaplet well becomes the invincible ; Ascend thy cliariot— we will fling the palms Before thee, while the peal of martial music Echoes thy high celebrity around. Hadst thou in olden times of fable lived, I had invoked thee as a demigod. Behold, how glitteringly in northern heaven Thy star exults : the name of Magnus fits FRANCIS BARHAMS TRANSLATION. II Both it and thee, inseparably linked : In thee, the genius of the North expands. And all the virtue of thy ancestry Illustrates thee. Chief of our gallant chiefs — Too gallant for a song as weak as mine — Oh ! could their names enshrined in monuments Appear, how would the eyes of Sweden kindle To read them. Coronets of gold for thee Were all too little recompense ; — hereafter, A crown of stars is all thine own. The foe Lies broken by thy force and heroism : Numerous as Denmark's sands they came — how fes«r Returned — their princes and their soldiery Repulsed with scorn, while shuddering horror hung Upon their flight — ^Jove's thunderstorms assailed Their bands of treachery, daylight was eclipsed In thickest clouds, and the pure cause of God And patriotism triumphed. Ay, the cause Of Sweden's royalty, which Denmark strbve — How vainly — to despoil. Our king perceived Their rising hatred ; poets were forbid To sing his praise — his praise beyond compare : For this, in sooth, the land was steeped in blood ; Even for this, the fire and sword laid waste Our native soil. Then let each warrior bind The laurel chaplet, and the bard exult O'er slaughtered rebels. For the destiny Of Charles shall yet awake the Muse's hymns. Ah, soon return, — Oh, monarch of our love ! Oh ! Sun of Sweden, waste not all thy light To illumine the crescent of the Ottomans ! Thy absence we bewail, wandering in glooms Of midnight sorrow — save that these bright stars That lead us on to victory, still console Thy people's hearts, and bid them not despair." Our author was now on the threshold of active life, and his Right Reverend father gave him full liberty to choose the direction of his future career. The Bishop has left in the Library at Skara an autobio- graphy of I coo pages, in which, as we have seen, he mentions his son Emanuel with praise and pride. This book must be a curiosity, and we hope will one day be published, to illustrate the history and manners of the time and the writer. In the course of other ; 9 !t 12 FREE CHOICE OF A CAREER. A.D. 171S-18.] THE NORTHERN DiEDALUS. 13 ml mf I matter the Bishop says : — " I have kept my sons to that profession to which God has given them inclina- tion and Hking : I have not brought up one to the clerical office, although many parents do this incon- siderately, and in a manner not justifiable, by which the Christian church and the clerical order suffer not a little, and are brought into contempt." Swedenborg started in life with powerful family connections : one of his sisters married Eric Benzelius, a man of great talents and influence, and subsequently Archbishop of Upsala ; another was united to Lars Benzelstierna, governor of a province, and whose son became a bishop. Other members of his family also enjoyed ecclesiastical and civil dignities. There can be no doubt that he had abundant patronage with the court, in addition to the great talents and moral integrity which were his personal commendation. The profession to which he brought these advantages, was such as was concerned about mining, smelting, and various mechanical and engineering works. His letters from abroad to Eric Benzelius at Upsala, brought him into connexion with the active and youthful minds in that University, detailing, as they did, whatever inventions, discoveries, and good books he met with on his travels, as well as new ideas and suggestions of his own. No sooner had he returned to Sweden in 1715, than we find him entering upon active prosecution of his calling. "Swedenborg," says Collin, "is silent on the merits of his youth, which were great The author of a dissertation on the Royal Society of Sciences at Upsala, published in 1789, mentions him as one of its first and best members, thus':—* His letters to the Society while abroad, wittiess that few can travel so usefully. An indefatigable curiosity, directed to various important objects, is conspicuous in all. Mathematics, astronomy, and mechanics seem to have been his favourite sciences, and he had already made great progress in these. Everywhere he became ac- quainted with the most renowned mathematicians and astronomers, as Flamsteed, Delahire, Varignon, etc. This pursuit of knowledge was also united with a constant zeal to benefit his country. No sooner was he informed of some useful discovery, than he was solicitous to render it beneficial to Sweden, by sending home models. When a good book was published, he not only gave Immediate notice of it, but contrived to procure it for the library of the University.' " From 1716 to 1718 he edited a periodical work, entitled Dadalus Hyperboreus* a record of the new flights of mechanical and mathematical genius in Sweden. This work reached six numbers. In the preface to it, the editor showed how little he valued the " impossibilities " of the day : he had already begun to think of flying-machines, and to speak of them as among the desiderata of the age ; for he was imbued with the very spirit of our own railroad and electric era, and had a very limited belief in final impossibilities. Among the contributors to this work was Christopher Polhem, called the Swedish Archi- medes, whose connexion with Swedenborg was of great importance to the latter. Besides this, the Dceda/us is said to contain the lucubrations and papers of a scientific society that was founded by Eric Benzelius among the professors at Upsala. In the course of 17 16, Swedenborg was invited by Polhem to repair with him to Lund, to meet Charles XIL, ,who had just escaped from Stralsund ; when he enjoyed much intercourse with the king, who was pleased to praise the Dcedalus^ and to take Swedenborg under his royal patronage. It was his Majesty's wish that in time he should succeed Polhem, the Counsellor of Commerce. He had the choice of three offices, and Charles had the warrant for the rank and duties * The DaJalits has not been translated into English. \ ■> 14 CHARLES XII. AND THE NORTHERN DAEDALUS. > of Assessor Extraordinary of the Board of Mines made out for him. (The Board of Mines, it is to be observed, was a constitutional department of the Government, having inspection over the mines and metalHc works, so important to the prosperity of Sweden, whose foreign commerce is still greatly dependent upon its mineral wealth.) On this occasion intrigue was busy against him, but the clear-sighted Charles saw the merits of Swedenborg, and confirmed him in his place, obliging the other candidate, at the king's own table, to write out the warrant himself. The king also wrote a letter to the College of Mines, "ordering that Swedenborg should have a seat and voice in the College, whenever he could be present, and especially whenever any business of a mechanical nature was to be considered." It was also expressly stated in the same document, " that Swedenborg was appointed to co-operate with Polhem, and assist him in his affairs, and in the working of his inventions." The works of which he was thus immediately summoned to the joint superintendence, were the formation of the basin of Carlscrona, and of locks between • Lake Wener and Gottenburg, among the rapids and cataracts of Trolhiitta. Upon these undertakings he was engaged from time to time until the death of his royal master. At this period there occurred an interesting passage in his life. He sojourned in Polhem's house, at once as his coadjutor, and as his pupil in mathematics, and fell in love with his second daughter, Emerentia Polhem. " Polhem's eldest daughter," says he in one of his letters, " is promised to a page of the king's named ^landerstrom. I wonder what people say of this in relation to myself. His second daughter is, in my opinion, much the handsomest." The lady was only in her fourteenth year, and not being willing to accept Swedenborg's overtures, she did not suffer herself to be betrothed. Her father, however, had a A.D. 1715-18.] EMERENTIA POLHEM. 15 great affection for him, and gave him the lady in a written agreement, hoping that in future years his daughter would be more favourably disposed. This bond his daughter, from filial obedience, signed. Great was her depression of mind after thus binding herself to one to whom she felt no attachment ; and her brother, in compassion, abstracted the document secretly from Swedenborg, who used to read it over day after day, and soon missed it. When Swedenborg found what anguish he had caused to the object of his affections, he freely relinquished all claims to her hand, and took his departure from her father's house ; and this is the only love affair which his biographers have to record. For the life of prodigious concentra- tion that he was henceforth to lead, it seemed almost necessary that the ordinary impediments to solitary and public energy should be put aside ; and this early disappointment probably had its share in preventing him from contracting domestic ties. So at least the best authorities presume. We shall once again recur to this topic later on. With regard to the Dcedalus, it appears to have been stopped for want of funds. In a letter from Wenersborg (of which we insert the latter part also, for the light which it throws on Swedenborg's prospects at the time), Sept. 14, 17 18, our author says: "I found his Majesty very gracious to me, more so than I could expect ; which is a good omen for the future. Count Morner also showed me all the favour I could possibly desire. Every day I laid mathematical subjects before his Majesty, who allowed evervthing to please him. When the eclipse took place, I had his Majesty out to see it, and we reasoned much thereupon. He again spoke of my Dcedalus, and remarked upon my not continuing the work, to which I pleaded want of means; this he does not like to hear of, so I hope to have some assistance shortly. With respect to brother Esberg, I shall endeavour to find : ii i6 CHARLES XII. AND SWEDENBORG. A.D. 1718.] MILITARY ENGINEERING. 17 him employment on the sluice works. I wish my little brother Ericus were grown up. I think I am already in a condition to begin a sluice work for myself, and when I have my own command I shall be able to serve both of them. My pay on the sluice works at present is only three silver dollars a day ; I hope soon to have more." We have some record of the sort of intercourse which Swedenborg enjoyed with his sovereign, in a letter that he wrote to Nordberg, the biographer of Charles XII. In this document he enters in detail upon certain long conversations that his Majesty held with Polhem and himself, upon the decimal mode of numeration ; and in the course of which the king not only proposed, but actually produced, a specimen of a system founded upon ciphers up to 64, which specimen, in his own hand-writing, he gave to Swedenborg. He said to the latter one day, regard- ing mathematics, that *' he who knew nothing of this science did not deserve to be considered a rational man." "A sentiment," as Swedenborg adds, "truly worthy of a king." For the rest, in these years Swedenborg was not without family discrepancies, which caused him pain. Eric Benzelius appears throughout to have been his trusted friend and adviser, and we find him writing to his correspondent as follows : *' Among all my relations I know of no one who has wished me, and still wishes me, so well as yourself. In this I was particularly confirmed by your letter to my father respecting my journey. If I can in any way shew my gratitude, it shall not be wanting. Brother Unge likes nobody , at least he has estranged my dear father's and mother's affections from me now for four years. How- ever, it will not benefit himself." At the same time, for his own part, Swedenborg was using every effort to forward the interests of his family, and especially of his brothers, through his connexion with the highest personages in the realm. In 17 18, Swedenborg executed a work of importance dunng the siege of Frederickshall. He was commis- sioned to transport over hill and dale, by means of rolling machines, two galleys, five large boats and a sloop, from Stromstad to the Iddefjord, a distance of 1 7 miles. By this operation the king found himself in a situation to carry out his plans ; for under cover of these vessels, he transported on pontoons his heavy artillery, which it would have been impossible to have conveyed by land, under the very walls of Fredericks- hall. It was at the siege of this fort that Charles XII. was killed on the 30th of November. Sweden- borg was not present at Frederickshall. He escaped the winter campaign in Norway very narrowly, and not without employing some little management. In the same year our author published two works, I. An Introduction to Algebra, under the title of Tke Art of the Rules, This book, which we are not acquainted with at first hand, was reviewed at considerable length, and mentioned with honour, in T/ie Literary Transactions of Sweden* not only because the author was the first Swede who wrote on the higher branches of the subject, but for the excellence of the treatise, its clearness, and the examples showing the application and uses of the rules. Only a part of the work was published; the unpublished portion, according to Lagerbring, contains the first account given in Sweden of the differential and integral calculus. 2. Attempts to find the Longitude of Places by Lunar Obsen^ations. Both the above works were written in Swedish, and published at Upsala. Of this period of Swedenborg's life there are some interesting records preserved in his letters to Eric Benzelius, from which we have already quoted. Not- withstanding the king's patronage, and Swedenborg's increasing repute, the latter appears to have been far * Acta Litcraria Suecia^ vol. i. p. 126. B i8 swedenborg's dissatisfactions. A.D. 1719.] TREATISES IN SWEDISH. 19 from satisfied with his position or prospects. He com- plains that his labours are not appreciated. " I have taken a little leisure this summer," says he, "to put a few things on paper, which I think will be my last pro- ductions; for speculations and inventions like mine find no patronage or bread in Sweden, and are looked down upon by a number of political blockheads as a sort of school-boy exercise, which ought to stand quite back, while their presumptuous finesse and intrigues step forward." It may excite a smile to find the most voluminous author of the last century imagining that his labours were completed with what, in his case, were really but " school-boy exercises ; " at the same time it is not surprising that one so singly devoted to the arts and sciences should conceive a disgust for those who were jostling and manoiuyring towards the world's rewards up the stair of political intrigue, and with whom his position brought him into contact. .In 1 7 19, the Swedberg family was ennobled by Queen Ulrica Eleonora, and from this time our author bore the new name of Swedenborg,* by which his nobility was signified, and took his seat with the nobles of the equestrian order in the triennial assemblies of the States. We are not aware whether he bore any part in the deliberations of the Assembly during this period of his life. His new rank conferred no title beyond the change of name : he was not either a count, or a baron, as is commonly supposed. His pen, which was gradually becoming fertile, yielded four works in this year. i. A Proposal for a Decimal System of Money and Measures. 2. A Treatise on the Motion and Position of the Earth ■ and Planets. 3. Proofs derived from appearances in Siveden, of the Depth of the Sea, and the Greater Force of the Tides, in the Ancient World. And 4. On Docks, Sluices, and * We have used, as most convenient, the name of Swedenborg thioughout our sketch. Salt Works. These little works were all written in Swedish. In allusion to his proposal for a decimal coinage, and to certain mathematical studies, he says in another of his letters that " it is a little discouraging to him to be advised to relinquish his views, as among the novelties which the country cannot bear." And he avows that for his part he "desires all possible, novelties, ay, a novelty for every day in the year, because in every age there is abundance of persons who follow the beaten track, and remain in the old way ; while there are not more than from six to ten in a century who bring forward innovations founded on argument and reason." He adds his confidence that " he has proposed nothing that can cause the slightest inconvenience to the country." The world around him was in the midnight of the past, but he saw clearly that in the distribution of human talent, there is no just proportion kept between antiquity and genius, and he laboured and longed for the new era, for even then he lived in the dim twilight of that day which is still but dawning upon the earth — the day of the nobler installation of the arts and sciences. His work on the decimal system must have been thought something of in his own country, for we find it reprinted so late as 1 795. We may add, however, that none of his Swedish treatises are known in this country, excepting those which also have a Latin version. We have now sketched the preludium of Sweden- borg's life — that portion of his career which belongs peculiarly to his native country, and in concluding this department of our narrative, we will again borrow from the same collection of letters, to gain an insight into some of the motives which caused him to desire another sphere of operations. "What I have now printed," says he, "with a sheet on the decimal system, will be my last production, for I find thaf Pluto and Envy possess the Hyperboreans, and that I ■• 20 REMARKS ON THE m'PERBOREANS. A.D. 1719-20.I CHARACTER AND PROSPECTS. 21 a man will prosper better among them by acting the idiot, than by remaining a man of understanding." And again : " Should I be so fortunate as to get together the means which are required, and in the meantime . . . ha¥C been able to acquire some credit abroad, I have determined to go forth, to seek my fortune in my business, which lies in all such things as concern the advancement of mining. To be loose and irresolute, to see one's place abroad, and yet to remain in the darkness and frost of Sweden, where the furies, Envy and Pluto, have taken up their abode and dispense all rewards, and where all my pains are rewarded with shabbiness, would be worthy only of a fool.'' We give these solitar}- specimens of grumbling, revealed in private letters, to stand for what they are worth. The author's station might be thought by those who are less fortunate, an enviable one ;" but it is highly probable that the office of Assessor in the Mineral College, conferred upon him in 17 16, involved few direct duties, and but little salar\^; and that it was not till he succeeded to the place held by Polhem at the Board, according to the king's original intention, that he derived from it a satisfactory income. Polhem lived to the age of 90, and died in Having followed Swedenborg, the Swede, through his youth, and come to a convenient halting place, let us take a brief sunrey of the ground we have passed over, and gather up his character and propenies, so far. He germinated, as nearly all children do, in theolog)* : rose thence into poetr\- and literature, speedily alternating them with mathematics : out of these proceeded mechanical and physical studies having a reference to practice. His early manhood was devoted to active employment, and spent partly under the eye and command of the most incurably warlike of the Swedish kings. Even at this time a widely contemplative element glimmers from such of the foregoing w^orks as we have perused. His ardent pursuit of geolog)', then a comparatively new science, was already converting itself into cosmogonical speculations. We are not indeed aware that any great brilliancy was displayed in his works up to this date, but rather great industr>^, fertile plans, a belief in the penetrability of problems usually given up by the learned, a gradual and experimental facuTtv, and an absence of precocity. In regard of general truths, he showed the evidence of a slowly-apprehending, persevering, and at last, thoroughly comprehending mind. If we may use the metaphor, the masonry of his intellect was large, slow, and abiding, but by no means showy ; from the parts hitherto constructed, we could hardly prophecy whether the superstructure would be a viaduct, or a temple ; a work of material utility, or a palace for sovereignty and state. On the moral side, we infer strong but controllable passions, not interfering with the balance of his mind, or the deepness of his leisure. His filial affection is brilliant, though we have no record of the extent of his obligations to his mother, whose death took place in 1720, to his father's *• great grief and loss." His energy and fidelity in his business commended him to those above him, and he was probably more in- debted to intrinsic qualities for his position, than to his family connexions, or to clever courtiership on his own part. His religious beliefs at this time nowhere appear ; but from indications in his books and letters, it is certain that his mind was not inactive upon the greatest of subjects, and that he was a plain believer in revelation, though not without his own conjectures about its meaning and import. Such was Swedenborg in the spring and flower of his long manhood. In the early part of 172 1 our author visited Holland for the second time, and in this year, besides being a contributor to 7/^ Literary Transactions of Sweden* * 1720 and 1721. I 22 TREATISES IN LATIN. he published the following little works at Amsterdam : — I. Some Specimens of a J Fork on the Principles of Natural Philosophy, comprising New Attempts to explain the Phenomena of Chemistry and Physics by Geometry. 2. Neto Observations and Discoveries respecting Iron and Fire, and particularly respecting the Ekmental Nature of Fire ; together 7inth a Netv Construction of Stoves. 3. A New Method of finding the Longitudes of Places on Land or at Sea, by Lunar Observations. 4. A New Mechanical Plan of Con- structing Docks and Dykes. 5. A Mode of Discovering the Powers of Vessels by the Application of Mechanical Principles.* From Amsterdam Swedenborg went to Leipsic, through Aix-la-Chapelle, Liege, and Cologne, and examined the mines and smelting-works near those places; and in 1722 he published at Leipsic, Miscellaneous Observations cotinected 7inth the Physical Sciences, Parts L — IIL ; and at Hamburg, in the same year. Part IV., Principally on Minerals, Iron, and the Stalactites in Bau mannas Cavern.^ Sweden- borg made this tour to improve his practical knowledge of mining, and at the same time to publish the treatises which he had on hand. The whole expense of his journey was defrayed by Louis Rudolph, Duke of Brunswick, who presented him on his departure from Blankenburg, with a golden medallion and a weighty silver goblet ; Swedenborg, on his part, making an elegant acknowledgment of the Duke's munificence, in dedicating the Fourth Part of his Miscellaneous Observations to that Prince. In the Works we have just enumerated Swedenborg began his travels into future ages ; he manifested the * These works have recently been translated by C. E. Strutt, and published by the Swedenborg Association. We refer, with acknowledgment, to Mr. Strutt's Prefaces to this and his other translations, as containing materials that have been of help to us in writing this Memoir. t Translated by C. E. .Strutt. A.D. 1721-22.] GEOMETRY THE ORGANON OF NATURE. 23 tokens of a light distinct from contemporary genius, and with a very decided intrepidity attempted to scale the proximate heights of nature. The fortress of mineral truth was the first which he approached, and with the most guarded preparation. His method was furnished by geometry and mechanics ; the laws of the pure sciences were to be the mterpreters of the facts of chemistry and physics. "The beginning of nature," says he, " is identical with the beginning of geometry ; the origin of natural particles is due to mathematical points, just as is the origin of lines, forms, and the whole of geometry; because ever}-- thing in nature is geometrical, everything in geometry, natural." He therefore attempted to traverse chemical essence and combination by the fixed truths of mathematics, and to carry the pure sciences into those which are mixed, interpreting the latter by the former. It was the ^ posteriori method with ct priori conceptions directing it, — he began with the known, and pushed it into the unknown, — with the outermost truths of figure or outline, and travelled by their clue into the inner mineral architecture, into chemistry itself. The immediate doctrine which our author formed, and by which he worked, was, that the particles of primary solids are moulded in the interstices between the particles of fluids, and take the shape of those interstices; and that the frame- work thus modelled, by undergoing a fracture at its weakest parts, through motion caused by heat, etc., gives rise to new shapes that become the initial particles of new substances. As with Thales of Miletus, the oldest Grecian speculator, so with Swedenborg, water was the first of planetary exist- ences, which in its oceanic depths, by the world of pressure from above, broke up its own particles, forced them to resign the last encasement of which they were made, and by precipitating this into the interstices of other round water particles, modelled w «i 24 A FIRST DOCTRINE OF FORMS. A.D. 1721-22.] CHEMICAL ARCHITECTURE. 25 the infinite seeds of the dry land which was to come in those precise and ever-working matrices. Water was the womb of the infinitesimal land; common salt, the first modelling of the future earth. The fracture of the saline particle, breaking off its sharp parts, gave rise to acids ; and the body or stoma that was left, constituted a peculiar earth. Of course we cannot pursue this theory, but must be content with remarking, that Swedenborg has worked his mould, the interstice of the water-particle, (or we should rather say, the various interstices, for round particles may be placed upon each other in many ways so as to produce different forms,) with an apparently exhaustive ingenuity. With surprising power of detail he has applied the principle to the chemical facts known in his own day respecting diverse substances, as also to light and colours ; suggesting a cosmogony and celestial mechanics in the smallest things, similar to that which obtains in the system of the universe. There seems no reason why the intellect should not at length reach such a position, though how far Swedenborg has attained it, geniuses kindred to his own, if the old method of thought be per- manent, can perhaps alone decide. We ought, however, to note, that rigidly mechanical as our author's theory appears, it has at the core, in what he calls " the subtle matter," that is to say fire, ether or caloric, a latent dynamical principle which shapes and guides the mechanical one, and upon which Swedenborg largely draws ; although it must also be confessed, that in his theory of fire, he pushes mechanics into even that finality of nature, and harnesses the horses of the sun to the car of his ambitious geometry. Was he right, or was he not, m supposing that knowledge of nature is co-extensive with mechanical ideas, and that though these do not give niotion, or life, yet where they are absent. Being Itself falls through into nothingness? This thought was not absent from his latest Theology. We appre- hend that the history of science will tell us, upon whatever ascertained truth we fix, that that truth has a mechanical precision or basis, and that though it may have vital contents besides, yet these are only true and lasting in themselves so far as they also are similarly founded and embodied. The faith in this principle, as it is successively produced, appears in fact to be in the mind, the essential outline of the new sciences ; and the man who has the faith first, enters the field thereby, and is the first to reap the knowledge. For these works M. Dumas, the French chemist, does not hesitate to ascribe to Swedenborg the origin of the modern science of Crystallography. ** It is to him we are indebted," says Dumas, '* for the first idea of making cubes, tetrahedrons, pyramids, and the different crystalline forms, by the grouping of spherical particles ; and it is an idea that has since been renewed by several distinguished men, Wollaston in particular." Before dismissing The Miscellaneous Observations, we will remark upon the pleasant mixture of practice and theory which prevails in the work, and upon the extraordinary activity of the author's senses. Well does Sandels say, that it was not only mines that he went to examine, but that " of all that could fix the attention of a traveller there was nothing that escaped him." His observations are told in an easy style which wins the reader's confidence, and one wishes that one had shared with his fellow-traveller. Dr. John Hessel, the way-side conversation of so instructive and amusing a pilgrimage. After fifteen months spent abroad, Swedenborg returned to Stockholm in the midsummer of 1722, where in that year he published anonymously a work in Swedish, On the Depreciation and Rise of the Swedish Currency, What may be the nature, or merits, of this 26 ASSESSOR OF THE BOARD OF MINES. treatise, we do not know, but that it had material in it may be surmised from the fact, that it was re- published, with introductory remarks respecting the coinage in ancient and modern times, at Upsala in 1771. We shall see presently that Swedenborg did not cease to devote attention to the currency, and that of his few senatorial acts in his lat^r days, some had reference to that especial subject. It was now that he entered for the first time upon the actual duties of the Assessorship, the functions of which he had been unwilling to exercise until he had completed his knowledge of metallurgy. For the next eleven years he divided his time and occupations between the business of the Royal Board of Mines and his studies. The current of his life during this interval flows in a silent stream, but which was turned into working power, as we shall shortly learn. We may picture the punctual official at his desk, and the courageous student, observer and contemplatist in oyer hours : practice and theory in business — practice atid theory' in science. "The Consistory of the University and the Academy of Sciences of Upsala," as Sandels says, " did theipselyes the honour of being the first to acknowledge the merit of their illustrious countryman, and to show him marks of their esteem. In 1724 the Consistory had invited him to accept the professorship of pure mathematics, vacant by the death of Nils Celsius ; because, as they expressed themselves, his acceptance of the office would be for the advantage of the students and to the ornament of the University. But he dechned the honour. The Academy of Sciences admitted ^m. io|o tlie number of its members in 1729." Apropos of pure mathematics, he makes some amusmg remarks in a letter to his brother-in-law. "I wonder at Messieurs the mathematicians," says he, "havmg lost all heart and spirit to realize that A.D. 1722-33.1 HE GOES TO GERMANY. 27 fine design of yours for an astronomical observatory. It is the fatality of mathematicians to remain chiefly in theory. I have often thought it would be a capital thin^ if to each ten mathematicians one good practical man'' were added, to lead the rest to business : he would be of more use and mark than all the ten. One can understand why a professorship of pure mathe- matics was not the chosen vocation of Swedenborg. Durin^T this time his books were reviewed with commendation in The Transadmis of tJu Learned* published at Leipsic, the great literary and scientific or^an of the time ; his contributions to art and science berng thankfully acknowledged, although his theories broucrht the reviewers to a non-plus, and made them exclaim, with a postponement of which we also may avail ourselves—/^/ others decide. We are now about to enter upon another era ot Swedenborg's life, when his tentative youth and manhood were past, and he came into possession of a region all his own, and presided there with an almost despotic strength of affirmation ; at which we must not wonder, for whether owing to the /ault or discernment of his contemporaries, he inhabited his intellectual estate unquestioned, unlimited, uncon- tradicted, and alone. No longer, an issuer of pamphlets, or an ordinary petitioner of the arts and sciences, he had for years lain fallow of small attempts, and had accumulated the resources of his untiring industry and observation in a work with which his great career may be said to have commenced. W e allude to his Principia. ' , , r In the middle of May, i733. he went abroad for the third time, accompanied by Count Gyllenborg and other friends; and after spending five months m Germany, (storing himself with every object that his large curiosity could bring before him, whether arts, manufactures, museums, books, scenery, men, * Acta Eruditonim. \ 28 ANTiEUS TOUCHING THE EARTH. 1 I manners and customs, ecclesiastical institutions, or governments,) * he commenced the printing of his Frincipia^ at Leipsic, in the month of October. This was the first foiio volume of three, collectively bearing the title of Fhihsophical and Mineral Works, which were completed and published at Dresden and Leipsic in the middle of 1734. His former patron, the Duke of Brunswick, at whose court he was again a visitor, defrayed the cost of this expensive publica- tion, which was dedicated to the Duke, and enriched with numerous copperplates, and with an engraved likeness of the author. It is a strange general title which he chose— Fhilosophical and Mineral Works, but there is a meaning in this uncommon blending. Philosophy is nothing, just in proportion as it is not married with all thmgs : and in the aseending scale of its alliances, it first solicits the hand of the mineral universe, before arrivmg at the higher degrees. Such at all events was Swedenborg's method, which the title of his book justly conveyed : and he afterwards rose to the union ot the philosophical and organic, and finally to the marriage of the philosophical and the human. It is there alone that philosophy realizes its first love, and subjugatmg the earthly bond, but never disowning n, freshens itself age after age in contact with that better nature which contains the eternal. U'e must, however, sunder the philosophical and the mmeral and look separatelv at each, for the author kept them perfectly free and distinct, though not disunited. And first for the treatises on mining. 1 hese were Swedenborg's offering to his business and position; the earnest of his desire to leave the i i*. ^"'^cpninum edidu Dr. T. F. I. Tafel t //X5 Fnmipm; mriki Iwt Primipks of Natural Thina ' A.D. 1733 34 ] PHILOSOPHY AND METALLURGY. 29 metallurgic world better than he found it. The second folio volume (pp. 396) is on iron; the third (pp. 546), on copper and brass. Facts speak well for their practical value. The chapters on the conversion of iron into steel were reprinted at Strasburg in 1737 ; and the treatise on iron was translated into French by Bouchu, and published at. Paris in 1762 in the magnificent Description des Arts et Metiers. Cramer says of the work in his Elements of the Art of Assayi?ig, that Swedenborg has "given the best accounts, not only of the methods and newest im- provements in metallic works in all places beyond seas, but also of those in England and the American colonies." Each volume has a threefold division ; the first part on smelting, the second on assaying, the third on the chemical processes and experiments about the metals. Each volume is ushered in by a characteristic preface. In that on iron, the author avows his desire to collect and publish the mining and metallurgic secrets of different countries, and indignantly denounces those who keep them from the public for purposes of private gain. He also shows his partiality for metallurgy, as being a thoroughly practical science, " all whose details are squared with works; "yet desires that it may "enter into friendly relations with chemistry, and the two join hands, and tend unitedly to one and the same goal" He further states, that it had been his intention to give "a theoretical treatise on the metals,"' but that an integral survey of chemistry and the elemental world was necessar}' to such an enquir}^ : which again shows the practical tendency to unity, to regard his subjects in their planetarj- dimension, which was with him a constant method, and governed all particular in- vestigations. In the preface on copper, we have a gorgeous description of his native mine at Fhalun, and a statement of the authors views of the causes and advantages of the delude — not, however, the ri 11 30 THE PRINCIPIA. m Noah tic, but a planetary deluge ; of how it brought the treasures of the earth to the surface, and by opening the womb of the general mother, contributed to the multiplication of causes and occasions, and to the variety of telluric substances. ** In forming our estimate of Swedenborg's calibre at this time," as we have observed elsewhere, "we cannot omit taking notice of his large Treatises on Iron and Copper, each occupying a folio volume, and busied with the practical details of mining in various parts of the world. That a mind of such potent theoretical tendency should have had strength to undergo the dry labour of these compilations — that one who breathed his native air in a profound region of causes, should come for so long an abiding into the lower places of the earth, to record facts, pro- cesses and machineries, as a self-imposed task in fulfilment of his station as Assessor of Mines — this is one remarkable feature of a case where so much is remarkable, and shows how manly was his will in whatever sphere he exerted himself. The books of such a man are properly works, not to be confounded for a moment with the many- coloured idleness of a large class who are denominated ' thinkers.' " * The Principia next claims our attention, and calls forcibly to mind the truth of a remark by Mr. Emerson, that it would require " a colony of men " to do justice to the works of Swedenborg. From the barest descriptions of iron and copper works, such as the Vulcanian workmen might themselves appreciate, we arrive by a step at a pinnacle of one of those mountains where a Newton and a Humboldt might be useful fellow-watchers of the most delicate laws on the one hand, of the panorama of a subjacent universe on the other. We pay the work no ill compliment, * A Popular Sketch of Stvcdenborg' s Philosophical IVorkSy pp. 29-3a A.D. 1734-1 THE PRINCIPIA. 3^ and have the authority of the translator of the Principia with us, when we state our belief that it still belongs to the future. The following is a short account of the book from Mr. Clissold's Preface. "The object of the Principia is to trace out a true system of the ivorld^ and in so doing the author has distributed his subject into Three Parts. The First Part treats of the origin and laws of motion, and is mostly devoted to the consideration of its first principles; which are investigated philosophically, then geometrically ; their existence being traced from a first natural point down to the formation of a solar vortex, and afterwards from the solar vortex to the successive constitution of the elements and of the three kingdoms of nature. From the first element to the last compound it is the author's object to shew that effort or conatus to motion tends to a spiral figure ; and that there is an actual motion of particles constituting a solar chaos, which is spiral and conse- quently vortical. " In the Second Part the author applies this theory of vortical motion to the phenomena of Magnetism, by which on the one hand he endeavours to test the truth of his principles, and on the other by application of the principles to explain the phenomena of Magnetism ; the motion of the magnetical effluvia being as in the former case considered to be vortical. "In the Third Part the author appUes the same principles of motion to Cosmogony, including the origination of the planetary bodies from the sun, and their vortical revolutions until they arrived at their present orbits ; likewise to the constitution and laws of the different elements, the motions of all which are alleged to be vortical ; likewise to the constitution and laws of the three kingdoms of nature, the animal, vegetable, and mineral ; so that the entire Principia aims to establish a true theory of vortices, founded upon a true system of corpuscular philosophy." II 1 ' •\ \ 32 THE PRINCIPIA IN tHE PAPAL INDEX. }\: 4 In this work then the author applies an active geometry to the mundane system, carrying the conception of a spiral or breathing movement down the stairway of natural being, and showing the pro- ductions and evolution of the motion in its various spheres; thereby accounting, on a single principle, for the properties of atoms, as of universes; and piercing the generative process of worlds by the same law that beholds their actual state. The geometrical method is evidently one way of passing from the known to the unknown, that is to say, of reasoning by analogy; although it may be doubted whether this method is sufficiently living to suggest all the analogies of the case : however, we can hardly question that it is the t^/Zima ratio of other methods. It was, indeed, fertile in Swedenborg's hands; nay, his primitive idea of a spiral effort is of vegetable- organic power; it evokes the mundane tree of the Scandinavian mythology, puts it into science, and enables it to bear atmospheres and auras for leaves and flowers and sun and multitudinous planet as fruits upon its all-spreading and all-shadowing boughs. Nevertheless it may be that an approach to the subject directly founded upon man and organi- zation as both principle and method, will lead to a deeper admission into world-making, and account more intelligibly for the distribution'of the system, bringing home its reasons to the doors of all ; which can never be done by the geometrical procedure. Spirality, however, is in the basement-idea o{ breathing, as breathing again is the foundation or ultimate of Spirit and influx and Divine Inspiration. In spite of the signal piety displayed throughout the Frincipia, the work was prohibited by the Papal authority in 1739, because, as Mr. Clissold thinks, it was held to contravene the position that God created all things out of nothing ; and also because of the difficulty of reconciling such a process of creation as A.D. 1734.] OUTLINES ON THE INFINITE. ^3 Swedenborg conceives with the literal interpretation of the First Chapter of Genesis. Respecting the first reason, Mr. Clissold keenly remarks, that "no definition is more common than that truth is that which is; hence in a corresponding sense, untruth, error or falsehood is that which is not, and con- sequently that which is the genuine nonentity — or nothing. Upon this ground, to say that God created all things out of nothing, is to attribute the origin of all things to error and hence to evil." But leaving this destructive dialectic, which marches a decisive moral truth through the cold intellectualism oi nothing, and burns it down, we resume our narrative of Swedenborg's works. At Dresden and Leipsic, in the same^ear (1734) with the volumes we have just described, he published also Outlines of a Philosophical Argument on the Infinite* a small work dedicated to his brother-in-law, then Bishop Eric Benzelius, who, he tells us in a dedication to that prelate, had been the first, by his advice and wishes, to direct the author's attention to that and similar subjects. Swedenborg had previously held some private polemics of an interesting nature with the friendly Bishop, in which the former had certainly the best of the argument, and he now brought the fruit of more mature study to the notice of his old correspondent. The work may be regarded as in a measure a supplement to the Frincipia^ following a similar method with that Treatise ; t for the Author here also proceeds from the common con- ceptions of the finite and infinite, and of the soul and the body, to construct a system of relations which he afterwards applied to the facts of Revelation, and thus - * Outlines of a Philosophical Argument on the Infinite ^ and the Final Cause of Creation ; and on the Intercourse between the Soul and the Body. t The reader who desires a urther account of the Outlines will find a summary of the work in our Popular Sketchy pp. 19-24. C •ti 34 TRIALS OF METHODS. A.D. 1734-36.] SWEDENBORG AND WOLFF. 35 I again imbeds the abstract world of truth in the real. What we said of the method of the Principia applies equally to the Outlines. It is doubtful whether geometrical conceptions furnish the best beginning for a system of the outward universe ; it is equally, or rather, much more doubtful, whether metaphysical conceptions are the best commencement for an explanation of either psychology or Scripture. But Swedenborg was before his age in daring to bring any department of the mind in contact with these real subjects ; and w^ith respect to the present field, it is one which he cultivated thenceforth, again and again, by method after method. So that we need not censure his process until we have sufficiently admired his progress. Sandels affirms that during the printing of the above works at Dresden and Leipsic, Swedenborg "visited the mines of Austria and Hungary, a journey which lasted a year." Of this journey, however, we are doubtful, for the author himself makes no mention of it, but states, on the contrary, that he went from Leipsic to Cassel, inspecting the mines in that Dutchy, and then hastened homewards through Gotha, Bruns- wick and Hamburg, by Ystad to Stockholm, where he arrived in July, 1 734, at the time when the States General were in session ; an important period, when a new code of laws was adopted in Sweden, and when probably our author took his seat in the House to which he belonged. He, therefore (p. 28), could not have spent a year as Sandels relates, and indeed there is nothing to show that he had visited Austria or Hungary. On his outward journey, however, he had been at Prague, and spent a considerable time in examining the Bohemian mines. The publication of the preceding w^orks gave him a European reputation, and his correspondence was eagerly sought by Christian Wolff, and others of the learned. In 1734, Dec. 17, the Imperial Academy of Sciences of Petersburg appointed him a correspond- ing Member. At this time he was a diligent student of Wolff's philosophy, in which he discerned con- siderable similarity to his own, though the reader observes in Swedenborg an original power of which there is not a glimmer in Wolff. The difference between them lay not so much in their first concep- tions, or even in the order and method of these, as in the facility with which Swedenborg applied his mind to, and modified it by, nature, for his genius was docile ; while on the other hand, Wolff remained always a spinner of ingenuities and conceptions : yet even in subtlety of thought Swedenborg is immeasur- ably the superior : witness his theory of what he terms the " actives " in nature, his explanation of elasticity, etc. ; things to which Wolff could make no approach. The one was a facile metaphysician after the school of Leibnitz ; the other was a philosophical scientific explorer, ready to make temporary use of any meta- physic that opened a gate into facts, but always deriving from those facts a different statement of hid grounds. The works of the one are all " thinking ; " in those of the other we come constantly to solid floors, and are forced to exclaim, " That is nature herself, and no man made it." From 1734 to i 736 our author remained in Sweden. On the 26th of July, 1735, he lost the good Bishop, his father, from whom, according to Robsahm, he inherited a considerable sum; and, on the loth of July, 1736, he again "went abroad for a sojourn of three or four years, to write and publish a certain work," as he says in his journal * of the tour. On this occasion, he relinquished half of his salary (1200 silver dollars was the whole) to his substitutes, but re-entered upon the full income when • Itinerarium^ ex operibus Em AN. Swedenborgh posthumis. Pars II. Nunc primum edidit Dr. J. F. I. Tafel. Stuttgard, m It f 36 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC. he came back. The same fresh curiosity, the same ardent love of knowledge, the same manifold sym- pathy, appear in the note-book of these travels, as in that which we have previously mentioned, and we can only regret that any portion of so entertaining a document is lost. He passed through Denmark, Hanover and Holland, and arrived at Rotterdam at the time of the fair, when he took due opportunity to admire the amusements of the people, mountebanks, shows, and whatever was to be seen. Then im- mediately afterwards come his reflections upon the prosperity of the Dutch. " Here at Rotterdam," says he, '* it has suggested itself to me to enquire, why it is that God has blessed a people so barbarous and boorish as the Dutch, with such a fertile and luxuriant soil ; that He has rescued them for so long a course of years from all misfortunes; that He has raised them up in commerce above all other nations, and made their provinces the mart and emporium of the wealth of Europe and the world. On consideration, the first and principal cause of these circumstances appears to be, that Holland is a Republic, which form of government is more pleasing to God than an absolute monarchy ; as we may see from the history of Rome. In a Republic, no veneration or worship is paid to any man, but the highest and the lowest think themselves equal to kings and emperors ; as may be seen from the characteristic bearing of every one in Holland. The only one whom they worship is God. And when G©d alone is worshipped, and men are not adored instead of Him, such worship is most accept- able to Him. Then, again, in Holland there is the greatest liberty. None are slaves, but all are as lords and masters under the government of the most high God, and the consequence is, that they do not depress their manliness either by shame or fear, but always; preserve a firm and sound mind in a saund body ; and with a free spirit and an erect countenance, A.D. 1736.) THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 37 commit themselves and their property to God, who alone ought to govern all things. It is not so m absolute monarchies, where men are educated to simulation and dissimulation; where they learn to have one thing concealed in the breast, and to bnng forth another upon the tongue; where their minds, by inveterate custom, become so false and counterfeit, that in divine worship itself their words differ from their thoughts, and they proffer their flattery and deceit to God Himsdf, which certainly must be most displeasing to Him. This seems to be the reason why the Dutch are more prosperous in their under- takings than other nations. But their worshipping Mammon as a Deity, and caring for nothing but gold, is a thing which is not compatible with long prosperity. Yet perhaps there are ten in a thousand, or ten thousand, who avert the punishment, and cause the rest to participate with them in the abundance and blessings of this life." On his journey from Antwerp to Brussels by treckschuyt (the canal boats of the Netherlands), he had among his fellow-passengers two barefoot Franciscan friars, one of whom stood in one spot for four hours, praying devoutly all the time ; upon which Sweden- borg remarks; "This custom of praying is doubtless " well pleasing to God, if it proceed from a true and faithful veneration, and from a pure mmd, and not from simulation and hypocrisy, as with the Pharisees. Prayer avails much, as we know from the instance of Moses when his people were rebellious, as well as from other examples. Paul was also desirous that others should pray for him." Our author paid great attention throughout to the state and ordinances of the Roman Catholic church, and in no carping spirit ; yet he noted with strong animadversion the sensuality of the priests, over and^ above what was needed to lead the minds of popula- tions manageable only through the senses. "The H I I 38 PARIS AND FRANCE. 1 IH monks," says he, " at Roye are fat and corpulent, and an army of such fellows might be banished without loss to the state. They fill their bellies, take all they can get, and give the poor nothing but fine words and blessings ; and yet they are willing to take from the poor all their substance for nothing. What is the good of barefoot Franciscans?" On the 4th of September he arrived at Paris, in which city he spent a year and a half Of Paris he says, *' that pleasure, or more properly speaking, sensuality appears to be there carried to its possible summit." His mind at this time was directed to the general state of France, and his auguries are sagacious. **It is found," he observes, " that the tax which they term the ' tenths ' {'di'xthNe') yidds annually 32 millions sterhng; and that Paris on account of its rents contributes nearly two-thirds of that sum. In the remote provinces the impost is not in general fairly i)aid, because the people make false returns. One-fifth of the whole possessions of the kingdom is in the hands of the ecclesiastical order. If this condition of things last long, the ruin of the empire will be speedy." We cannot but think of the most terrible page of modern history, when we read these quiet lines of Swedenborg. From France he went into Italy, and spent a year (173S-39) at Venice and Rome. On his journey from Novara to Milan he was in some danger from B, yetturtflo,* who every now and then paraded his stiletto, which Swedenborg quietly parried by per- suading the man that he had no money on his person. His note-book of this tour shows that he was occupied with investigating the modern institu- tions, as well as the remains of antiquity, in the various Italian cities. He nowhere informs us what the work was that he had gone abroad to write and publish. In 1736', * The vettiintio is a functionary- in Italian travelling, who undertakes at once to convey and provide for the traveller. A.D. i736-39'l PONDERINGS. 39 while at Paris, we find him meditating a treatise to prove that "the soul of wisdom lies in the acknow- ledgment and knowledge of the Deity;" and on the next day a second treatise, settmg forth that "it is now time to proceed from facts to the exploration of nature." On another occasion he tells us that he is working at the outlines of a book, ''De auris in genere;'* on the atmospheres in general; which shows that he was still pondering on the subjects treated in the Frindpta ; znd. further, on Oct. 4, 1736, after recording a visit to the Tuilleries gardens, he adds, "My walk was exceedingly pleasant to-day; I was meditating on the forms of the particles in the atmospheres. Again on the 9th of August, 1738, at Venice, he says that he "has completed his work: and here his own mention of his labours ceases in this joum^. . , . u- It appears to be certain, that m this year on his way from Italy, he was at Leipsic, where he put forth a kind of sonnet in honour of the centenary of printmg. But wherever he next travelled, (for his journal ter- minates abruptly at Genoa on the 17th of March, 17-10,) it appears that his Economy of the Animal Kingdom was the work that he wrote during this tour. It will be recollected that in the middle of 1736 he had gone abroad for three or four years of literary labour ; now the First Part of the Economy appeared in 1740 A number of small MS. treatises lately published,t were the outlines of this work, and were probably written early in these travels. The end of his studies, as we shall soon discover, was a knowledge of the soul ; but for long he was doubtful how to • This Itinerary was written in Swedish, but has been elegantly translated into Latin by Dr. Achatius .^^,^1 ^^ ^^/'.^ffitiSJ to by Dr. J. F. I. Tafel. The original MS. is difficult to decipher. t Posthumous Tracts^ i 40 SCIENTIFIC RECOGNITION AT STOCKHOLM. approach it. At first he began from the philosophical side, after a rather wordy trial of which, he came gradually round to the anatomical, and at length rose upwards from the bodily structure by a purely inductive process. It is most probable that he deposited the Mb. of the Economy at Amsterdam, on his way from Leipsic to Sweden in 1740; that he lived in his own country from 1740 or 174 1 till 1744, and in the latter year came agam to Holland, and from thence went to I'.ngland, where we meet him in 1745. To these conjectures we are helped by his publications. We have now then to record that in 1 740-1 he published m 4to at Amsterdam his Economy of the Animal Kingdom,f~2i large work in which our courageous mmer sunk a shaft into the deep veins of the organic sciences. Probably h was on his return to his own country that he became a Fellow, by invitation, of the Royal Academy Of Sciences of Stockholm, then first incorporated by a charter from the Crown, though founded as a private association by Linnaeus and a few friends in 17^0 He was a worthy member," says Sandels, "of this Royal Academy ; and though before his admission into It he had been engaged with subjects different from those which it cultivates, yet he was not willing to be a useless associate. He enriched our memoir! with an article On inlaid work in marble for tables and for ornamental purposes generally, » This memoir (in Swedish) may be seen in the Transactions of the Academy for 1763, vol. xxiv., pp. 107-113. We must now spend a few moments in tracing his advent to the animal kingdom, under which title he exclusively signified the human body. At the outset of his studies he lets us know in an early letter, that he had come to a "determination to I ^f ^^l Preface to the Posthumous Tracts, iZJn i^r^^^^n ^^ *^^ ^'"'''^^ Ktngdom, considered Ana- tomually, Physually, and Philosophically "■^'"'^'^ ^««- A.D. 1740-41 1 ADVENT TO THE HUMAN BODY. 41 penetrate from the very cradle to the maturity of nature " — from the atoms of chemistry to the atoms of astronomy — from the smallest groups to the largest — from the molecular to the universal : and this determination, which hitherto impelled him along the varied line of physics, now took wings, and combining with a higher nature, carried him into the realms of organization. He had touched upon this region many times in the course of his physical preamble, but gently and modestly, and as it were with pausing footsteps. In the Miscellaneous Obser- vations he had admired the facile circulation of the blood in the capillaries. In a manuscript of about the same date he entered at considerable length into a doctrine of the membranes, and followed to a certain extent the same track as Hartley afterwards in his famous scheme of vibrations. In the Principia he had laid down the law, that the human frame is an organism respondent to the vibrations and powers of all the mundane elements ; that there is membrane and fluid within the body, beating time and keeping tune with airs and auras in the universe; that man and nature are coordinate in the anatomical sphere ; that the body is one vast instinct acting according to the circumstances of the external world. In the Out- lines this correspondence is re-asserted in a masterly style, and moreover the human body is opened some- what as a machine whose utter wisdom harmonizes with God alone, and leads right minds to God : but in all these works the author's deductions are close to facts, comparatively timid, and limited to the service in each instance of the particular argument in hand. Yet it is easy to see from all, that he was laboriously wending his way from the first to the temple of the body, at whose altar he expected to find the soul, as the priest of the Most High God. It is evident that his studies for compassing this object were of no common intensity. He made ti! il I ' 42 ECONOMY OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM. himself intimately acquainted with the works of the best anatomists of his own and preceding ages, and transcribed from their pages the descriptions suited to his purpose, forming what was in fact a manuscript encyclopaedia for his own use. He made a note-book also of the technical terms of the sciences; and laboured to be before his age in the conveniences of a scholar, as he was assuredly before it in the wants of his mind. We do not know to what extent he was a practical anatomist ; he informs us that he had made use of the dissecting room ; and it is said that he attended the instructions of Boerhaave* at the same time as the elder Monro ; the authority for which is however only traditional. Be this as it may, it is plain that Swedenborg derived his knowledge of the body chiefly from plates and books ; though assuredly he was one who lost no opportunity of pursuing his subject in the best way. We therefore conclude that he gained what experience he could by dissection, but relied in the main on the facts supplied by the accredited authorities, as hopeless to exceed these in accuracy, also as being more impartial over the data supplied by others, and, moreover, as feeling his own vocation to lie rather in the interpretation, than in the collection, of phenomena. From 1 741 to 1744, Swedenborg appears to have devoted himself entirely to the study of the human frame; indeed, when we consider the quantity of works and manuscripts which he has left on the subject, it is difficult to suppose otherwise than that his principal attention was directed to it from the time of the publication of his Philosophical and Mineral works,— a period of 11 years to 1744. In 1744-5 he published his Animal Kingdom* in 4to, Parts I. and II. at the Hague, Part III. in London, * Boerhaave died at Leyden in 1737. t The Animal Kingdom, considered Anatomically, Physically, and Philosophically. ^ Ml A.D. 1744-45-1 ANIMAL KINGDOM. 43 1^ but his hkbits and sojournings at this period there are no data to show. How he managed to be absent from his Assessorship, where he studied, whom he conversed with, what sympathies he enjoyed, or whether he worked with only his great cause over his head, are points which we do not know. We shall, therefore, give a brief general account of his contri- butions to philosophical anatomy, including under our remarks the whole of his treatises in this department. The Economy of the Animal Kingdom treats of the blood and the organs which contain it, of the coinci- dence between the movements of the brain and lungs ; and of the human soul ; The Animal Kingdom^ of the organs of the abdomen, of those of the chest, ar\d of the skin. The descriptions of the best anatomists are admirably selected as a basis of fact for each chapter, and prefixed thereto, after which follows the author's induction or theory, and next a comment upon it illustrated by the previous facts. The method obviously is, to state and study the facts first ; thus to elicit from them a vintage of first principles ; and then to keep and refine this wine of truths within the vessels of the facts, amplifying it wherever possible to the unfilled capacity of the latter. It is difficult to conceive a more excellent method for philosophical anatomy, or one which keeps the stages of truth- making more distinct, or more profitable to each other. There is one vessel which is all facts ; there is a second which is all principles ; there is a third in which the two come together, and the principles suggest new experiments, and the facts enlarged principles. The method is a little image of the grand circulation of the sciences, from facts or con- fused general truths, through universal truths, to particular or clear general truths. There is not one of such truths but becomes a fact before the method has done with it. i ;i I 44 DIVINE AND HUMAN ANCESTRY OF TRUTH. In the works we are considering, as indeed in all that Sweden borg wTote, there is an unconcealed belief from the first in God and His providence, and such a belief as results, not from meditation only, or from sceptical second thought, but from the religious atmosphere of Christendom. On this head our author was a child to the end of his days, and never questioned the earliest instructions which he had received from his father and mother, whom he honoured to the extent of believing, that thought can never begin ab origine, as though it had no human parentage. He knew that every truth and mental possession has its genealogy, which it can no more deny or question with propriety, than we ourselves can dispense with our natural ancestry ; by proceeding from whom we start from the vantage ground of previous manhood, and may be originators in our line, instead of fruitlessly repeating the past of creation for each fresh individual. Especially did he know that no Christian man can, without sheer impuissance, begin out of Christianity. Accordingly Swedenborg took full advantage of the religion of his time, and the belief in a personal God was with him the fountain ot sciences, which alone allowed a finite man to discover m nature the wisdom that an infinite man had planted there. Nothing is more plain than that only m so far as man is the image of God, and can think like God, can he give the reason of anything that God has made. Not to admit then a personal Ood IS to deny the grounds of natural knowledge, to make it what the philosophers call subjective, that is to say, true for you, but not God's truth or true in Itself. It was, however, Swedenborg's avowed aim to lead the sceptic to an acknowledgment of God through the wisdom of God in nature ; and, for this purpose, he did not begin by himself postponing and denying Ood, but by a plenary- acknowledgment, as the door A.E.. i7i4-4S.] THE REALM AND REIGN OF ORDER. 45 into the secret parts of nature where the divine wisdom is enthroned. This constituted the providence of God as the order of nature, which order was now to be unfolded. What are the great oudines of our knowledge of order? Arrangement, distribution, hierarchy, likeness, relation, fitness, law, and other terms, are expressions of what we mean by order. To look, then, for and from order in nature, is to look from and for these various demarcations and conjunc- tions ; in Swedenborg's words, it is to look from the principle of series, by which nature moves in rows, lines, or regiments, — from the principle of degrees, by which everything is in its own rank, and knows its place, — from the principle of association, whereby friendly and mutually-helpful substances and things are near each other, and work for each other, — from the principle of forms, whereby nature descends down the stairs of excellence and universality, from vortex to spire, from spire to circle, and from circle to angle, and reascends by supersinuations from the earth to the sun, and from the mineral to man, — from the principle of influx or influence, according to which not physical force alone is power, but every ray of purpose and intention is communicated from every side, and from above to below, and received and acted upon, — from the principle of correspondence and representation, whereby all fitness comes ; fitness of the body to the soul, and vice versa, as being both the same thing in different spheres ; fitness of man to nature; fitness of man to man, and of nature to nature, and of all good things to God ; and, as the corollary of this fitness, a conjunction of all the fellow works and fellow workers into one grand unity, which is reality and creation, the solid and univer^l order, the whole being consummated in the idea of organiza- tion or truth. Such was Swedenborg's analysis of our current knowledge of order, as the instrument of God's doings, and of man's discoveries and imitations i 1. 46 THE SOUL THE END OF ORGANIC KNOWLEDGE, which are the sciences and the arts. To this was added what he termed the Doctrine of Modification, which recognizes the manner in which vital and other vibrations p)ermeate the world ; in which the Word of God and the words of man — in which all expressions, whether looks, voices, acts, or things — make their way through the universe, and infect with their own life and powers the system and its parts : speech and the modifications of the air being the ready aymbol of this general converse and parliament of the beings and creatures, wherein the laws are resumed according to the interests of the whole. Swedenborg did not then attempt to enter the body either abruptly or without assistance, but only after gathering up all his mind, and marshalling his forces, from the first generalizations in which every childhood is fruitful down to the last which his maturity supplied. He advanced, in fact, under all the discipline and with all the machinery and strategy of his age and of his own genius, and with the name of the God of Battles and the Prince of Peace distinctly emblazoned on his tranquil banners. There is something really hushing and imposing in the measured tread of his legions, in the formal music which drills the air where his staff of general truths is in the field, and in the absence of passion in so firm a host advancing to such important conquests. "I intend to examine," says he, "physically and philosophically, the whole anatomy of the body ; of all its viscera, abdominal and thoracic ; of the genital members of both sexes ; and of the organs of the five senses. Likewise, "The anatomy of all parts of the cerebrum, cere- bellum, medulla oblongata, and spinal marrow. "Afterwards, the cortical substance of the two brains, and their medullary fibre; also the nervous fibre of the body, and the muscular fibre, and the causes of the forces and motion of the whole organism : A.D. 1744-45.] THE INCARNATE SOUL. 47 Diseases, moreover, those of the head particularly, or which proceed by defluxion from the brain. " I purpose afterwards to give an introduction to Rational Psychology, consisting of certain new doctrines, through the assistance of which we may be conducted from the material organism of the body, to a knowledge of the soul which is immaterial : these are, the Doctrine of Forms ; the Doctrine of Order and Degrees ; also, the Doctrine of Series and Society ; the Doctrine of Influx ; the Doctrine of Correspondence and Representation ; lastly, the Doctrine of Modification. "From these doctrines I come to the rational psycholog)^ itself, which will comprise the subjects of action, of external and internal sense, of imagination and memory, also of the affections of the animus ; of the intellect, that is to say, of thought and the will ; and of the affections of the rational mind; also of instinct. " Lastly of the soul, and of its state in the body, its intercourse, affection, and immortality; and of its state when the body dies. The work to conclude with a Concordance to Systems. " From this summary or plan, the reader may see that the end I propose to myself in the work, is a knowledge of the soul; since this knowledge will constitute the crown of my studies. This, then, my labours intend, and thither they aim. . . . In order therefore to follow up the investigation, and to solve the difficulty, I have chosen to approach by the analytic way; and I think I am the first who has taken this course professedly. " To accomplish this grand end I enter the circus, designing to consider and examine thoroughly the whole world or microcosm which the soul inhabits ; for I think it is in vain to seek her anywhere but in her own kingdom. . . . "When my task is accomplished, I am then II' HI 48 RESOLVE TO FIND THE SOUL. admitted by common consent to the soul, who sitting as a queen on her throne of state, the body, dispenses laws, and governs all things by her good pleasure, but yet by order and by truth. This will be the crown of my toils, when I shall have completed my course in this most spacious arena. But in olden time, before any racer could merit the crown, he was commanded to run seven times round the goal, which also I have determined here to do. " I am, therefore, resolved to allow myself no respite, until I have run through the whole field to the very goal, or until I have traversed the universal animal kingdom to the soul. Thus I hope, that by bending my course inwards continually, I shall open all the doors that lead to her, and at length contemplate the soul herself : by the divine permission " One of his MSS.* again places these designs in a clear light. "I have gone through this anatomy," says he, "with the single end of investigating the soul. It will be a satisfaction to me if my labours be of any use to the anatomical and medical world, but a still greater satisfaction if I afford any light towards the investigation of the soul." The whole course of the sciences, he observes, has aimed at this effect. "The learned world has striven hither without any exception ; for what else has it attempted, than the ability to speak from general principles, and to act synthetically on the lower sphere; such however is angelic perfection, such is heavenly science; such also was the first natural science, and such ambition is therefore innate in ourselves; thus we too strain towards the integrity of our first parent, who concluded from principles to all effects, and not only saw universal nature beneath him, but commanded its subject spheres." All science by this account is the way back to a divine magic and a spiritual seership. * Published by Dr. Tafel as the Seventh Part of The Animal Kingdom, ^ CHRISTIANIZATION OF SCIENCE. 49 " Hence," he adds, " our mighty interest in attaining to principles of truth." He concludes by avowing, that '* he knows he shall have the reader's ear, if the latter be only persuaded that his end is God's glory and the public good, and not his own gain or praise." His object then was, to open a new way through natural knowledge to religious faith, and to transfer to Christianity the title-deeds of the sciences. We have said enough, however, of his preparations ; it is time to speak of what he accomplished. And still, in treating of such a genius, we must guard the reader against supposing that he was bound to his own stated method, to the fettering of his powers. The extraordinary flexibility with which he handled his rules, constituted a new and inimitable regime presiding over them all, and which gave him the benefit of liberty in addition to the benefits of law. In his mind, formality and freedom went hand in hand, and strengthened each other by a perpetual procreation of new rules, interpretation of old, and the eruption of fresh liberty at every exigency or circumstance not provided for in his code. Truth rose on his path as an ever broadening constitution. But did he, or not, arrive at the soul by the aid of the general doctrines we have particularized, and which seemed to be the ladder that the soul let down to whoso would ascend to her secret chambers ? He came, instead, to the inner parts of the living body, but not to the soul. It was an achievement to dissect the body alive without injuring it, nay with its own concurrence; to disintegrate brain, lungs, heart, and vitals, and to see them as individuals, as partial men ; so to endow them with the whole frame, that they could subsist to the mind as human creatures ; and this Swedenborg has done to a con- siderable extent : but to see the soul, or the spiritual body, was not accorded to him at this stage. The doctrine of correspondence might have shown it ; but ii; in 50 COMMON SENSE FOUNDS SCIENCE. then before correspondence works there must be two experimental terms, two visible things ; the soul must be already seen, after which, correspondence will show its fitness with the body, and illustrate each by each. In a word, sight or experience is the basis of knowledge; the invisible is the unknown, and no doctrines can realize it, or honestly bring it near to our thoughts. It rests upon Swedenborg's confession, not less than upon his quitting the aforementioned track, that his principles so far did not and could not lead him to an acquaintance with the soul. But if, whilst engaged upon an impossible quest, he remained among nervous and spirituous fluids and the like entities, which are most real, only not the soul, still he shed surprising light upon the plan and life of the human body. His method was eminently good for this. The doctrines he worked with, the preliminaries he believed in, are the common sense of all plans and organizations. Whoever makes or constitutes anything, does it by spontaneous obedience to these very laws : whoever works successfully, works through the doctrine of forms, whereby form corre- sponds to function, and invites its own corresponding movement or life ; through series and order, whereby arrangement enters, and superiority in material, design, and so forth, has an intimate favour shown it, and governs the lower parts; through degrees, wherebv step over step is measured and laid ; through association, — viz., of the kindred parts with each other; through modification, whereby the play of circumstances has channels laid down in the work contemplated, through which the world-power flows, and is turned to use :— not to particularize Sweden- borg's wheels of method more precisely. Now then, these ubiquitous laws are the life, or in the life, of our minds ; and applied to the body, they put thereinto the only life which we, at second hand, can give it — the life of imagination, fancy, thought, passion; THE LIFE-SPRINGS OF SCIENCE. 5^ I! bestowing upon it a theatric scientific vitality, beyond which mere science cannot go ; for science deals with cleverly galvanized puppets after all — with animated machines ; it subsists by a life from without, and is not itself the complete man to whom brains and pulsing heart are a divine right in his inside. In broad terms, it may be stated, that Swedenborg has thus animated the human body with the outermost circle of common sense reduced to formulas, to which he has added from his own unconfined experience a very large amount of life of a description unaccounted for by his doctrines ; borrowing vitality every now and then, Prometheus-like, from a wider sphere than that of his own philosophy, — in short, from the next human body, or the social man. Immeasurably high as he stands in comparison with the anatomists, we regard his unconsciousness of the social world as a life-giver to the corporeal, as the lacuna of his philo- sophical works. For if life is to be brought to the body ah extra, why not take it from the vast reservoir of our daily experience, — from home, friends, country, and the world, and carrying it by the chalice of analogy, pour it through all convenient doctrines into that empty shell of the anatomists? If order is the unlocking of that hide-bound place, why not take the order from our own growth and ages, — from that which opens us for life after life? If series and degrees, why rest in mineral thoughts, and why not draw upon those manifest series, dispositions and ranks, that exist in our communities ? If life is to come to the body, why not go directly for it to the great motives which sway the world, and which are both individual and social? If influx or influence, why disregard the influence of man upon man in the collective and general spheres? In short, why not get enlivenment from life as we all understand and speak of it day by day ? This it is which glitters from all eyes about our path, and bathes and surrounds us ; \ 52 THE LIFE-SPRINGS OF SCIENCE. THE LIFE-SPRINGS OF SCIENCE. 53 this runs through our frames, and stirs our muscles doubly moved by our own and the general will ; this penetrates through our thickest skins, and warms our hearts with their strongest fires : in the light of this we are all anatomized into vitals larger than ourselves, cut from the texture of our extended lifetime, and our secret souls are placed under our eyes, and still more under the world's. It is indeed strange that in these doctrines of Swedenborg, there was no doctrine of life, no conduit whereby the main essence could run into the dead carcass. And yet life is what we best understand, and death is what wants most ex- plaining. But the truth is, that to have proceeded so far as this, Swedenborg — necessarily ignorant of the spiritual world and its sciences, like all in his day — must have taken his general doctrines from new fields, which, at that time, was impossible. Thus, however, it is, that a living anatomy grows up. The first life, faint yet beautiful, comes from the first perceptions of life in humanity and con- sequently in philosophy ; from the formulas derived from our infantile experience ; from the child's ideas of order, which are the boundary of philosophy.* The second and subsequent lives upon which anatomy can enter, arise from subsequent perceptions of life as exemplified in our social and hence new individual relations ; and the wisdom or last life of the science, * These philosophical formulas are, for example, the simple abstractions of end, cause, and effect; the axioms that ** sub- stances are the subjects of all predicates ;" that the "general includes the particular;" that substance and form are in- separable ; and the lika Swedenborg carried these ideas through certain provinces of nature, and enriched them with reality. This is tiie way to one order of the philosophical sciences, but this method alone is not powerfully analytic, because the above abstractions being themselves deficient in intrinsic nature, your instrument of analysis is single and indivisible; it may and does produce arrangement, but it is general itself, and only capable of arranging generals, but by no means particular and coloured things. lies in the transplanting of our religious life, or our relation to God, into the bodily fabric. The body already contains all these lives, because it contains ourself ; but not consciously until the sciences have put them into the dead body, and resuscitated it. Swedenborg has then only treated his subject anatomically, physically, and philosophically ; or first in its dead truth ; secondly in its relations with the physical universe, which sways it with motion as the herald of vitality ; thirdly, as possessing our common sense in the lowest degree : but furthermore it requires to be treated humanly, socially and spiritually. Be it admitted, however, that in his triple method, Sweden- borg had already raised to the cube the sciences of the body which the anatomists had left at the plane degree, and had thereby facilitated the next steps to be taken. His observations or facts are as superior to the ordinary foundations as his method is better than the procedures which are still in vogue. His power of remark is more physiognomical than in any previous writer with whom we are acquainted. Other collectors of facts rushed at once into dissection and violence, and broke through the speaking face of things in their impatience. He, on the other hand, proceeded cautiously and tenderly, and only cut the skin when he had exhausted its looks aud expressions, conv^rsmg first with the face, then with other parts of the surface, and at last with the inner inexpressive parts, the poor dumb creatures which were , the sole company of the anatomists. He was the most grandly superficial writer who had then arisen, — a rare qualification in its good sense, and which gives the benefit of travel to the sciences, enabling them to take liberal views of their materials ; a qualification, moreover, which is the preparative for depth, for the whole surface alone leads to the centre, and when complete is itself an apparent sphere, the most perfect of scientific forms. I 1 54 INSPIRATION AND EXPIRATION. Accordingly when Swedenborg goes upwards or inwards he is guided to the sun, or the core, by myriads of rays from the translucent skin, and ubiquitous fingers invite and beacon him into the depths. Such is nature's privilege for those who beseech her permissions, and read the wishes of her broader lineaments. In illustration of these remarks we have only space to allude to one fact and doctrine made use of by our author in the foregoing works, but that one is of the utmost value both in his system and history; we mean his doctrine of respiration. Let any reader think for a moment of what he experiences when he breathes, and attends to the act. He will find that his whole frame heaves and subsides at the time; face, chest, stomach, and limbs are all actuated by his respiration. His sense is, that not only his lungs but his entire body breathes. Here is a large surface of fact; the foundation-story of any doctrine of respiration. The most unlearned experience contains it as well as the most learned, and often much more vividly, for learning sometimes hinders the breath; the plethora of science and philosophy confines the heaving to the chest alone, and the learned puff and pant. Now mark what Swedenborg elicited from this fact, because he accepted it as a material for science. If the whole man breathes or heaves, so also do the organs which he contains, for they are necessarily drawn outwards by the rising of the surface ; therefore they all breathe. What do they breathe? Two elements are omnipresent in them, the bloodvessels and the nerves, the one giving them pabulum, the other life. They draw then into themselves blood, and life or nervous spirit. Each does this according to its own form ; each, therefore, has a free individu- ality like the whole man ; each takes its food, the blood, when it chooses ; each wills into itself the life, according to its desires. The man is made up of THOUGHT AND BREATH. 55 manlike parts ; his freedom is an aggregate of a host of atomic, organical freedoms. The heart does not cram them with its blood, but each, like the man himself, takes what it thinks right; the brain and nerves do not force upon them a heterogeneous life, but each kindles itself with appropriate life accordmg to what it already has, and what it wants to have. There is character and individuality in every mole- cule ; and the mind is properly built upon faculties analogous to its own, conferred upon material organs. It handles nature by the willing correspondence of nature in this high machine, with its own essential attributes. The body is a mind and soul of flesh. But furthermore, thought commences and corre- sponds with respiration. The reader has before attended to the presence of the heaving over the body ; now let \\m\feel his thoughts, and he will see that they too heave with the mass. When he entertains a long thought, he draws a long breath; ,when he thinks quickly, his breath vibrates with rapid alternations ; when the tempest* of anger shakes his mind, his breath is tumultuous; when his soul is deep and tranquil, so is his respiration ; when success inflates him, his lungs are as tumid as his conceits. Let him make trial of the contrary; let him endeavour to think in long stretches at the same time that he breathes in fits, and he will find that it is impossible ; that in this case the chopping lungs will needs mmce his thoughts. Now the mind dwells in the brain ; and it is the brain, therefore, which shares the varying fortunes of the breathing. It is strange that this correspondence between the states of the brain or mind and the lungs has not been admitted in science, for it holds in every case, at every moment. In truth it is so unfailing, and so near to the centre of sense, that this has made it difficult to regard it as an object ; for if you only try to think upon the breathing, m consequence of the fixation of thought you stop the 56 THOUGHT AND BREATH. THOUGHT AND BREATH. 57 |t« breath that very moment, and only recommence it when the thought can no longer hold, that is to say, when the brain has need to expire. Now Swedenborg' with amazing obser\-ation and sagacity, has made a regular study of this ratio between the respiration and the thoughts and emotions : he shows in detail that the two correspond exactly, and moreover that their correspondence is one of the long-sought links between the soul and the body, whereby every thought is represented and carried out momentaneously in the expanse of the human frame, which it penetrates by vicegerent motions or states. Thus, if the mind is tranquil, the body is similarly tranquil, and the two are at one, that is to say, united; if the mind is per- turbed, the body is likewise so in the most exact similitude; if the mind loves what is high, the body looks to It and aspires to reach it ; and while the two w(^k for each other, that is to sav, so long as health sufficient lasts, there must be connexion between them, or the all-knowing soul would not profit by its own tool, Its ver>- double in the world It is difficult to give a more plain m excellent reason of the tie between the body and the soul, than that the latter lincis the body absolutely to its mind ; while, on the other hand the living body clings to the soul, because It wants a friendly superior life to infuse and direct its lire. The power which Swedenborg possessed of watch- mg his own breath, is not, as we hinted before, uncon- nected with his biography, but explains in a measure much of which he was the subject. For to note the respiration (we invite the reader to make the attempt) implies Its gradual cessation, because of the fixed thought required. This cessation of the breath, to which our author was evidently used, involves, where It is persisted m, one of two things ; either the passing h~..K""''''-T'''"'?'''^' "^^^^ ^^^ thought cannot breathe without the lungs, or else, where this rare condition is possible, the cessation of the pulmonary movements, the thought in the brain persisting the meanwhile, but without intercourse with the body, and taking cognisance no longer of the lower world, but of the cerebral or proximately spiritual state. The latter happens only where there is a more inward thought which endures when the outward is suspended. The management of the respiration then with some persons, or its similar ordinary habit in others, is one way to annul for the time that intercourse of the mind with the body which respiration establishes, and to enfranchise the mind in its own sphere. There can be no doubt that Swedenborg was peculiarly endowed in this respect, as we shall abundantly illustrate when we come to speak of the psycholog}' of his seership. But we must not forget that we are now treating of his contributions to science, of which we have recorded the above as among the most valuable, and as incal- culable in its results both upon thought and practice. In stating, however, any one point as remarkable in such a genius, we are in danger of having it under- stood that his claims in this respect can be enumerated by any critic or biographer. On the contrar}% we should have to write a volume were we barely to devote but a few lines to each detail of his excessive fruitfulness. Suffice it to say, that there is no inquirer into the human body, either for the pur]X)ses of medical or general intelligence, above all, there is no philosophical anatomist, who has done justice to himself, unless he has humbly read and studied — not turned over and conceitedly dismissed — the Economy and Animal Kingdom of Swedenborg. These works of course are past as records of anatomical fact, but in general facts that are bigger than anatomy, they have not been excelled, and none but a mean pride of science, or an inaptitude for high reasons, would deter the inquirer from the light he may here acquire, 5$ SWEDENBORG AND THE REVIEWERS. in spite of meeting a few obsolete notions, or a few hundreds of incomplete experiments. We are indeed free to admit that Swedenborg's tools have been handled and improved since his own time. The law of series, to which he attributed so much, has been set in a new light, and made into a machine of analogical power, by Charles Fourier, and analogy has been only too prolific in the hands of the German, Oken. • The latter, we may remark, is all analogy, with no roots. The day of railroads has been preceded by railroads in thought, with all the excesses and expenses of their material types, and these mental iron ways are the analogies between different provinces of nature, whereby sciences, incom- municable hitherto as Japan or China, are now running into each other for mere lust of travel. But however rapid our mental touring, there are still towns in Swedenborg that have not been visited ; a prudence in his transit that has not been sufficiently imitated ; a motive in his journeys that will give hfe to their record when newer travellers succumb. A better method than his may perhaps now be employed, mamly because he himself has lived and thought ; and m the meantime the observ^ation of the man himself at this period is enduring and inimitable. The reception of Swedenborg's natural philosophy by the world furnishes a negative event of some interest in his biography. So long as he confined himself to the practical sphere, his treatises met with a fair share of approval, both in his own country and throughout Europe ; but the moment his own genius appeared, it consigned him, as we said at the outset, to temporar>' oblivion— a goal at which he arrived ^ter passing through some preliminar>- opprobrium. The Transactions of the Learned, published at Leipsic, was not slow to discover his uncommon qualities, and to denounce them. In February, 1722, the reviewer said of his Chemical Specimens, "The author has SWEDENBORG AND THE REVIEWERS. 59 displayed great abilities and equal industry; but how far he has followed truth in his theories, let others decide." In 1735, in reviewing his Outlines on the Infinite, the same journal charged him with materialism. And in i747» it gave a derisive notice of his Animal Kingdom, ending with the significant words : " So much for Swedenborgian dreams." These dreams however had not gone to their glorious limits then. Swedenborg kept pace with his reviewers in an opposite spirit. Thus he says at the close of The Principia : " In writing the present work, I have had no aim at the applause of the learned world, or the acquisition of a name or popularity. To me it is a matter of indifference whether I win the favourable opinion of every one or of no one, whether I gain much or no commendation ; such things are not objects of regard to one whose mind is bent on truth and true philosophy ; should I, therefore, gain the assent or approbation of others, I shall receive it only as a confirmation of my having pursued the truth., I have no wish to persuade any one to lay aside the principles of those illustrious and talented authors who have adorned the world, and in place of their principles to adopt mine. For this reason it is that I have not made mention so much as of one of them, or even hinted at his name, lest I should injure his feelings, or seem to impugn his sentiments, or to derogate from the praise which others bestow upon him. If the principles I have advanced have more of truth in them than those which are advocated by others; if they are truly philosophical and accordant, with the phenomena of nature, the assent of the public will follow in due time of its own accord ; and in this case, should I fail to gain the assent of those whose minds, being prepossessed by other principles, can no longer exercise an impartial judgment, still I shall have those with me who are able to distinguish the true f I 60 CONTENTMENT. from the untrue, if not in the present, at least in some future age. Truth is unique, and will speak for Itself. Should any one undertake to impugn my sentiments, I have no wish to oppose him; but in case he desire i% I shall be happy to explain my pnnciples and reasons more at large. What need however is there of words? Let the thing speak for Itself. If what I have said be true, why should I be eager to defend it?— surely truth can defend itself If what I have said be false, it would be a degrading and silly task to defend it. Why then should I make myself an enemy to any one, or place myself in opposition to any one ? » And again he observes in the Economy : " Of what consequence is it to me that I should persuade any one to embrace my opinions ? Let his own reason persuade him. I do not undertake this work for the sake of honour or emolument ; both of which I shun rather than seek because they disquiet the mind, and because I am content with my lot : but for the sake of the tmth, which alone is immortal, and has its portion in the most perfect order of nature ; hence in the series of the ends of the universe from the first to the last, or to the glor>' of God; which ends He promotes : thus 1 surely know Who it is that must reward me '' Of his sincerity in these declarations, the repose which pervades his books, and the hearty pursuit of his subject at all times, bear incontestable witness. The absence of his laurels never troubled him, he was not afraid of pillage or plagiarism, there was none of the fire of competition in him, he was never soured by neglect, or disheartened by want of sympathy. It is, however, remarkable how entirely the foregoing works were unknown even to those who knew him best personally. His intimate friend Count Hopken says, that ".he made surprising discoveries in anatomy, which are recorded so JeroAere m certain literary transactions," evidently in complete LEARNING AND INNOVATION. 61 ignorance of the great works that ne had published, and moreover ill-informed upon the subject of the " Transactions.*' And yet Swedenborg was not mis- taken in his estimate of his own powers, or in the belief that posterity had work and interest in store in writings that, at the time, were utterly neglected. The history of literature is eloquent upon the fate of those who were before their age, and that fate was never more decisive for any man than for Swedenborg, or more cheerfully acquiesced in by any than by him. It is interesting to know the amount of learning possessed by those who have caused revolutions in thought or instituted empires in the arts, and especially so in the case of Swedenborg, who professed to build upon facts supplied by the past. Undoubtedly his learning was not so thorough as to lead to danger of mere scholarship : nay from long experience in editing his works, we pronounce his acquaintance with the ancients loose and inexact; and with more modern writers, (we speak principally of the anatomists,)' undoubtedly wide and general, but by no means verbal and literal. Theory was his joy; and so strongly did he asseverate his main discoveries, that he often based them upon citations which will not bear their weight. His inattention, however, to metaphysical philosophy, and inability to heed or remember it, were the defences of that freedom which made him what he was. In this he is like other originators, who happily did not comprehend the details of that which they departed from ; had they understood these in the way in which sympathy understands, it is probable that they would not have escaped in time from their systematic fascination. The same allegation has been made of Bacon, who they say would never have attacked Aristotle, had he appreciated him. It is very probable, and shows that a certain ignorance is a genial night when a new birth is to come. That which originates novelties is some new want. i iti/ 62 THE WORSHIP AND LOVE OF GOD. and no merely intellectual quarrel with the past; hence, to this extent, the past cannot fairly be attended to. In the same year as the third part of the Animal Kingdom, />., in 1745, Swedenborg published in London another work in two parts, On the Worship and Love of God* We shall presently see that he was residing in London during this period, which became so important an era in his life. Of his sojourn and habits at the time we have no particulars, and hence our biographical course again enters upon a review of his work. The Worship and Love of God is a centering of all that he had previously elicited from his studies, and an attempt moreover to carry them into another field. As the title prepares the reader to expect, it is an end in his scientific march. He began from God as the fountain of the 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 amid the sheaves, con- templating the tillage of future years in the old domain ; although trembling nevertheless in the presence of an undisclosed event. But we must not anticipate. In The Worship and Love of God, Swedenborg gives an ornate scientific narrative of the creation of our solar system, dropping the mathematical form of The Principia, and telling the story of the world iii^a physical and pictorial strain. The method runs from the general to the universal, making use of nature as a vast tradition that speaks to those who understand her, of the whole past by the present. Thus as the sun is the material sustainer of the system, so this * The Worship and Love of God; Part I. On the Origin of the Earth, on the state of I'aradise in the Vegetable and Animal Kingdoms, and on the Birth, Infancy, and Love of Adam, or the tirst-born Man. Part 1 1. On the Slarriage of the First-bom ; and on the Soul, the Intellectual Mind, the state of Integrity, and the Image of God. THE SCIENTIFIC EDEN. 63 sustenance demonstrates a parental relation, and hence the sun was originally its material parent. Further, as all growth and springing take place in spring times, so the vernal seasons of all things point backwards to a primordial universal spring, the ocean of every rill of geniality, the germinal warmth of the world. This parentage with its conditions is unfolded — the con- ception and birth of the planets near the bosom of the sun, from his own body and substance; their incubation in the great egg of the universe; their exclusion therefrom, and their entry into space for themselves. The first kingdoms of nature are also described, and their difference from all others, for they were pregnant with all ; moreover the general spring resulting from the nearness of the earth to the sun, and from the rapidity of its revolutions, whereby all the seasons were blended into one as their temperate and delightful mean, night also being melted into, and mingled through, day, as winter through summer. And as the mineral was parturient with the vegetable, and the vegetable with the animal, so the innermost of the vegetable, the tree of life, bore the transcendent ovum of our race, and there the infinite met the finite, and the first Adam was born. This concludes one department of the work. It will be seen that Swedenborg's is a theory of evolutive generation, extending to universes with their contents, and so far, not dissimilar in some respects to the theories founded upon recent geological and astronomical views. There reigns throughout it, however, a constant sense of the presence of the Creator who descends through all his work, (evolutive creation being His way of causation then,) and ^t last reappears beneath his work as above it, and of himself attaches it to himself through his final creature, man. The remainder of the book is occupied with a description of the education of the first man, which ii I v: A 64 THE INFANCY OF ADAM AND EVE. J took place by spiritual ministrations ; and the second part is devoted to the creation of Eve, with her education, and marriage to Adam ; the whole being an allegory of a six days' work. It is noticeable that Adam, born an infant, is instructed in intellectual matters, and whatever conduces to wisdom, but Eve, in scientific truths, particularly those of the human frame, the brain and the living fibres ; somewhat in the reverse order of the present culture of the sexes. In both sexes, however, the spirit lessons are taught by delightful representation and scenework born of the plastic atmospheres; and the novitiate mankind is raised to its feet, and eye after eye opened to the heaven above them, by sportive similar children fluttering around, and by attractive fruitage pendent over head from the motherly groves of Paradise. Nothing can be more vernal than the earlier portion of the work ; the reader is guided deeper and deeper into a delicious embowerment, and treads the carpets of a golden age. Every clod and leaf, grove, stream, and a multitude of rejoicing inhabitants, all the dews, atmospheres, and skyey influences, the very stars of the firmament, busily minister with a latent love, and each with a native tact and understanding, to the coming heir of the world, the son of earth, the mind in a human form, who can look from the paradise of earth to the paradise of heaven, and venerate and adore the Creator, returning to God immortal thanks for himself and all things. At last in the central grove, in the most temperate region of the earth, where the woven boscage broke the heat of day, and so " induced a new spring under the general one ; " and where the gushing streamlets veined the area, and lifted by the sun in kindliest vapours, hung upon the leaves, and descended in continual dews, — in this intimate temple of the general garden, lo, the tree of life, and the arboreal womb of the nascent human race. Truly a bold Genesis; but the steps W< THE SCIENTIFIC EDEN. 65 that lead to it, though beautiful as sylvan alleys, are also of logical pavement, and the appreciating reader, for the time at any rate, is carried well pleased along in the flow and series of the strong-linked narrative. The subsequent portion of the work is inferior in interest to the beginning; less artistic and more didactic; certain abstractions which are difficult to embody, wisdoms, intelligences, and the like demi- persons, are among the actors in the drama. It reminds one, though in an elevated rafioy of tales of the genii, for there is something inhuman about all that is more or less than human, and wisdoms and intelligences come under one or the other designa- tion. Moreover the instructions of these ambiguous agencies are rather prolix, and their dogmatism is occasionally obscure. It is in tJie philosophical narrative that Swedenborg has shown truly surprising powers which we may challenge literature to surpass : so far as this extends, the work is a limpid and running inspiration ; for the rest, it is an expectant day-dream of his theology, abundant in charming details, and crowded with significance. We have now concluded a rapid survey of this part of the Swedenborg library, and we will say a few words on the author's style. We find increased life in this respect as we proceed with his works. The style of T/ie Principia is clear, felicitous, though ' somewhat repetitious, and occasionally breaks forth into a beautiful but formal eloquence. The ancient mythology lends frequent figures to the scientific process, and the author's treatment would seem to imply his belief that in the generations of the gods, there was imbedded a hint of the origin of the world. Occasionally subjects of unpromising look are in- vested with sublime proportions, as when he likens the mathematical or natural point to a "two-faced Janus, which looks on either side toward either universe, both into infinite and into finite immensity." E \\. 66 swedenborg's literary manner. IMPORT OF HIS SYSTEM. 67 r (li The manner of the Outlines on the Infinite is not dissimilar to that of The Frincipia, only less elaborate, and somewhat more round and liberal. The style of The Economy, however, displays the full courtliness of a master, — free, confident, con- fiding ; self-complacent, but always aspiring ; at home in his thoughts, though voyaging through untravelled natures; then most swift in motion onwards when most at rest in some great attainment ; not visibly subject to second thoughts, or to the devil's palsy of self-approbation; flying over great sheets of reason with easy stretches of power; contradicting his predecessors point-blank, without the possibility of offending their honoured manes : in these and other respects the style of The Economy occupies new ground of excellence. The latter portion of the work particularly, "On the Human Soul," is a sustained expression of the loftiest order, and in this respect won the commendations of Coleridge, who was no bad judge of style. And Emerson says well of this particular work, that "it is an honour to human nature." The Animal Kingdom, however, is riper, rounder, and more free than even the last- mentioned work; more intimately methodical, and at the same time better constructed. The treatises on the organs, themselves correspondently organic, are like stately songs of science dying into poetry ; it is surprising how so didactic a mind carved out the freedom and beauty of these epic chapters. It is the same with The Worship and Love of God, the ornament in which is rich and flamboyant, but upborne on the colonnades of a living forest of doctrines. We observe then, upon the whole, this peculiarity, that Swedenborg's address became more intense and ornamental from the beginning to the end of these works ; a somewhat rare phenomenon in literature, for the imagination commonly burns out in proportion as what is termed sober reason advances, whereas with this author his imagination was kindled at the torch of his reason, and never flamed forth freely until the soberness of his maturity had set it on fire from the wonderful love and wisdom that couch in all things. What is the import of the scientific system which he left ? We have seen that it arose from a catholic experience and observation, and carried the particular sciences which it traversed, beyond the limits of class- cultivation. We have seen that the philosophic miner brought forth the human frame from the colleges of medicine, and conferred the right to know it upon all who study universal knowledge. We have also seen that he incorporated the formulas of the old philosophy, making them no longer abstractions, but the life or order of these sciences. We may now then state that Swedenborg's philosophy attains its summit in the marriage of the scholasticism and common sense, with the sciences, of his age ; in the consummation of which marriage his especial genius was exerted and exhausted. In him the oldest and the newest spirit, met in one ; reverence and innova- tion were evenly mingled : nothing ancient was super- seded, though pressed into the current service of the century. He was one of the links that connect bygone ages with to-day, breathing for us among the lost truths of the past, and perpetuating them in unnoticed forms along the stream of the future. He lived however thoroughly in his own age, and was far before his contemporaries, only because others did not, or could not, use the entire powers of its sphere. We regard him therefore as an honest representative of the eighteenth century. He in his line, gives us the best estimate of the all which any man could do in Europe at that period. But who can exceed his age, although not one in a generation comes up to it ? It is not for mortals to live, excepting in, and for, the present ; the next year's growth of thought is as 68 SCIENTIFIC SYSTEMS. unattainable for us to-day, as the crops of the next summer. Still the future may and does exist in prophecies and shadows. These, among other things, are great scientific systems, the children of single powerful minds, the Platos, Aristotles, and Sweden- borgs; yet which are but outlines that will one day have contents that their authors knew not, modifica- tions that their parents could not have borne, supersessions that hurt no one, only because their sensitive partisans have given place to other judges. It is humanity alone that realizes what its happiest sons propose and think they carry ; most things require to be done for ages after their authors have done them, that so the doing may be full ; and above all, the race, ever providentialized, is the covert individual who writes the philosophies of the world. Add, that whatever system is safe always follows practice. It will be borne in mind that we here speak of his system particularly with reference to its generative power, and which system, we presume, has been exceeded and surpassed : with reference, however, to his physical principles, such as the doctrine of respiration above mentioned, these are sempiternal pieces of nature, and rank not with the results, but among the springs of systems. The world will therefore taste them afresh from age to age, long after discarding the beautiful rind which enclosed them in the pages of their first discoverer. Swedenborg's scientific system, with all its detail, may indeed be judged from its ends ; its proposed introduction to the soul, which it did not bring about, and on this head we remark- that it is entirely a subjective scheme. It matters little whether we dive into the interiors of the mind, or those of the body, by the study of consciousness, or of anatomy, by mental, or bodily introspection : in either case we are equally subjective, we go away from expression THE FOUNDING OF PUBLIC SCIENCES. 69 and conversation, and kill and paralyze that whose life we wish to learn. This of course can never lead to a knowledge of the entire soul, though just where we cease to cut up, and institute gentle conversation in the subjective sphere, it may give us knowledge of partial souls, of the subordinate animation of particular organs of the body and faculties of the mind. But the human soul is a man, the man is a society, the society is human nature, intended to become heavenly nature; and it is by conversing with the largest lives at first, that we are instructed by and bye in the class languages of the lesser, and in the dialects of the least. It is to this new end that the present sciences are tending in their truths ; it is from the same end that they are diverging in the opposite direction as scientisms. An era has consequently arrived when the prin- ciples of thought itself consist of larger atoms than heretofore, and moreover when thought more patiently grows from deeds, and philosophy from history. This is the era of the public mind and the public sciences. The unity of the world is beginning to be recognized as the basis of teaching; the universality of phenomena as the explanatory state- ment of single facts. The sweep of the ocean currents is seen by the child as part of a planetary picture. The fortunes of each trade are found to be regulated by the whole mundane society. Private medicine resolves itself into the question of public healing. And so forth. It is clear that no previous philosophy could anticipate the wants of such a condition ; that no system can apply to it but one which blooms from its own summit. When such a system arrives, it will be as an expressive and decorous skin, both hiding and re- vealing the subjective wisdom of the past, and through whose transparency the common eye will see deeper into organization than the anatomist or metaphysician now sees by groping in the vitals of his sciences. 70 PROVIDENTIAL PROGRESS. THE NATURAL THEOLOGIAN. 71 \i In thus emancipating ourselves from the plan which Svvedenborg prescribed, we can only wonder what he would have accomplished had he lived in our day and drank its spirit. How manfully would he have handled the terrible problems of the time! How would he have compacted the social and political in the narrow breast of the physical thought, and in that compression and condensation of life, have given breath and stroke to the deadest laws ! How would he have exulted in that free humanity which sees that the truths and weal of the miUions are the ground from which future genius must spring : that the next unity is not of thought with itself or nature, but of practice and thought with righteousness. In the meantime his scientific works are and will be helpful ; and we regard it as a misfortune that through what- ever cause, the ripest minds have not the same acquaintance with these books as with the other philosophies ; for Swedenborg belongs to our own age as a transition ; and it will be found that, at least in time, he is the first available schoolmaster of the nations. Well did he conceive the problem of universal education, which lies not merely in teaching all men, but first in teaching them a new kind of knowledge, catholic and delightful enough for those who cannot learn class sciences, but only truths like dawn and sunset, as self-evident and immemorial as the ways of nature from of old. Let it not, however, be supposed that Swedenborg thought he had completed the method of the sciences, or even inaugurated the new day that his genius foresaw. On the contrary, he looked for this from the hands of his successors, and his humility covered the whole ground of his mind, although it did not discourage him from the most energetic labours. Fully conscious of his own limits, he called upon the age to supply a stronger intelligence and a more winning explorer. " It now remains for us," says he, " to close with nature where she lies hidden in her invisible and purer world, and no longer barely to celebrate her mystic rites, but to invite her in person to our chamber, to lay aside the few draperies that remain, and give all her beauty to our gaze. . . . She now demands of the present century some man of genius — his mind developed and corrected by experience, prepared by scientific and other culture, and possessing in an eminent degree the faculty of investigating causes, of reasoning connectedly, and of concluding definitely on the principles of series ; — and when such an one comes, to him, I doubt not, she will betroth herself; and in favour of him will yield to the arrows of love, will own his alliance and partake his bed. Oh ! that it were my happy lot, to fling nuts to the crowd and head the torch-bearers on her marriage day ! " A word on Swedenborg thus far as a natural theologian. This was a character which he professed, and it is difficult to give too high an estimate of the manner in which he supported it. There is a peculiar sacredness pervadins: the treatment of his subjects, depending on the perception that their last wisdom is always God. He seldom utters the divine name, but points to a truth and sapience in things, which elicit the repeated inward thought, '* this is none Other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." Without having stirred a step, we suddenly find that we are in the sanctuary ; w^e kneel with the kneeling creation, with the stones, the suns, and the organs, and the invisible love hears its own murmur in our heart of hearts. The litanies and chants of this natural piety are the intrinsic order of the » creatures and the upward leap of their motions from the mineral to the immortal man. Swedenborg's natural theology is all facts and things, which, won to speak by his good genius, tell their own tale, and acknowledge, and to the limit of their capacity 72 THE SOUL SO FAR. ^ 11 I < describe, the Author of their being. And doubtless everything is a divine act, the bare story of which is its maker's most affecting praise. See Note i, Appendix. We have said that Swedenborg did not attain to the human soul, to that sensible imagination thereof that he desired; but as this is a subject of some importance to what follows, we will briefly state his culminating point in the foregoing works. He saw clearly that the soul is finite ; that it is part of a purer world ; that it is doubly immortal, once by the grace of God, and once by the contrivances and immunities of nature ; that the deeds done in the body prescribe its ultimate form; that it is different in different brains and men, and a most active essence ; that it is subtle and all-pervading, has an ethereal envelope, and is in the perfect shape of the human body. Putting all which together, we arrive at a scientific theory of the soul very much like that which apparitions would suggest. Indeed there is a close similarity between Swedenborg's doctrine and that founded upon experience by //m Seeress of Prevorst, and moreover we are prepared to show that our author was a believer in ghostly matters at a com- paratively early period. So far then his induction doubles in with supernatural experience common to all nations and ages, and which, though thin and vapoury, has yet performed we know not how im- portant a part in keeping a faith in immortality alive in spite of the sceptics and the philosophers. We now pass onwards to another man and author, to Swedenborg the seer and theologian. "Natural Theologv-," says the Rev. Augustus Chssold, "will be found to be the same as Re- vealed, when Natural Theology shall itself have been revealed." Swedenborg also says already in The Principia, "The end of the senses is that God may be seen." PART II. Swedenborg, the Seer, Theologian, and Philosopher of Spirit. Throughout his life, as we have hitherto detailed it, we have seen in Swedenborg a continual tendency from the natural to the spiritual, a steady ascension from the sciences towards natural theology, and an acceptance throughout of biblical revelation. We have now to contemplate hini after he had attained the goal of his endeavours, and when, on looking back to his previous life, he tells us that he saw its purpose, that " he had been introduced by the Lord first into the natural sciences, and prepared from 1 710 till 1744, when heaven was opened to him : the reason why he, a philosopher, had been chosen for this office, being, that spiritual knowledge, which is revealed at this day, might be reasonably learned, and naturally understood; because spiritual truths answer to natural ones, which originate, flow from, and serve as a foundation for them." Although, however, as we have observed, this opening of the spiritual was Swedenborg^s tendency from the first, yet plainly he never anticipated either the manner or the extent of it. It would seem that he expected the kingdom of God to come upon him in the shape of clear principles deduced from all human knowledge ; a scientific religion resting upon nature and revelation, interpreted by analysis and synthesis, from the ground of a pure habit and a holy life. His expectations were 74 RENUNCIATIONS. fulfilled, not simply, but marvellously. He was him- self astonished at his condition, and often expressed as much. "I never thought," said he, "I should have come mto the spiritual state in which I am, but the Lord had prepared me for it in order to reveal the spiritual sense of the Word, which He had promised in the Prophets and the Revelations." What he thenceforth claimed to have received and to be m possession of, was spiritual sight, spiritual illummation, and spiritual powers of reason. And certamly in turning from his foregone life to that which now occupies us, we seem to be treating of another person,— of one on whom the great change has passed, who has tasted the blessings of death, and disburdened his spiritual part of mundane cares, sciences and philosophies. The spring of his lofty flights in nature sleeps in the dust beneath his feet. The liberal charm of his rhetoric is put off, never to be resumed. His splendid but unfinished organon is never to be used again, but its wheel and essence are transferred for other applications. It is a clear instance of disembodiment— of emancipation from a worldly lifetime ; and we have now to contemplate ' Swedenborg, still a mortal, as he rose into the other world.* From that elevation he as little recurred to his scientif c life, though he had its spirit with him as a freed so j1 to the body in the tomb : he only possessed it in a certain high memory, which offered Its result to his new pursuits. Faithful to our intention at the beginning of this narrative, we shall chiefly recount the marvels which follow, in Swedenborg's own words, leaving to the reader full freedom respecting these unwonted announcements. • It has been reproached to Swedenborg by the first essayist of the day that he represents the universe in a *' magnetic sleep, /h'ch IS true enough, because nothing else would give the tint of both hfe and death. A.D. 1745.] THE LORD APPEARS TO HIM. 75 " I have been called,'* says he in a letter to Mr. Hartley, dated 1769, "to a holy office by the Lord Himself, who most graciously manifested Himself in person to me. His servant, in the year 1 743 ; when He opened my sight to the view of the spiritual world, and granted me the privilege of conversing with spirits and angels, which I enjoy to this day. . . . The only reason of my later journeys to foreign countries, has been the desire of being useful, by making known the secrets entrusted to me." Another account of the same event has been related by M. Robsahm, who inquired of Swedenborg where and how his revelations began. "I was in London," said Swedenborg, "and dined late at my usual quarters, where I had engaged a room, in which at pleasure to prosecute my studies in natural philosophy. I was hungry, and ate with great appetite. Towards the end of the meal I remarked that a kind of mist spread before my eyes, and I saw the floor of my room covered with hideous reptiles, such as serpents, toads and the like. I was astonished, having all my mts about me, and being perfectly conscious. The darkness attained its height and then passed away. I now saw a man sitting in a corner of the chamber. As I had thought myself entirely alone, I was greatly frightened when he said to me, *Eat not so much!' My sight again became dim, but when I recovered it I found myself alone in my room. The unexpected alarm hastened my return home. I did not suffer my landlord to perceive that anything had happened; but thought it over atten- tively, and was not able to attribute it to chance, or any physical cause. I went home, but the following night the same man appeared to me again. I was this time not at all alarmed. The man said : * I am God, the Lord, the Creator and Redeemer of the world. I have chosen thee to unfold to men the spiritual sense of the Holy Scripture. I w41l myselt 76 THE LORD APPEARS TO HI\L I dictate to thee what thou shalt write.' The same night the world of spirits, hell and heaven, were convincingly opened to me, where I found many persons of my acquaintance of all conditions. From that day forth I gave up all worldly learning, and aboured only in spiritual things, according to what the Lord commanded me to write. Thereafter the Lord daily opened the eyes of my spirit, to see in perfect wakefulness what was going on in the other world, and to converse, broad awake, with angels and Dr. Beyer gives a third narrative of the transaction. The report/ says he, "of the Lord's personally appeanng before the Assessor, who saw Him sitting in purple and in majestic splendbur near his bed! whilst He gave him commission what to do, I have heard from his own mouth, whilst dining with him at he house of Dr. Ros^n, where I saw, for the first T'/u^ venerable old man. I remember to have asked him how long this appearance continued. He replied that it lasted about a quarter of an hour. I also asked him whether the vivid splendour did not pam his eyes.? to which he said. No. . . . In respect to the extraordinary case of the Lord appearing to him, and opening, m a wonderful manner, the internal and spiritual sight of His servant, so as to enable him to see into the other world, I must observe that this °P^"^"p ^^ "°^ °*^^"^ ^^ ^"^^» b"^ by degrees." In his Dmry the same event appears to be narrated : the paragraph is as follows :— " A vision in the day time : of those who are devoted to conviviality in eating, and indulge their "397. In the middle of the day at dinner an angel Mht^ ^u-f'^u^ ^^'^ "^^ "°^ '^ ^^^ too much at n i; .If Y '''"' ^'^^ "^^' ^^^'^ P^^i'^b^ appeared L K 5 ^'"t ""^ ''^P''"' steaming from the pores of the body. It was a most visible watery vapour, and \' A.D. 1745.] EAT NOT SO MUCH. 77 fell downwards to the ground upon the carpel, where it collected, and turned into divers vermin, which were gathered together under the table, and in a moment went off with a pop or noised A fiery light appeared within them, and a sound was heard, pro- nouncing, that all the vermin that could possibly be generated by unseemly appetite, were thus cast out of my body, and burnt up, and that I was now cleansed from them. Hence we may know what luxury and the like have for their bosom contents. 1745. ^ April." Smile not, reader, at this plain repre- sentation of what lies under thy sumptuous table: perhaps thou dost not yet know, what shall be taught thee, that so/id temperance is both more difficult, and more fruitful than fiuid ; and that revelations and overloaded stomachs are contrarious. We shall recur to this topic in Part HL of our Work. It would appear from a collation of the various accounts of the event referred to, that it took place in 1745, in the middle of the month of April. Nevertheless there is ground for concluding, that although the Lord appeared to Swedenborg at that time, yet his immediate preparation, and the opening of his spiritual sight, were operations extended over several years: a circumstance rendered the more likely, because his subsequent state was plainly gradual and progressive, which warrants the opinion that it was at first brought on by degrees. We must here recur to Swedenborg's doctrine of respiration, at which the reader may be surprised, but we shall have him with us in the sequel. The truth is, that without respiration a man can neither be born, or die ; it is breathing that opens the gates of this world's life, and cessation of the breath that marks our exit through the opposite portal. Now the terms of breathing being birth and death, the whole inter- mediate career, — all the actions that oscillate between the two,— are nothing in one sense but the contents t. t 'I II' 78 HIS ORDERED BREATHING. A.D. X745.J HIS ORDERED BREATHING. 79 ' Ml or details of breathing. As we breathe, so we are. Inward thoughts have inward breaths, and purer spiritual thoughts have spiritual breaths hardly mixed with material. Death is breathlessness. Fully to breathe the external atmosphere, is equivalent cateris paribus to living in plenary enjoyment of the senses and the muscular powers. On the other hand, the condition of trance, or death life, is the persistence of the inner breath of thought, or the soul's sensation, while the breath of the body is annulled. It is only those in whom this can have place, that may still live in this world, and yet be consciously associated with the persons and events in the other. Hybernation and other phenomena come in support of these remarks. Thus we have common experience on our side, in asserting that the capacities of the inward life, whether thought, meditation, contemplation, or trance, depend upon those of the respiration ; and the reader is now prepared for what Swedenborg says of himself regarding his endowments in this respect. He tells us in his Diary (n. 3464) that there are ' many species of respirations, producing for their subjects divers introductions to the spiritual and angelic persons with whom the lungs conspire; that according as the breath continues or ceases, the man dies back for the time into the inward life, meets its inhabitants, and explores their scenes. After describ- ing various kinds of respirations, sensible and insen- sible, he goes on to say, that he was at first habituated to insensible breathing in his infancy, when he said his morning and evening prayers, and occasionally aften^-ards when exploring the concordance between the heart and lungs, and particularly when writing his thoughtful works; and this he observed for several years. On these occasions he always remarked that his respiration was tacit, and hardly sensible; a circumstance respecting which he not only thought but wrote : and thus for a number of years, beginning with childhood, he was introduced into these peculiar respirations, mainly by intense speculations, in which breathing stops, for otherwise intense intellectual speculation is impossible. He further adds that when heaven was opened to him, and he spoke with spirits, the above was so thoroughly the case, that sometimes for nearly an hour together he hardly breathed at all, only drawing in enough breath to serve as a supply for his thoughts : in which way he was introduced by the Lord into inward breathing. The same phenomena also occurred when he was going to sleep, and he thinks that his preparation went on during repose. So multiple was it, by his own account, so obedient had his breathing become and so correspondent with all spheres, that he obtained thereby the range of the higher world, and was enabled to be at home among spirits and angels. Among other passages in his Diary to the same effect, we also cite the following (n. 3317, 3320) on this interesting subject. " My respiration," says he, "has been so formed by the Lord, as to enable me to breathe inwardly for a long period of time, without the aid of the external air; my respiration being directed within, and my outward senses, as well as actions, still continuing in their vigour, which is only possible with persons who have been so formed by the Lord. ... I have also been instructed, that my breathing was so directed, without my being aware of it, in order to enable me to be with spirits, and to speak with them." And again he says, "It has been shewn me that each of the bodily senses has its peculiar respiration, yea, its peculiar place of respiration. . . . Moreover it was granted me to gather the same thing from much experience before I spoke with spirits, and to see that breathing corresponds with thought ; as for instance during my infancy, wJun I tried purposely to hold my breath ; also at morning and evening prayers ; and when I attempted to make i f' I So HIS POWERS OF BREATHING. the rhythm of the breath correspond with the heart's pulsation, in which case the understanding began almost to be obliterated. And furthermore after- wards, when I was writing and using my imagination, at which time I could observe that I held my breath, which became in a manner tacit." Some analogous power over the breath — a power to live and think without respiring, for it is the bodily respiration that draws down the mind at the same time that it draws up the air, and thus causes mankind to be compound, or spiritual and material beings — some analogous power to the above, we say, has lain at the basis of the gifts of many other seers besides Swedenborg. It is quite apparent that the Hindoo Yogi were capable of a similar state, and in our own day the phenomena of hypnotism* have taught us much in a scientific manner of these ancient con- ditions and sempiternal laws. Take away or sus- pend that which draws you to this world, and the spirit, by its levitation, tends upwards to the other. There is however a difference between Swedenborg's state, as he reports it, and the modern instances, inasmuch as the latter are artificial, and induced by external effort, whereas Swedenborg's was natural also and we may say congenital, was the combined regime of his aspirations and respirations, did not engender sleep, but was accompanied by full waking and open eyes, and was not courted in the first instance for the trances or visions that it brought. Other cases moreover are occasional, whereas Sweden- borg's appears to have been uninterrupted, or nearly so, for twenty-seven years But of this we shall have to speak further presently. We have now therefore accounted in some measure for one part of Swedenborg's preparation, and what we have said comports with experience, which shows • See Braid's Nenrypnoh^^ or the Rationale of Nervous Sleeps London, 1843. / A-t>. 1745] HIS POWERS OF BREATHING. 81 that those amphibious conditions with which we are more familiar, hinge upon certain peculiarities of bodily structure or endowment ; and we have thereby prepared the reader to admit, that if living below the air or under water, requires a peculiar habit or organism, so also does living above the air— above the natural animus (avc/nos) of the race, require answerable but peculiar endowments. The diver and the seer are inverse correspondences. Swedenborg himself corroborates this, where in enumerating the conditions requisite to qualify for the ecstatic life, he particularizes that a peculiar state is indispensable, mainly regarding the connexion of the brain with the heart, between which the lungs are the uniting medium : a state which may either be natural, or the result of artificial means applied to the existing organization. To show how intelligent Swedenborg was of these deep things, we have only to examine his anatomical works and manuscripts, which present a regular progress of ideas on the subject of respiration. " If we carefully attend to profound thoughts," says he, I* we shall find that when we draw breath, a host of ideas rush from beneath as through an opened door into the sphere of thought ; whereas 7vhen we hold the breath,'^ and slowly let it out, we deeply keep the while in the tenor of our thought, and communicate as It were with the higher faculty of the soul ; as I have observed in my own person times out of number. Retaining or holding back the breath is equivalent to having intercourse with the soul : attracting or drawing it amounts to intercourse with the body." This indeed is a fact so common that we never think about it : so near to natural life, that its axioms * We again request the reader to watch his own breath, and he will in due time spontaneously learn many interestine truths about respiration. I S2 THE WIDE WORKS OF RESPIRATION. are almost too substantial for knowledge. Not to go so deep as to the intellectual sphere, we may remark that all fineness of bodily work — all that in art which comes out of the infinite delicacy of manhood as contrasted with animality — requires a corresponding breathlessness and expiring. To listen attentively to the finest and least obtrusive sounds, as with the stethoscope to the murmurs in the breast, or with mouth and ear to distant music, needs a hush that breathing disturbs ; the common ear has to die, and be born again, to exercise these delicate attentions. To take an aim at a rapid-flying or minute object, requires in like manner a breathless time and a steady act : the very pulse must receive from the stopped lungs a pressure of calm. To adjust the exquisite machinery of watches, or other instruments, compels in the manipulator a motionless hover of his own central springs. Even to see and observe with an eye like the mind itself necessitates a radiant pause. Again, for the negative proof, we see that the first actions and attempts of children are unsuccessful, being too quick, and full moreover of confusing breaths : the life has not fixed aerial space to play the game, but the scene itself flaps and flutters with alien wishes and thoughts. In short, the whole reverence of remark and deed depends upon the above con- ditions, and we lay it down as a general truth, that every tnan requires to educate his breath for his business. Bodily strength, mental strength, even wisdom, all lean upon our respirations ; and Swedenborg's case is but a striking instance raising to a very visible size a fact which like the air is felt and wanted, but for the most part not perceived. We have dwelt upon the physical part of inspiration and aspiration, because with the subject of this memoir, body was always connected with, and fundamental to, spirit ; and therefore it is biographi- cally true to him^ to support his seership by its AD. »74S.] PRELIMINARY SPIRITUAL EXPECTATIONS. Z^ physical counterpart. Moreover it is important for all men to know how much lies in calm, and to counsel them (whether by biography, or science, it matters not,) to look to the balance of their life-breath and to let it sometimes incline as it ought towards tine immortal and expiring side. But if Swedenborg was exprt-ssly constructed and prepared for spirit-seeing, the end developed itself in a measure side by side with the means, which is also a law of things. We have seen that in his boyhood his parents used to declare that angels spoke through his mouth which again calls to mind the entranced breaths of prayer that he commemorates at this period. Much later on, but before his theological mission commenced, we find him intellectually aware that heaven might be entered by the sons of earth and, as he then thought, by the analytic method of science, which having arrived on some of the peaks of truth, would introduce us to those who are at home in that region, and enable us to revert with a kind of spiritual sight to the world from which we had ascended. He says on this head, that "knowledge unless derived from first principles is but a beggarly and palliative science, sensual in its nature! not derived from the world of causes, but animal, and without reason: that to explore causes, we must ascend to the infinite, and then and thence we may descend to effects, when we have first ascended from effects by the analytic way. Furthermore, that by this means we may become rational beings, men angels, and may be among the latter, when we shall have explored truths, and when we are in them • that this is the way to heaven, to the primeval state of man to perfection." This is doubtless a bold interpretation of induction and deduction, but no one knew better than Swedenborg in his day whither real methods would conduct us. It only concerns us however now to show, that he was conscious of a possible entrance 84 THE LIGHTS OF SEERSHIP. L. for the understanding into the atmospheres of the higher world, and that he conceived it to lie in true ladders of doctrine framed by good men out of true sciences. But we are moreover enabled to add that his senses also were stricken by spiritual objects before his express mission commenced. For example, in his posthumous Adversaria on Genesis and Exodus, when speaking of the spiritual meaning of flames of fire, he observes that " flames signify confirmation or attestation of truth ; and that this has been shewn to him from above." He proceeds to say that " he had seen flames of different sizes, and of different colour and splendour, and this, so often, that for several months whilst writing a certain work,* scarcely a day passed in which there did not appear before him flames as vivid as those of a common fire, which," he adds, "was a sign of approbation : and this was before the time when spirits began to speak with him vtrd voce. So again he says in his Diary.f that " for many years before his mind was opened, and he was enabled to speak with spirits, there were not only dreams inform- ing him respecting the subjects that were written; J but also changes of state when he was writing, and a peculiar extraordinary' light in the writings: after- wards many visions when his eyes were shut; light miraculously given ; spirits influencing him as sensibly as if they appealed to the bodily senses ; temptations also from evil spirits almost overwhelming him with horror ; fiery lights ; words spoken in early morning ; and many similar events." To some of these particulars we have his current testimony at the very time when they were happening. • Supposed by Dr. J. F. I. Tafel to be TTie Worship and Love of Cod^ but it might be the Fourth Part of The Animal Kingdom. t N. 2951. X He often speaks thus impersonally. A.D. 1745.] THE PREPARATIONS OF SLEEP. S5 Of this, the. Fourth Part of The Animal Kingdom (a MS. written, for the most part, as it would appear, during 1744) affords the proofs. At p. 82 of this work he has the following Observandum. " According to admonition heard, I must refer to my philosophical Principia . . . and it has been told me that by that means I shall be enabled to direct my flight whither- soever I will." Twice also in the same work he notifies that he is commanded to write what he is penning.* At p. 194 he mentions that he saw a representation of a certain golden key that he was to carr)', to open the door to spiritual things. At p. 202 he remarks at the end of a paragraph, that **on account of what is there written there happened to him wonderful things on the night between the first and second of July;" and he adds in the margin, that the matter set down was " foretold to him in a wonderful manner on that occasion." f Still further on (p. 215) he again refers to his extraordinary dream of the above date. This brings us to the subject of his sleep, which will contribute its share to his psychological history. So observant was Swedenborg of what went on within himself, that he left a MS. record of several of his dreams from 1736 to 1740, which has been printed by Klemming since the first edition of this Sketch was written, and also translated from its Swedish original by the presept writer. Moreover we have Swedenborg's testimony in several parts of his MSS., that for years before 1 745 his dreams were ordered and instructive, and constituted one department of his preparation. ,- Lastly, there is one doctrine that Swedenborg held, * "Jussus sum. Ita videar jussus." MS., p. 202, 223. t •' Ha?c quae scripsi prsenuntiata mihi sunt mirabiliter, vide finem Juli i et 2. Scripsi JuL 2." MS., p. 174 in margin. We give these references to the MS., because by some oversight the words appear to have been omitted from Dr. J. F. I. Tafei's edition. 86 CORRESPONDENCE LEADS SEERSHIP I ( i and which constitutes an immediate link between intellect and reality, possession with which would contribute to predispose to spiritual experience; we mean the doctrine of Universal Correspondency. To this great intellectual substance we shall have to recur in the sequel, but for the present it suffices to observe, that it imports that bodies are the generation and ex- pression of souls ; that the frame of the natural world works, moves and rests obediently to the living spiritual world, as a man's face to the mind or spirit within. Now this plainly makes all things into signs as well as powers j the events of nature and the world become divine, angelic, or demoniac messages, and the smallest things, as well as the greatest, are omens, instructions, warnings, or hopes. Accordingly it was on intellectual reasons of solid science, that Sweden- borg interpreted the events about him as of sjiiritual significance, and we are not surprised to find that his always recording pen noted down minute occurrences as pregnant to himself. We find one remarkable instance of this in the last MS. we have cited, where the author takes account of the presence and absence and the movements of a fly in his apartment* This of course is either insanity or a high pitch of wisdom, in which, however, it only partakes of that double chance that permeates the universe. The philosophers and the mad doctors regard all spiritual experience of a real kind as delusion ; but our theory is different, and we see in it both good and bad, sound and insane, and judge each case on its own merits, not cramping the verdict by ill-advised general rules. In this we have Scripture, tradition, the present usages of society, and the balance of the twelve judges at Westminster, on our side, to say nothing of practical charity towards our fellow citizens. * Op. Cit.^ p. 164. ** Sed hsec obscura sunt, forte nee vera : vidi muscaniy ilia ahiit^ recessi. Jieratum de veritatibus^ secundum maniiioneSf ut autumo ilia rediit me invito^ et ego viam tuli." A.D. 1745.3 IN THE TWO WORLDS AT ONCE. 87 Among many more important circumstances, Swedenborg's clear-seeing stands apart from most others by comprising the two worlds at once. In him the inward thought had learned to breathe, and the inward sight to exert itself, by contemplative respira- tions and abstractions, but thi? being attained, and the spiritual power developed and set free, it appears that his bodily activity was no hindrance to his spiritual. Perhaps the former could go on habitually while the latter was the express field of his conscious- ness. Thus, by analogy, we find that we can perform several acts at once, provided some have become habitual, and they are not all in the same sphere. For instance, we walk to our journey's end by sheer habit, and converse and observe different objects on the way, without confusing the operations of our limbs. But a child just learning to walk, must bend will, eyes, mind and care upon its legs, or it will fall to the ground: but by and bye its mind becomes emanci- pated from its members, and it can run, and prattle of different things, at the same time. So we can, when the eye is practised, see the whole of a landscape by habit, and yet see some special object therein by quite a different observation. And in the same manner, raising these common examples to higher powers, there is no reason why two worlds and dramas should not appear to the same duplex individual, the natural side being seen by indefeasible habit, nhe spiritual by direct present attention; or vice versa. There is no reason why active and passive sight should not coexist to this extent. But we owe an apology to the reader for so long detaining him on the threshold, a course which we should not have taken but that the current of the age has set in strongly towards spiritual seerships, as witness the facts produced every day by mesmerism, and now placed beyond a doubt. The sequel of our remarks will show that we had reason in these preliminaries. 88 THE SPIRITUAL FISHERMAN. AD- >745-47.] THE SPIRITUAL FISHERMAN. 89 Respecting the reasons for Swedenborg's "call," we give them in his own words. " I was once asked,'* says he, *' how I, a philosopher, became a theologian. My reply was : In the same way that fishermen became the disciples and apostles of the Lord. And I added, that /, ^oo^ from early youth had been a spiritual fisherman. On this, my enquirer asked what I meant by a spiritual fisherman. To which I answered, that a fisherman, in the spiritual sense of the Word, signifies one who rationally investigates and teaches natural truths, and afterwards spiritual truths. . . . My interrogator then said: Now I can understand why the Lord chose fishermen for disciples ; and therefore I do not wonder that He has also chosen you ; since, as you observed, you were from early youth a fisherman in a spiritual sense, or an investigator of natural truths ; and the reason that you are now an investigator of spiritual truths, is,- because the latter are founded upon the former. . . . At last he said : Since you have become a divine, what is your system of divinity ? These are its two principles, said I, that God is one, and that there IS A CONJUNCTION OF CHARITY AND FAITH. He replied, Who denies these principles? I rejoined, The divinity of the present day, when inwardly examined." After having been "called to a holy oflice by the Lord Himself," Swedenborg at once embraced the duties of his new commission. Negatively he had already one important qualification for it, he had read no dogmatic or systematic theology, and had none of its " unfounded opinions and inventions " in his mind to be extirpated. He now, therefore, learnt the Hebrew language, and read over the word of God many times, studying its spiritual correspondences, and was thereby enabled to receive instruction from the Lord, who is the Word. At once also he began to commit his studies to paper, thinking out the extent of his immense theme in the act of writing. Of the continued character of these studies, we have before us a stupendous record in the manuscript which he left on the books of the Old Testament, and which shows an unwearied power, and a gradually- brightening intelligence on the scope and spirit of the Bible. It was by slow degrees that he rose from his previous conceptions to the new development that we find in his next publication: his earlier manuscripts being in some measure a continuation of the psychological and intellectual system that appears in the Worship and Love of God. His spiritual experi- ences also in the first instance partook somewhat of that thinness which we have noted as peculiar in the last-mentioned work : he still regarded spirits as minds and intelligences appearing under human forms ; he heard their spiritual voices, and saw them as it were in ethereal outline, not being yet opened to regard them as our only acquaintances, — men and women. However his Adversaria^ from which we gather these particulars, are in truth a marvellous series of cogita- tions, and setting his own works aside, we know not with what commentaries they are comparable for unfolding the spiritual aspect of the Holy Scriptures, and the subjective philosophy of the human mind. His personal history at this date is scanty, and almost conjectural. He resided in London (probably with Brockmer, in Fetter Lane) until the beginning of July, 1745, w^hen he took ship to Sweden, arriving thither after a passage of more than a month, on the seventh of August. During the voyage his spiritual intercourse was suspended; perhaps at this period the sea was not so favourable for it as the land. He remained in Sweden in 1 746, and in the earlier part of 1747 also. He had now entered upon a vocation which no longer permitted him to discharge the functions of his office as Assessor of the Board of Mines, and in 90 RESIGNS HIS ASSESSORSHIP. 1747 he asked and obtained permission of King Frederick to retire from it. His petition to his Majesty contained also two other requests, namely, that he might enjoy during life, as a retiring pension, one half of the salary attached to the Assessorship ; and that his retirement from the office might not be accompanied by any addition to his rank or title. He gives his motives in the transaction in his own modest way. "My sole view in this resignation," says he, "was, that I might be more at liberty to devote myself to that new function to which the Lord had called me. On resigning my office, a higher degree of rank was offered me, but this I declined, lest it should be the occasion of inspiring me with pride." The king granted his desires, but in con- sideration of his services of 31 years, continued to him the whole salary of his late office ; a proof of the esteem in which he was held in Sweden. We presume that he made this last voyage to Sweden for the purpose of obtaining his dismissal from the Assessorship, which when he had procured, he again repaired to London in 1747, and wrote out the first volume of the Arcana Cxlestia for the press, to which John Lewis was "eye witness." This was published about the middle of 1749. At the begin- ning of 1750 he was out of England, probably in Sweden, for he sent the MS. of the second volume of the Arcana from abroad to London to be printed. He was certainly in his own country in 1751, when we meet him at the funeral of his old coadjutor, Polhem, an occasion on which he saw both sides of his friend's grave. We quote from his Dtaty (com- menced about 1747) the record of the burial. "Polhem," says he, "died on Monday, and spoke with me on Thursday. I was invited to the funeral. He saw the hearse, the attendants, and the whole procession. He also saw them let down the coffin into the grave, and conversed with me while it was A.D. 1747-56.] TRAVELS AND LABOURS. 91 going on, asking me why they buried him when he was alive? And when the priest pronounced that he would rise again at the day of judgment, he asked why this was, when he had risen already? He wondered that such a belief should obtain, con- sidering that he was even now alive ; he also wondered at the belief in the resurrection of the body, for he said that he felt he was in the body: with other remarks." From 1749 to 1756 appeared his great work, the Arcana Coelesiia* in eight volumes 4to, containing, in 10,837 paragraphs, an exposition of ^the spiritual sense of the books of Genesis and Exodus. This work was published in London, volume by volume, the second being issued in numbers, with an English version, said to be executed by one Marchant. Swedenborg's publisher, John Lewis before mentioned, has left some notice of him at this time. He says that, though he is " positively forbid to discover the author's name," yet he hopes to be excused for mentioning " his benign and generous qualities." He "avers that this gentleman, with indefatigable pains and labour, spent one whole year in studying and writing the first volume of the Arcana, was at the expense of ^200 to print it, and advanced ;^2oo more for the printing of the second; and when he had done this, he gave express orders that all tlie money that should arise in the sale, should be given towards the charge of the Propagation of the Gospel. He is so far from desiring to make a gain of his labours, that he will not receive one farthing back of the ;i4oo he hath expended ; and for that reason his works will come exceedingly cheap to the public." * Arcana Cixlestia. The Heavenly Arcana which are con- tained in the Holy Scriptures, or Word of the Lord, Unfolded, beginning with the Book of Genesis. Together with Wonderful Things seen in the World of Spirits a)ui in tfie Heaven of Angels. ^ k , I \- ' V 92 THE ARCANA CCELESTIA. A.D. 1749-56.) THE ARCANA CCELESTIA. 93 I i I 1 11 Hi Let us now turn to the work itself, and waste as little force as possible upon admiration of it in a literary sense. The author indeed professed to have derived the whole of it from direct rational illumina- tion by the Lxjrd ; no spirit and no angel had infused its supernatural knowledge, but it proceeded directly from the Almighty himself. As, however, it was an intellectual light by which the Most High communi- cated himself to Swedenborg's understanding, and through that to his spiritually-opened senses, so it comes to be judged and apprehended by the human understanding, and is freely placed before the rational powers. No man, according to Swedenborg, is bound to receive it on his ipse dixit, but he is to examine it, and decide according to intrinsic evidence. The work runs in two parallel streams ; there is on the one hand a series of scriptural interpretations unlocking the letter of the Word into truths pertaining to the Lord and the inner man : there is on the other a narrative interjected between the chapters of the former, and embracing a description of the wonders of the other life. We must give to these two depart- ments a separate consideration. For the first, the position of the Bible is defined as the Word of the Lord, and the nature of biblical evidences is thereby determined. If it be the book and message of the Infinite, its proper attestations are its intrinsic divinity ; its wisdom and its love ; its adaptation to man as a religious being in all time and place, and in all states of existence : in a word, it must contain details, infinite in every way, and con- necting every possible state of the soul with the Fountain of blessings. This profound creed respect- ing the Word, is the postulate of Swedenborg's Arcana, to be proved in the sequel by the showing of the work itself. The method whereby the Word is unfolded is called in general the science of correspondences. If there be unity in the creation, then is the whole one coherent plan, beginning from God, and ending in God. If there be order, then is there a hierarchy of natures, whereof the highest are first produced, and nearest to their source ; the second creatures standing next to the first, and the third to the second : each bemg placed between those which are next of kin to It above and below. If there be life and movement, then the action must pass in the before-mentioned order, and each new mean, as it is produced, will engender the means of representing and carrying itself out in another and a further sphere. These are our needful thoughts of every consistent work ; and the perfection of the work is in proportion to the strictness with which the above conditions are realized. Let the reader apply the case to anything which he himself does, and he will discover that the unity of his result contains and depends upon these particulars. But nature is the work of God, and the Word is the speech of God, and the speech is in like manner a work. The Word therefore involves the above substantial laws. In its innermost essence it is divine ; in its next intentions it regards the ends that are to follow from it, in times beyond the present, and in realms beyond time itself: speaking to the ultimate races of man, and to the highest heavens : in its next meanings it speaks to a future less remote, and to a lower altitude of heaven, and so forth ; until at length it addresses each man and spirit in his own language, and in his own age. Like the world itself it stands for ever, but the race, according to its various state, draws from its inexhaustible bosom ' new mines of treasure, from its surface new circum- stances of life and conscience, from its atmosphere new sources of power. What therefore is the science of correspondences ? It is the intellectual teaching of the relations between l! 94 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCES, all different spheres. The difficulty of illustrating it lies in the fact that the works of God differ from those of God's image, man, in one important particular. The human workman in this world is only conscious of operating on one platform at once ; if he makes a machine, it is all in nature ; if he writes a book, it carries, to his mind, but one meaning. The divine workman, however, operates at once in all altitudes and worlds : his fiat, and its productions, pervade the depth and breadth of his creation: his creative wisdom passes by unknown paths through every sphere, and the same ray of divine light deposits in one an angelic affection, in the next a human love, in the next an animal faculty, and only terminates by creating some animal, vegetable, or mineral reality or modification, which breathing straightway with the divine effort, tends upwards again through the same series, subsisting from all, supporting all, and running back through all. What makes the difference of these productions? Not the creative ray, but the place, time, state, and circumstances upon which it works ; for it is no other than one wisdom in a various exercise. The correspondence between the forms that it leaves in its passage, is simply this, that they ire all one in soul, but each suited to a different use ; and hence as a rule, correspondence is a divine equation, whereby one thing is to one sphere precisely as another thing is to another sphere. Whenever this is the case, the two things are fundamentally united ; they mutually do each other's work in their own places, and are each other's, no matter how unlike they appear in form ; for the form is but the face or body that each shows to its peculiar sphere. Now if we had experience of this compound operation in our own works, we should easily admit it of the works and Word of God : as it is, however, we obtain a glimpse of it in another way, by symbols in language, which make the objects of nature into bodies of A.D. 1749-56.] THE SPIRITUAL WORLD. 95 thought, thereby suggesting that all things are the naturalization of divine thoughts; by the human face, which expresses the soul, and thus presents us with two corresponding things in two different spheres • also by gestures and particular acts, which, we know not why, are felt to be images of the persons who produce them, and are interpreted of them by this signification. Not to mention other illustrations. The Word of God then, on Swedenborg's showing contains various bodies of divine truth adequate to divers orders of angels and men ; to the celestial man, m whom goodness is paramount, it is celestial, and teaches the truths of the innermost heaven : to the spiritual man, in whom truth is supreme, it is spiritual, and teaches the truths of the second heaven : to the lower heavens, and to the natural world, it is natural, and teaches truths by symbols in the one case, and by a mixture of history and symbol in the other. It has therefore three general senses which correspond to each other, but is throughout divme in its origin and end. The Arcaua Cxlestia is chiefly devoted to an exposition of the spiritual sense of one portion of it. This brings us to the second department of the work, or the spiritual experience, which comprises lengthy accounts of the other world. And here we may remark that some persons have greatly regretted that the author should have introduced these narra- tives into his interpretation. Among the rest, Swedenborg's friend, Count Hopken, **once repre- sented to the venerable man, that he thought it would be better not to mix his beautiful writings with so many memorable relations, or things heard and seen in the spiritual world, . . ^. of which ignorance makes a jest and derision." But Swedenborg answered, that " this did not depend upon him ; that he was too old to sport with spiritual things, and too much con- cerned for his eternal happiness to give in to such : ! 'ii I g6 THE SPIRITUAL WORLD. ' Hi foolish notions," with more to the same purport And still, notwithstanding, the Count says that " he could have wished that Swedenborg had left them out, since they may prevent infidelity from approaching his doctrines." The truth however is that they are vital to his doctrines, and to omit them would reduce his interpretations to a philosophical system, that like the rest would have no hold upon creation, and no heel upon infidelity, which indeed it would supply with a new field of operations. A visitant of the spiritual world, Swedenborg has described it in lively colours, and it would appear that it is not at all like what modem ages have deemed. According to some, it is a speck of abstrac- uon, intense with grace and saving faith, and other things of terms. Only a few of the oldest poets — always excepting the Bible — have shadowed it forth with any degree of reality, as spacious for mankind. There Swedenborg is at one with them, only that he is more sublimely homely regarding our future dwelling-place. The spiritual world is the same old world of God in a higher sphere. Hill and valley, plain and mountain, are as apparent there as here. The evident difference lies in the multiplicity and perfection of objects, but everything with which we are familiar is perpetuated there, and added to in- numerable other things. The spiritual world is essential nature, and spirit besides. Its inhabitants are men and women, and their circumstances are societies, houses and lands, and whatever belongs thereto. The common-place foundarion needs no moving, to support the things which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived. The additions and pinnacles of wisdom are placed upon the basis which God has laid. Thus nature is not only a knowledge, but a method; our introducrion to the mineral, vegetable and animal worlds, to the air and the sun, is a friendship that will never be dissolved : 1 > > *i A.D. 1749-56.1 SPIRITUAL AND NATURAL ORDER. 97 there is no faithlessness in our great facts if only we are faithful to them, but stone and bird, wood and animal, sea and sky, are acquaintances which we meet with in the spiritual sphere, in our latest man- hood or angelhood, equally as in the dawn of the senses, before the grave is gained. Such is the spiritual worid: duration and immensity resuming nature, but subject to spiritual laws. What do these spiritual laws introduce ? Or first, what is the regime of the natural laws? The latter, we reply, give fixity to things. The order of the sun and planets introduces time through measured move- ments, while cohesion and gravitation keep spaces permanent, and all things bom in this Cosmos suck time and space from the revolving worid ; thus day and night, size and separation are written upon them fi-om the beginning. Wliatever changes they undergo are through and in time and space. These rules of fixa- tion * are the natural laws, which support mankind and * See the Author^s work,. TAe Greater Origins and Issues of IJ/e and Death, 1885, ^e chapter on The Sun, for a further statement on the fixity of Nature as the basts of human immor- tality. On this subject Swedenborg says in his Treatise on The Divine IVisdym in the Apocalypse Explained: "The angelic mind cannot be procreated, or multiplied by acts of procreation, excepting in man. Whoever is aware of the respective natures of the substances in the spiritual world, and of the matters in the natural world, may easily sec that no procreation of angelic minds exists, or can exist, excepting in those, and from those who inhabit some earth ; the earths being the last work of creation. But because the relation between the substances in the spiritual world, and the matters in the natural world, is unknown, it shall be explained. The substances in the spiritual world appear as if they were material, but nevertheless are not so, and as they are not material, there- fore they are not constant. They are correspondences of the aflfectiofis of the angeU, and last with the angels while their affections last, and cease when they cease. The like would have been the case with the suigek themselves if they had been there created. Besides which, with the angels, no other procreation, and no multiplication, exists, or is possible, but that which is spiritual, which, in feet, is the procreation of wisdom 98 SPIRITUAL ORDER. I the human faculties, but do not obey them. The spiritual laws, on the other hand, are the laws of the mind, or laws like the mind's, swaying a universe of forms like those of nature. The spiritual world is full of quasi natural objects, but which are not fixed, but fluid to the spirit. Its centre is not the sun, but the divinity, and humanity also is its subsidiary centre. As humanity is the second law and force of that world, so its con- tents and changes represent those of humanity. Its spaces and quarters are determined by the spiritual sun, which is the divine love ; those who reciprocate that love the most, are in the spiritual east ; those who receive the divine wisdom are in the south ; and the declensions of these qualities constitute severally the west and north of the spiritual quarters. The whole combines into instant and irresistible arrange- ment according to the spiritual affinities of the parts. And as humanity in the aggregate gravitates to its own places in the inward world, so does each nation, each society, and finally every individual; and wherever they be, the three kingdoms, in divine plenitude, are there also ; the inhabitants still stand upon the ground, but it is a floor that symbolizes and depends upon their spiritual status ; they still see the growths of the vegetable world, but these are the very germina- tion of their senses ; nor are there wanting birds and animals, new and old, to reflect, by exact co-ordination, their intelligence and affections. Hence the spiritual universe is the last justice and harmony of mere man- kind, where for goodness there is goodness, for the beautiful soul, beauty; and in every particular, for and love, such indeed as belongs to the souls of men who are born anew or regenerated. In the natural world, however, there are matters through which, and by which, procreations and afterwards formations, can be effected ; and in this manner multiplication of men, and therefore of angels." This passage is worth studying, and underlies that cardinal doctrine of Swedenborg, that there are no angels who have not been born men in some part of the material world. A.0. 1749-56.] SPIRITUAL ORDER FROM EXPERIENCE. 99 the moral, a corresponding physical. The world, the scenery, the house, the associations, stand and change with the mhabitants. The whole is not only a man- sion but an instruction; for the good a pathway of brightening wisdom and a countercheck to the conscience ; for the wicked self-punishment and self- imprisonment, supporting, compressing, and correcting. The same laws associate all men with their likes, all societies with those next them in the genus, and finally bind the whole of humanity into one indis- soluble body, whose place is God. For love and likmg are spiritual nearness, and produce conjunction according to their intensity. Those who ardently desire to see each other, straightway are together, the desire is spiritual presence. Thus the diversities of love sift men into their places with accurate finality, in a universe where all is Love's. \ye may now see how essential was Swedenborg's spiritual experience to his interpretation of the spiritual correspondences of the Bible. He says indeed that he received the latter from the Lord, but as he received it by rational means, this does not exclude any of the providential ways by which he could be instructed. And mingling with societies whose inward states were effigied in the outward forms of the world, and who had witnessed for thousands of years (to measure their wisdom by our computation) the correspondence between the outward and the inward ; who had tallied off thought and affection as they arose, and all their own human deeds and words, against the events and forms which surrounded them • he could not but learn in innumerable instances that the one set of things answered to the other, and thereby acquire correspondences by much hearsay as well as much experience. Otherwise, inasmuch as the events of this world do not proceed by individual correspondence, he could never have learnt that par- ticular natural forms correspond to particular spiritual 100 SPIRITUAL ORDER FROM EXPERIENCE. ' ' I )l It If states, the former never being seen to be produced in myriads of instances concurrently with the latter. He might indeed have surmised the fact by a brilliant genius for analogies, which assuredly he possessed, but the spiritual world alone can furnish the proof positive, by exhibiting the generative act in which the outward answers to the inward. For example, he says that the ass corresponds to scientific truth ; the horse, to intel- lectual truth. Now this he might have divined, and corroborated, by tables of analogies, in which these animals would be shown, by a kind of spiritual rule of ihree^ to be to nature, what those truths were, to spirit ; but the proof would have been only mental, until, in the spiritual world, he saw that horses and asses were respectively always present, and circum- stanced, when, and according as, those inward qualities were central; in which case reiterated coincidence would suggest causation, and have the force of fact. There is one important function of correspondence to which we have slightly adverted, and upon which we must spend a few moments. All correspondence means conjunction, and produces it, for correspond- ence is nothing but harmony, and harmony is extended love. The body corresponds to the soul, and so the two cohere together, and both are alive. Now as the natural and spiritual senses of the Word correspond, so also they are closely united as a body and a soul, and hence Swedenborg avers that the Word is the means of union between the world and heaven, and that to enter devoutly into its body or letter is to enter heaven upon earth, and to have the angels present in the inner sphere, and the Lord above all. In all nature God is present, but the Word is the immediate body of the divine wisdom, and in the body and no other one circumstance, dwells the soul. Among the great topics treated of in the Arcana^ A.D. 17<9-S6.] RESURRECTION FROM NATURAL DEATH. 1 01 is that of the process of resurrection from the dead, which Swedenborg experienced, in order to make it known.* Birth into the other life is better attended than births into this world. It is a work of celestial skill, committed to peculiar angels. They occupy the heart of the dying man, and uniting with it, isolate him from all lower spirits. They sit at his head, and communicate their thoughts with his face, so that another face is induced upon him; indeed two faces, for there are two angels. When they find that their faces are received by him, they know that he is dead. They discourse with his soul by still vibrations of the lips. They bend the scents of death into fragrance ; for an aromatic odour as of embalm- ment exhales from the corpse in their presence, whose perfume wards away evil spirits. They keep his thoughts in the pious frame usual at the point of death ; and converse with him by " cogitative speech." Swedenborg perceived, as they were assiduous about him, that they made light of all fallacies and falsities, not treating them with ridicule, but discarding them as nothings. He felt his own pulse during their union with his heart. After the celestial have communicated the novitiate's first life, the spiritual succeed them, and unroll the films from his eyes, introducing him into spiritual light. He then enters upon his own faculties, and at first is happy and joyful, the good spirits remaining with him whilst he desires them ; but at length he follows his own life, and procures his own associates, good or evil. In cases of natural death resurrection takes place on the third day after decease. The force which causes it, is the vivid spiritual attraction of the Lord's mercy, which with- draws the vital substances from the intricacies of the body, and separates them, so that nothing living is left behind. Such is the mode. It is analogous to birth into this world, only that the growth of spiritual * It happened to him March I, 1748. See his Diary ^ ro2 THE VAST ARCANA CCELESTIA. life IS rapid compared with natural ; the new-born man becoming adult and personal in a few days instead of many years. In the limited space of this biography, we cannot give even an idea of the contents of the Arcana, or of the spiritual sense, descriptive of man's regeneration, which Swedenborg evolves from the Scripture : but of the manner of the work we may say a few words with less injustice. Conceive then, gentle reader, twelve goodly 8vo volumes (in English) written with such continued power that it seems as if eating, drinking and sleeping had never intervened between the penman and his page, so unbroken is the subject, and so complete the sense. Add to the other health and harmony of this unflagging man, a memory of the most extraordinary grasp, which enabled him to administer the details of an intellect ranging through all truth on the one hand, and through the whole field of Scripture illustration and text upon the other. Then take into account the unity of the work from first to last ; the constant reference that binds all parts of it together, and shows the caution with which each strong affirmation is at first set down. Observe also the felicity of phrase, the happiness of mind, the easy greatness, which shine along and dignify those serious pages. Remark also that the author does not deal in generalities, but sentence for sentence, and word for word, he translates his text into spiritual meaning, and criticises and supports himself with nearly every parallel text in the sacred writings. Literature, good reader, shows no similar case, and though the fa'te of It be left to the future, yet we may safely predict that It will be found impossible to refute it on its own grounds ; and perhaps it would not be wise for thee to wait until a valid refutation shall come— in the production of a better interpretation, — one more worthy of God, and more ser\-iceable to human weal. We say this that thou mayest use what thou hast. A.D. 1749-56] ERIC BRAKE POST MORTEM. 103 but nowise doubting that the Almighty has more to give, through other sons than Swedenborg. In 1756, on the 23rd of July, Swedenborg was in Stockholm. This we learn incidentally from his iJtary, It was in this year that a revolution was attempted in Sweden, and on the day above mentioned, the leaders of the conspiracy. Count Eric Brahe and Baron Horn, were executed in the capital. Swedenborg has nothing to say against the death sentence. He did not lose sight of Brahe when he was beyond the axe ; as the following passage , reports: — " Of those who are resuscitated from the dead, and have made confession of faith in their last moments (Brahe). *' 5099. Brahe was beheaded at 10 o'clock in the morning, and spoke with me at 10 at night ; that is to say, twelve hours after his execution. He was with me almost without interruption for several days. In two days' time he began to return to his former life, which consisted in loving worldly things, and after three days he became as he was before in the world, and was carried into the evils that he had made his own before he died." This perhaps was the occasion to which Robsahm alludes in the following: "One day," says he, "as a criminal was led to the place of execution to be beheaded, I was by the side of Swedenborg, and asked him how such a person felt at the time of his execution. He answered, *When a man lays his head on the block, he loses all sensation. When he first comes into the spiritual world, and finds that he is living, he is seized with fear of his expected death, tries to escape, and is very much frightened. At such a moment no one thinks of anything but the - happiness of heaven, or the misery of hell. Soon the good spirits come to him and instruct him where he is, and he is then left to follow his own inclinations, 104 THE LAST JUDGMENT. A.D. 1757-58.1 ITS HISTORIC VALIDITY. which soon lead him to the place where he remains for ever.' " In 1758, Swedenborg published in London the five following works, i. An account of the Last Judgment and the Destruction of Babylon ; shewing that all the predictions in the Apocalypse are at this day fulfilled ; being a relation of things heard and seen. 2. Con- cerning Heaven and its Wonders, and concerning Hell, being a relation of things heard and seen. 3. On the White Horse mentioned in the Apocalypse. 4. On the Planets in our Solar System, and on those in the Starry Heavens; with an account of their ifihabitants, and of their Spirits and Angels. 5. On the Neiu Jerusalem and Its Heavenly Doctrine, as revealed from Heaven. We have now to speak seriatim of these productions. I. Swedenborg's Doctrine of the Last Judgment requires a short preface to understand it, but unlike other accounts of the great assize, it comes into human history, and has a very intelligible connection with future progress. The earth, says he, is the seminary of the human race, and the spiritual world is the destination. Mankind are educated here through the senses in a natural body, and after death their life continues with spiritual senses, and in a spiritual body. The supply of nutriment from earth to heaven, that is to say, of fresh human races, is perpetual, and will never cease ; for every divine work represents infinity and eternity, and hence the genera- tions of men in the natural world will continue for everlasting. The earth therefore will not be destroyed at the day of Judgment. Furthermore, all angels and spirits have once been men upon some planet ; there IS no direct creation of angels,~that is impossible : they would have no fixed immortality thus : but everv celestial inhabitant has risen according to his desert from the ranks of mankind. Thus there is no finite being superior to man, and no substantial intermediate between man and his Maker. Now it follows from 105 this that as heaven is peopled from this world, the state of the spiritual world depends upon that of the natural. When the ages pour into it good and true persons, then the upper woild thrives, and its integrity is maintained: on the other hand, when ages are declining, when hereditary vices consume mankind, and posterity goes on from bad to worse, then the human materials supplied to the inward world, disease, derange, and threaten it. At such a time our foul ancestry collects above us and around us, and acting from behind upon the nature that we have inherited from them, and from above upon our actual thoughts and lives, tends to environ us with a dense atmosphere of falsehood and iniquity. It is a common fallacy to suppose that we live by ourselves; our very inmost minds are immersed in the whole of humanity, they depend upon the entire past, as it is realized in those who have carried its spirit into the other life. When the spiritual world is crowded with unworthy ages, the light of heaven can no longer reach their descend- ants, for by the laws of the supernal order, the Lord's influence passes through the angelic heaven by distinct gradations into the world ; and the latter being over- hung by clouds of malignant and false natures, the beams of the celestial sun no longer reach it. Should this continue, the extinction of the human race, through vice and lawlessness, would at length ensue : and hence whenever mankind is falling, a special divine interposition alone can renew the bijoken order, restore the balance, revivify the earth, and present for the tottering heavens a fresh basis of establishment. Now this crisis has been imminent on this planet three several times : once in the most ancient church, whose last judgment was typified by the flood : once when the Lord was in the world, and when He said, " Now is the judgment of this world ; now is the prince of this world cast out : " and again : *' Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." And a io6 THE CONSUMMATED CHURCH. third time, teste Swedenborg, in 1757, when the first Christian church was consummated; for it is to be observed that each judgment marks a divine epoch, or takes place at the end of a church, and a church comes to an end when it has no longer any faith in consequence of having no charity. We observe that this doctrine'of the last judgment is a kind of historical netiessity, if the other life be indeed real, and if this life prepare its subjects : if on the other hand dead men are to stand for nothing, and if either annihilation, or any other piece of philosophy, such as the soul lying in the body's grave, be admitted, then is history cut from behind us every hour, and we stand as disconnected mortals in its broken chains ; in which case the affiliation of ages to each other is mere fortuity, and generation itself is only an ideal game. Belief in immortality however— belief in the enduring manhood of mankind, implies a belief in the substance and power of the dead, and to leave them out of the historic calculus, would be like omitting from the forces of the world its imponder- able and atmospheric powers, which are the very brains and lungs of its movements, though, save by their effects, invisible and quasi spiritual. Now the Christian church had been declining from the days of the Aposdes, with whom it was first founded in love and simple faith. It had declined through the anger and hatred of the Christians; through their violence and bloody wars; through their love of dominion in a kingdom where all were to be servants ; through their love of the world in a state whose early builders had all things in common, and m which the Lord's morrow would take care of Itself; through their councils where the human mind erected itself in session upon the truths of God, and made them into coverings for human sins; through the popedom, which sat upon the vacant throne of the Messiah ; through the reformation, which kindled A.D. 1757] ITS JUDGMENT IN THE SPIRITUAL WORLD. I07 fresh hostilities and passions, and brought into clear separation the mind and heart of the church, writing up justification by faith on the hall of the concourse of evil-doers : finally through the wide-spread Atheism which found too valid an excuse in the manifold abominations of the Christians. Through these stages had the church proceeded, and in 1757 the measure was full, the race upon earth had seen the last remnant of the heavenly azure disappear, and the thick night had closed in. For all these deeds had been carried upwards, and re-transacted with fresh power and malignity in the spiritual world; their several ages were still extant, and busily at work for themselves, as well as in the souls of their posterity. The judgment required could not take place in nature, but where all are together, and therefore in the spiritual world, and not upon the earth. This article from Swedenborg also depends upon an ac- knowledgment of the reality of the life after death ; also that heaven and hell are from mankind exclusively, and that all who have been born since the creation are in one or the other of them. Moreover no one is judged from the natural man, or therefore in the natural world, but from the spiritual man, and therefore in the spiritual world, where he is known as he really is. If men judge of actions by the spirit, surely God judges of them by the spirit purely ; that is to say, in the real and collective sense, judges the race in the spiritual world. And to conclude these reasons, those who have died are already fully embodied, will need no resurrection of the flesh, and will not and cannot return to earth to seek it. This judgment of which we are treating is no vindictive assize, such as we are unaccustomed to in this world, but spiritually historic, like the greatest judgments which are written in the records of nations, like the least which are pronounced from the bench by the law. Nay history in its fluctuations ii ! loS THOSE WHO WERE JUDGED. represents these divine settlements and periods better than anything else; and moreover attests them simply because it proceeds from them. When the vice and pomp of empires stop the world's progress and new eras struggle vainly for birth against the powers that be, then comes in the hand of God, and restores the balance, by removing the high places where sm has dwelt. And so in the spiritual world. God and his ministers are there more plainly, and the largest rights and the equilibrium of human universes are then decided m their proper assize. Such visita- tions have been periodical, and are not reserved for the end of time, but rather occur near its beginning, to make the course of heaven free for the emancipated generations The time when the tares and the wheat are separated, is not at the end of all harvests, but the future has the benefit of the separation, harvests in- numerable are gathered thereafter, and fertility only begins when the weeds are exterminated. So also it unf^L n ^^Tf^-^P^^hs of the world cannot open until the Day of Judgment is past. h J^%.^''!u^"'^''^,/ -'757 comprised all those who I u A r ^ Y""'^^ '^"^^ *^^ Lord's coming, those who had lived previously having been tried in the judgment which was effected during His advent If took effect however, principally upon only one section of that great multitude of spirits. For there are in the spiritual world three departments ; viz heaven, wl)ere those are received who are decisively ?n^ .i ' ' ""' ^}^ ^^^^^ °^ ^^'^ ^^"traO^ persons ; and the intermediate state, called the world of spirits where all are at first assembled, and where those who can keep up the outward semblance of order, whether tney be good or bad, are congregated so long as their inward nature does not disclose itself. It was in the latter receptacle that the current of respectable and professing Christendom had disembogued its hourly myriads, and there, under the varnish of A.D. 1757 ] THE FIRST HEAVENS WHICH PASSED AWAY. I09 goodness and religion, many had built up their doctrinal cities, and engendered false heavens and apparent churches. Thence they radiated darkness upon the earth, and communicating with heaven by their excellent seeming, and with hell by their hearts, they suffocated and extinguished the divine light which flowed down worldwards from above the heavens. The dispersion of this great hypocrisy was the divine object of the judgment, and consequently the preservation of the balance between heaven and hell, on which human freedom is founded. "The first heaven and the first earth," composed of the above associations, "passed away," in the following manner. The nations and peoples of seventeen centuries were arranged spiritually, each according to its race and genius : those of the reformed churches in the middle, the Romanists around them, the Mahometans in a still outer ring, the various Gentiles constituting a vast circumference to the area, while beyond all the appearance as of a sea was the boundary. This arrangement was determined by each nation's general faculty of receiving divine truths. Visitation was then made by angels, and admonition given, and the good were singled out and separated by the heavenly ministers. Then there appeared a stormy cloud above those seeming heavens, occasioned by the Lord's especial presence, for guard and protection, in the lowest plane of the real heavens ; and as His divine influence came in contact with the falsity and evil of those who were to be judged, their inward parts were manifested ; and their characters roused ; in consequence of which they rushed into enormities. Then were there great spiritual earthquakes, signs also from heaven terrible and great, and distress of nations, the. sea and the salt water roaring. These changes of state were accompanied by concussions of their houses and lands, and gaps were made towards ii I tlil no THE SPECTACLE OF THE JUDGMENT. the hells underneath, communication with which was opened, wherefrom there were seen exhalations ascendmg as of smoke mingled with sparks of fire. At this time the Lord appeared in a bright cloud with angels, and a sound was heard as of trumpets a sign of the protection of the angels by the Lord, and of the gathering of the good from every quarter. Then all who were about to perish were seen in the likeness of a great dragon, with its tail extended in a curve and raised towards heaven, brandishing about, as though to destroy and draw down heaven; but the tail was cast down, and the dragon sank berieath. Afterwards the whole foundation subsided into the deep, and every nation, society and person was committed to a scene corresponding outwardly with his own genus, species, and variety of evil; and in this manner the new hells— the prison houses of the first Christian epoch— were formed and arranged. " After this there was joy in heaven and light in the world of spirits, such as was not before ; and the interposing clouds between heaven and mankind being removed, a similar light also then arose on men in the world, giving them new enlightenment." Such is Swedenborg's account of that new day that dawned in the last century, and which shines onward since to joy and freedom. " Then,'' says Swedenborg, « I saw angelic spirits ^ in great numbers rising from below, and received into heaven. They were the sheep, who had been kept and guarded by the Lord for ages back, lest they should come into the malignant sphere of the dragonists, and their charity be suffocated. These persons are understood in the Word by the bodies of saints which arose from their sepulchres and went into the holy city ; by the souls of those slain for the testimony of Jesus, and who were watching; and by those who are of the first resurrection." Of these occurrences our Author was a witness in A.D. 1757.1 man's final lot is QUICKENED SINCE. Ill the spiritual world, and for many years before they happened he had a presage of them, though neither he nor the angels knew of the period, agreeably to the declaration, that of that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son' but the Father. Yet in his Biary (Feb. 13th, 1748* n. 765) he records, that "57, or 1657, has been shewn him in vision ; the numbers were written before his eyes, but he did not well know what they meant " It was a forecast of this judgment, which happened m the year 1757, and took many months to execute. Ihe Romanists were judged first, the Protestants at some interval afterwards. Since the last judgment no one is allowed to remain in the world of spirits more than 30 years whereas previously to that event, many had beerl there for centuries. There will be no more general judgments, because the way to the final state is now laid down for ever, and the outward man can no longer differ from the inward in the spiritual world. We have dwelt thus long upon Swedenborg's doctrine and description of the Judgment, because it illustrates the pretensions of his writings in an extra- ordinary manner, and is the postulate of the descent of a new dispensation to the earth, of which he announced himself to be the messenger. Moreover It explains his views of the future, and authorizes him in a certain sense to break with history, to discard the philosophical stream that has come down throut^h the middle ages, and to look for new developments of the race m no mere perfectioning of the past. It was .the church of the New Jerusalem which began to descend from God out of heaven when in 17 C7 -the "age" of primitive Christianity had been " consummated." 2. The next work which we have to notice is his doctrinal narrative of Heaven and Hell, a book which though sufficiently remarkable, yet quells literary 112 HEAVEN AND HELL. criticism. We would fain speak of its power, but are wrested irresistibly from that purpose, and compelled to canvass its truth. We would fain discuss its beauty and sublimity, but its good and service will have all place. We feel invited to test its reality by evidence, but its moral power ap{>eals only to self-evidence. It belongs in short to a new literature, shaping and fashioning itself from within ; it is a spiritual growth, and though you may either adopt or set it aside, you can neither praise nor blame it This is one reason why Swedenborg's works have obtained such little notice ; they are too impersonal : you may speak roughly to them, but they do not answer: nothing but harmony or sympathy com- prehends them, or elicits a response. To mere criticism they are lifeless and uninteresting. Their region lies away from brawls. The most spirited impugner does not even contradict them, because he is not where they are. The ether can only be moved by the ether, or by something still more movingly tranquil. The work we are considering is on the life and laws of heaven and hell. It comprises their universal gravitation, the appearances and realities of their inward cosmogony not less than the fates of their single inhabitants. It is at once human and immense ; the souVs sphere become the law and order of a divine creation. It is no ghostly narrative, but sub- stantial like earthly landscapes, only that vices and virtues are its moving springs, and it is plastic before the eminent life of man. Here are the circumstances to which the heart aspires, and the justice which the poets feign. Here the attributes of deity are conferred in the largest measure upon the creature, and every man lives in a world minutely and changefully answer- ing to his mind and life, as if created by himself. Space and time, with all their contents, that is to say, the universal world, determined by love and A.D. 1758.3 CONSTITUTION OF HEAVEN AND HELL, 113 wisdom, and corresponding, object for subject, with the latter — these constitute the spiritual worid. In the heavens, therefore, all are near to God, because all love him, and love is nearness ; moreover all are near to each other in proportion to mutual love \ and hence the law of love being the space-maker, combines all into the most exact and just societies ; and neigh- bourhood is a special affection, a district is an affection more general, and so forth. Love is combination, decline of love is removal, hatred is opposition and contrariety of space. All moreover are surrounded by lovely and productive objects by the same law, for love is with these objects, and they with love! Heaven therefore clothes itself with all beauty. The opposite to this is the case with hell, whose inhabitanis are indeed combined by similarity of passion, but discord reigns in their terrible coagulations : all that is deformed and foul in nature is already in the hells, whose love it effigies, and whose outward kingdom it is. In both states all the objects are spiritual-real ; the sun of heaven, never setting, but always in the east, is the sphere of the Lord ; its heat is his good- ness and its light his truth. In hell there is no sun, but the inhabitants roam in darkness corresponding to themselves, for they are darkness ; their light is artificial, as of coal fires, meteors, ignes fatui, and the lights of night ; they inhabit scenery of which they are the souls, as bogs, fens, tangled forests, caverns, charred and ruined cities. Such is the grouping of man towards God, of man also to his fellow man, and of man towards the forms of creation. It is the law of love become all-constructive, and extending organically through space and time, that produces the order of heaven and hell. Heaven is supremely human, — nay more, it is one man. As the members of the bixiy make one person, so before God, all good men make one humanity* every society of them is a heavenly man in a lesser 11 9 4; 114 CONSTITUTION OF HEAVEN AND HELL. form, and every angel in a least. The reason is, that God Himself is an Infinite Man, and He shapes His heaven into His own image and likeness, even as He made Adam. The oneness of heaven comes from God's unity; its manhood from His humanity. Heaven has, therefore, all the members, organs and viscera of a man; its angel-inhabitants, every one, are in some province of the Grand Man. Indefinite myriads of us go to a fibre of humanity. Some are in the province of the brain ; some in that of the lungs ; some in that of the heart ; some in the provinces of the belly; some are in the legs and arms ; and all, wherever humanized, that is to say, located in humanity, perform spiritually the offices of that part of the body whereto they correspond. They all work together, however spaced apparently, just as the parts of a single man. Their space is but their palpable hberty, and they touch the human atoms next them more closely, by offices which unite them in God, than the contiguous fibres of our flesh. Nothing can intervene between those whom God has joined, but the visible grandeur of all things at once cements and emancipates them. Hell, on the other hand, is one monster, compact of all spiritual diseases, and compressed into one hideous unity. It works by coercions for all those evil uses that human nature, evil in its ground, requires for its subsistence. It stands against heaven, foot to foot, member against member, and province against province. In its collective capacity it is the Devil and Satan ; the Devil is the name and style of its evil, and Satan that of its falsehood. Good and evil spirits are attendant upon every man ; he receives from them all his thoughts and emotions. The good are ever busy, pouring in tendencies to virtue, with intellectual power to apprehend and execute it ; the evil are always attempting to drug us with contrary influences. In the balance between their agencies, our freedom lives. Our trials and ^°->:58.] HEAVEN AND HELL ARE WITH MAN. 115 temptations arise from these opposing powers, each of which struggles to possess us for itself. The Lord moderates the conflict, and continually preserves the equilibrium. This doctrine is a consequence of the oneness of all creatures, and of their spiritual con- nectedness, for how can beings so powerful as angels and spirits, and so immediately above and beneath us, fail to operate upon us in their own sphere? Man bemg only a recipient organ, it is in the nature of things that the creatures next him in the scale, should out of their more subtle life communicate themselves m vibrations to his brain and bodily organs, con- stituting his outward spiritual world, which he receives according to his own freedom. His lifelong choice of these influences determines his state after death, when he goes to his fathers, that is to say, to those very persons of whom he has made himself an adopted son, by doing their work in this lower world. So by his deeds here, he chooses his company for ever. The maintenance of a world like the spiritual gives a new idea of the divine almightiness. Where every thought becomes real, how consummate the order must be, to preserve the harmony. Imagine this world, if all our desires and thoughts took eff'ect upon their objects! What destruction would ensue f What exquisiteness of spiritual association then is requisite to perpetuate such a state! What com- munion of joys there must be in the heavens ! What imprisonment of lusts in the hells! The same divine love that is softer than morning in the one, must be chains of adamant in the other, or the inward universe would go to pieces in a moment. Verily such a society requires an active God. Our limits forbid other details, but we beg the thoughtful reader to notice the coherency of Sweden- borg's narration, and on consulting the Heaven and Hell, to observe the reality which pervades it. Un- doubtedly it portrays such a world as this world pre- ii6 HEAVEN IS DIVINELY HUMAN. pares for ;yea, such as this world would be if it could. Our sympathies reach up into it ; our trades and pro- fessions are learnt for it ; our inner bodies are formed in and like our outer to inhabit it ; our loves and friendships are perpetuated in it if we please ; already our worship traverses it to God; our Bible in its spiritual splendour is there ; our Saviour in His humanity is its soul ; and indeed, such a world is the home for which our nature, and all nature yearns. Ah ! you will reply, it is too much founded upon human love, and too congenial to our eldest thoughts ! There is truth in the objection. After perusing such an apocalypse, what a trifler seems the parliament of philosophers debating the immortality of the soul. It is as though, at this date, we should examine the evidence for the existence of mankind. Once for all, the question is killed ; and whether Swedenborg be a true seer or not, he has convinced us at any rate that the Platos and Catos, Seneca and Cicero, were ineff<^ctual because not visionary, and that their words are henceforth waste where not experimental. Worlds can only be explored by travellers thither; reason and guessing at a distance are futile, unless the feet can be plucked from the old goutiness, the mind quit its fixed thoughts, and the eye alight upon the facts. The conditions of spirit-seeing are as those of nature-seeing ; the man and the sight must come together. But the eternity of hell, — what does Swedenborg say of that momentous creed ? In the first place, he denies that any existence is fundamentally punishment, but on the contrary, delight. Hell consists of all the delights of evil; heaven, of all those of goodness. The Lord casts no one into hell, but those who are there cast themselves thither, and keep themselves where they are. It is the last doctrine of free will, — that of a finite being perpetuating for ever his own evil, standing fast to selfishness without end, A.D. 17£8.] HELL IS IN man's CHOICE. 117 excluding Omnipotence in all its dispensations, and making the " will not " into an everlasting " cannot," to maintain itself out of heaven, and contrary to heaven. The question is, whether it is true of man experimentally ; and further, whether any conceivable benevolence can invent reform for every sinner? Damnation is a practical question. If our human statesmen can abolish the prison and the transportation, the fine and punishment, and draw all men into the social bond, then doubtless the Divine Ruler who works through our means, will accomplish more than this in the upper region in the fulness of his eternal days; but until all the wickedness of this world can be absorbed and converted, we see little hope from practice for the abnegation of the hells. They are, says Swedenborg, the prisons of the spiritual world, and every indulgence compatible with the ends of conserving and blessing the universe, is accorded to the prisoners. Moreover, the unhappy are not tormented by conscience, for they have no conscience, but their misery arises from that compression which is necessary to keep within bounds those who are not in harmony with the Divine love, and the outgoings of whose terrible life cannot be permitted by the Lord. Lusts which truth and goodness cannot recognize are the worm that never dies and the fire that is not quenched. The collision of falsehoods is the gnashing of hell's teeth. Yet the unhappiest are immortal, because they have an inalienable capacity to love and acknowledge God, and this capacity for union with Him, whether exerted or not, is the postulate of religion and the ground of immortality. The mistake hitherto has lain in conceiving the future life as too unhke the present, — as replete with divine interventions; whereas the divinity works in both worlds through human means, and in the limits which He sets to His power, creates the freedom of His children> Within that freedom filled with His I Il8 SWEDENBORG VISITS PLANETARY WORLDS; A.D. 1758.1 HOW, AND WHY. IT9 If i laws, (and freedom itself is but His widest law,) He allows mankind to help themselves, and by personal efforts, whether individual or social, to rise or fall, as the case may be. It is only where freedom works itself out and begins to die — when sin grows involuntary, and the heavenly space granted to a world is corrupt and perishing, that a Divine intervention takes place, and a new religion or reattachment to God is effected thereby. But Omnipotence meddles not with that pure power which it has previously given away. 3. But we have now to follow our spiritual traveller through extremely foreign journeys — through the planets of our own universe, and into distant solar systems. Ever since astronomy taught us that the stars are estates like our own world, we have acquired a curiosity about them ; we desire to know whether any, and what sort of persons, dwell there ; and if we can affirm inhabitants, the faith takes a heart which beats with a natural throb and foretaste of acquaint- anceship. Friendship and intercourse with the starry people is a want with every faithful child ; God gives all an affectionate curiosity ample to enfold Orion and the Dogstar. Swede nborg felt this too, for he knew as much as the astronomers, and had moreover rooted himself in the belief that a means so immense as the sun-strewn firmament was not meant for the little mankind and the little heaven of one planet, but for human races indefinite in extent, variet}', and function. Moreover, the Grand Man or heaven is so immense as to require the inhabitants of myriads of earths to constitute it; those whom our own earth supplies nourish but a patch in the skin of universal humanity; there requires immortal food for every other part, and planetary seminaries in divine profusion where men are reared. The plurality of the angels perfects heaven, just as the multitude and variety of good affections perfects the human mind Our traveller, therefore, knew that the stars were full of people, and he soon found that they were not inaccessible. One means of intercourse with other worlds is as follows. The spirits and angels deceased from each planet, are, by spiritual affinity, near^that planet. Every man also is a spirit in his inward essence ; and ' if the proper eyes be opened, can communicate with other spirits. In the higher world into which he is thus admitted, space and time are not fixed, but are states of love and thought. Now this being the case, the passage through states or variations of the mind itself takes the place of passage through spaces. Passage through states is spiritual travelling. Hence when Swedenborg was ten hours in one instance, and two days in another, in reaching certain of the planets, he implies that the changes of state in his mind whereby he approximated to the native spirits of that orb, went on for such a time, or rather were of such a quality. So also if any spirit could be brought into the same state with the spirits of Saturn, he would then be with them, because similarity of state in the spiritual world is sameness of place. Now being thus ' with the spirits of any particular earth, if the men of that earth had communication with spirits, (which Swedenborg avers to be the case with nearly every ■ planet but our own,) the traveller, through the spirits, might have intercourse with the inhabitants, and might see the surface of their earth through their eyes. It was by this circle that our author visited several worlds, his variations and approximations being directed by the Lord, all for the moral purpose that we might know experimentally that man is the end of the universe, and that where there are worlds there are men, and that we might be taught the immensity, and somewhat of the plan and constitution, of the inward heavens. "Man," says Swedenborg, "was so created, that whilst living in the world among men, he should also I20 THE RELIGION OF THE UNIVERSE. live in heaven among the angels, and, vice versa ; to the end that heaven and the world might be united in essence and action in him ; and that men might know what there is in heaven, and angels what there is in the world ; and that when men die, they might pass from vthe Lord's kingdom on earth to the Lord's kingdom in the heavens, not as into another thing, but as into the same, wherein they also were when they were living in the body." The particulars which our author has given respecting other worlds are homely enough, and more remarkable on the spiritual than on the material side. The spirits of Mercury, we learn, are the rovers of the inner universe, a curious correspondence with the style of the heathen Mercury — the messenger of the gods. They belong to a province of the memory in the Grand Man, and as the memory requires constant supplies to store it with knowledge, so the Mercurials, who are the memories of humanity, are empowered to wander about, and acquire knowledges in every place. The people of the Moon are dwarfs, and do not speak from the lungs, but from a quantity of air collected in the abdomen, because the moon has not an atmosphere like that of other earths ; which suggests the analogy of certain of the lower animals that gulp down the air, and give it out again in a peculiar manner ; among others a species of frog, which makes thereby a thundering sound like that attributed by our traveller to the Lunarians. These correspond in the Grand Man to the ensiform cartilage at the bottom of the breast bone.- It is noticeable as showing the limits of spiritual seership, that Swedenborg speaks of Saturn as the last planet of our system; his privilege of vision not enabling him to anticipate the place of Herschel. A fact to be expected. The theological particulars in the book are im- portant. We are told that the good in all worlds worship one God under a human form : that the Lord A.O. 1758.] THE HEAVENLY DOCTRINE. 121 was bom on this earth because it is the lowest and the most sensual, and hence, the fitting place for the Word to be made flesh. By virtue however of the incarnation here, the divine humanity is realized for the entire universe in the other life, all being there instructed in the reahties of redemption, and their inward ideas thereby united to that stupendous fact. Swedenborg's work now under consideration, may be characterized as a Report on the Religion of the Universe. 4. The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine is a treatise on spiritual ethics, delivering in a clear manner the practical part of the author's system. The reader of it will gain a high idea of the moral requirements that Swedenborg makes upon him. One doctrine brought out in strong relief is the superiority of the affectional to the intellectual element, the predominance of good over truth, of charity over faith, and of deeds over words, before God. Prior to Swedenborg, the human loves or affections were little considered, but he shows that they are our very life, that intelligence is their minister, and that their con- dition determines our lot in the future world. There is no point in his psychology more brilliantly vindicated than this main law of the power of love. At the end of the work we have his ideas on ecclesiastical and civil government, which are eminently those of conjoint liberty and order. The Lord's ministers are to claim no power over souls, and he who differs in opinion from the minister, is peaceat)ly to enjoy his sentiments, provided he makes no disturbance. The dignity of offices is only annexed to persons, but does not belong to them. The sovereignty itself is not in any person, but is annexed to the person. Whatever king believes contrary to this, is not wise. Absolute monarchs who believe that their subjects are slaves, to whose goods and lives they have a right, are "not kings, but tyrants. " One cannot but regret the absence of biographical 122 THE FIRE AT STOCKHOLM. details from this part of Swedenborg's history. The reason doubtless is, that whilst in London, (where we presume he spent a good share of the time from 1747 to iTS^j) ^e had no acquaintance with whom he sympathized on the subjects that now interested him. It was probably not until his theological works had been for years before the public, that he became acquainted with those English friends who have left some record of him. Previously to this, he was known only to those with whom he lodged, or had business. Mrs. Lewis, his publisher's wife, knew him; and "thought him a good and sensible man, but too apt to spiritualize things." He was also fond of the company of his printer, Mr. Hart, of Poppin's Court, Fleet Street, and used often to spend the evening there. But these worthy people contribute no particulars to our biography. Swedenborg was probably in London during the latter part of 1 758 ; the year in which the works that we have just been speaking of, were printed. We find him returning to Gottenburg from England on the 19th of July* i759> and here he gave a. public proof that he had a more spacious eyesight than was usual in his day. Immanuel Kant, the transcendental philosopher, shall be our historian of the occurrence that took place. " On Saturday, at 4 o'clock, p.m.," says Kant, " when Swedenborg arrived at Gottenburg from England, Mr. VV^illiam Castel invited hirfi to his house, together with a party of fifteen persons. About 6 o'clock Sweden- borg went out, and after a short interval returned to the company, quite pale and alarmed. He said that a dangerous fire had just broken out in Stockholm, at the Sodermalm— Gottenburg is 300 miles from Stock- holm — and that it was spreading very fast. He was restless, and went out often. He said that the house of one of his friends, whom he named, was already in ashes, and that his own was in danger. At 8 o'clock, A.D. 1758-59.1 kant's account of it. 123 after he had been out again, he joyfully exclaimed, * Thank God ! the fire is extinguished, the third door from my house.' This news occasioned great com- motion through the whole city, and particularly amongst the company in which he was. It was announced to the governor the same evening. On the Sunday morning, Swedenborg was sent for by the governor, who questioned him concerning the disaster. Swedenborg described the fire precisely, how it had begun, in what manner it had ceased, and how long it had continued. On the same day the news was spread through the city, and as the governor had thought it worthy of attention, the consternation was considerably increased ; because many were in trouble on account of their friends and property, which might have been involved in the disaster. On the Monday evening a messenger arrived at Gottenburg who was despatched during the time of the fire. In the letters brought by him, the fire was described precisely in the manner stated by Swedenborg. On the Tuesday morning the royal courier arrived at the governor's, with the melancholy intelligence of the fire, of the loss which it had occasioned, and of the houses it had damaged and ruined, not in the least differing from that which Swedenborg had given immediately it had ceased ; for the fire was extinguished at 8 o'clqck. " What can be brought forward against the authen- ticity of this occurrence ? My friend who wrote this to me, has not only examined the circumstances of this extraordinary case at Stockholm, but also, about two months ago, at Gottenburg, where he is acquainted with the most respectable houses, and where he could obtain the most authentic and complete information ; as the greatest part of the inhabitants, who are still alive, were witnesses to the memorable occurrence." Kant had sifted this matter, and also that of the Queen of Sweden (p. 1 2 7-8 below), to the utmost, by a circle of enquiries, epistolary as well as personal ; 124 VISION HAS VISION. A.D. 1759.] THE CLERGY MOVE. 125 r and his narrative is found in a letter to one Charlotte von Knobloch, a lady of quality, written in 1768, two years after Kant had attacked Swedenborg in a small work, entitled Dreams of a Ghost Seer illustrated by Dreams of Metaphysics. His account comes, there- fore, as a suitable testimony. But what proof is so good as a reappearance of the facts? Powers and events of the kind are now common enough not to excite surprise from their rarity. Mesmerism pro- duces a per centage of seers equal occasionally to such achievements. Nay, but the faculty of transcend* mg the horizon of space and the instance of time is as old as history : there have always been individuals who m vision of a higher altitude, saw the refractions of the distant and the future painted upon the curtains of the present. At any rate Swedenborg was aware of the faculty long before he became a seer. Thus in his Animal Kingdom, Part VII., p. 237, when speak- ing of the soul's state after death, he has the following, illustrative of its powers. " I need not mention," says he, "the manifest sympathies acknowledged to exist in this lower world, and which are too many to be recounted : so great being the sympathy and magnet- ism of man that communication often takes place between those who are miles apart Such statements are regarded by many as absurdities, yet experience proves their truth. Nor will I mention that the gnosts of some have been presented visibly after death and burial;" &c., &c. To account for events like Swedenborg's vision of the fire of Stockholm, (which also Robsahm says that he foretold,) we need not pierce the vault of nature; this world has perfections, mental, imponderable, and even physical, equivalent to supply the sense. The universe is telegraphically present to itself in every tittle, or it would be no universe. There are also slides of eyes in mankind as an Individual, adequate to converting into sensation all the quick correspondence that exists between things by magnetism and other kindred message- bearers. It is however only fair to Swedenborg to say, that he laid no stress on these incidental marvels, but devoted himself to bearing witness to a far more peculiar mission. There is no doubt that the rumour of this affair soon travelled to Stockholm, and coupled with the strange repute in which Swedenborg was already held, stimulated curiosity about him on his return to the capital. The clergy, as may be imagined, were not unconcerned spectators of the doings of one so intimately connected with some of the highest digni- taries of the Lutheran church. At first he had spoken freely to them of his spiritual intercourse, but perceiv- ing their displeasure excited, he became more cautious. A circumstance that occurred showed that even at this time (1760) they were longing to exercise a superintendence over him. They observed that he seldom went to church, or partook of the Holy Supper. This was owing partly to the con- trariety of the Lutheran doctrine to his own ideas, and partly, Robsahm says, to the disease of the stone which troubled him. In 1760 two bishops, his relations, remonstrated with him in a friendly manner upon his remissness. He answered that religious observances were not so necessary for him as for others, as he was associated with angels. They then represented that his example would be valuable, by which he suffered himself to be persuaded. A few days previously to receiving the Sacrament, he asked his old domestics to whom he should resort for the purpose, for " he was not much acquainted with the preachers." The elder chaplain was mentioned. Swedenborg objected that " he was a passionate man and a fiery zealot, and that he had heard him thundering from the pulpit with little satisfaction." The assistant-chaplain was then proposed, who was not so popular with the congregation. Swedenborg 126 THE UVING AND THE DEAD : said, " I prefer him to the other, for I hear that he speaks what he thinks, and by this means has lost the goodwill of his people, as generally happens in this world/' Accordingly he took the Sacrament from this curate. It was not however the clergy alone who felt an interest in watching his career, but he had become an object of curiosity to all classes. Supematuralism has charms for every society, whether atheistic or Christian, savage or civilized, scientific or poetic. May we not say, that it is the undercharm of all other interests, and that from childhood upwards the main expectation of every journey, the hope of every un- covering, the joy of every new man and bright word, is, that we may come at length somewhere upon that mortal gap which opens to the second life. Super- " naturalism in all ages has had also a commercial side, and has been cultivated as a means to regain missing property, or to discover hidden treasures. The good people of Stockholm were perhaps spiritual chiefly in this latter direction. It was in 1761 that Swedenborg was consulted on an affair of the kind by a neighbour of his, the widow of Lewis Von Marteville, who had been ambassador from Holland to Sweden! Curiosity too was a prompting motive in her visit: and she went to the seer with several ladies of her acquaintance, all eager to have "a near view of so strange a person." Her husband had paid away 25,000 Dutch guilders, and the widow being again applied to for the money, could not produce the receipt. She asked Swedenborg whether he had known her husband, to which he answered in the negative, but he promised her, on her entreaty, that if he met him in the other world, he would enquire about the receipt. Eight days afterwards Von Marteville in a dream told her where to find the receipt, as well as a hair-pin set with brilliants, which had been given up as lost. This was at 2 o'clock in the A.D. 1760-61.] WHICH IS WHICH ? 127 morning, and the widow, alarmed yet pleased, rose at once, and found the articles, as the dream described. She slept lafe in the morning. At 11 o'clock a.m. Swedenborg was announced. His first remark, before the lady could open her lips, was, that " during the preceding night he had seen Von Marteville, and had wished to converse with him, but the latter excused himself, on the ground that he must go to discover to his wife something of importance." Swedenborg added that " he then departed out of the society in which he had been for a year, and would ascend to one far happier : " owing, we presume, to his being lightened of a worldly care. This account, attested as it is by the lady herself, through the Danish General, Von E , her second husband, was noised through all Stockholm. It ought to be added, that she offered to make Swedenborg a handsome present for his services, but this he declined. It was in the same year (1761) that Louisa Ulrica, a sister of Frederick the Great of Prussia, and married to Adolphus Frederick, King of Sweden, received a letter from the Duchess of Brunswick, in which she mentioned that she had read in the Gottingen Gazette an account of a man at Stockholm who pretended to speak w4th the dead, and she wondered that the Quepn, in her correspondence, had not alluded to the subject. The Queen had no doubt heard of the Marteville affair, and this, coilpled with her sister's desires, made her wish to satisfy herself by an interview with Swedenborg. Captain Stal- hammar out of many authorities is the one whose narrative we select of what passed at that interview. "A short time," says Stalhammar, "after the death of the Prince of Prussia, Swedenborg came to court [being summoned thither by the senator. Count Scheffer]. As soon as he was perceived by the Queen, she said to him, * Well, Mr. Assessor, have you seen my brother?' Swedenborg answered, No; where- I 128 FREDERICK THE GREAT'S SISTER. upon she replied, * If you should see him, remember me to him.' In saying this, she did but jest, and had no thought of asking him for any information about her brother. Eight days afterwards, and not four-and- twenty hours, nor yet at a particular audience, Swedenborg came again to court, but so early that the Queen had not left her apartment called the white room, where she was conversing with her maids of honour and other ladies. Swedenborg did not wait for the Queen's coming out, but entered directly into her apartment, and whispered in her ear. The Queen, struck with astonishment, was taken ill, and did not recover herself for some time. After she came to herself, she said to those about her, ' There is only God and my brother who can know what he has just told me' She owned that he had spoken of her last correspondence with the prince, the subject of which was known to themselves alone." " The only weakness," adds the Captain, " of this truly honest man was his belief in the apparition of spirits ; but I knew him for many years, and I can confidently affirm, that he was as fully persuaded that he conversed with spirits as I am that I am writing at this moment. As a citizen, and as a friend, he was a man of the greatest integrity, abhorring imposture, and leading an exemplary life." Did space allow, we could produce a little volume of testimony to the truth of these narrations, as well as fill them up with several interesting particulars. But we will only add what the Chevalier Beylon records of his interview with Louisa Ulrica : *' I found an opportunity," says he, " of speaking with the Queen herself, who is now dead, concerning Swedenborg, and she told me the anecdote respecting herself and her brother with a conviction which appeared extraordinary to me. Every one who knew this truly enlightened sister of the great Frederick, will give me credit when I say, that she was by no means enthusiastic or fanatical, A.D. 1761.] THE DECEASED DENY THEIR DEATH. 129 and that her entire mental character was wholly free from such conceits. Nevertheless, she appeared to me to be so convinced of Swedenborg's supernatural intercourse with spirits, that I scarcely durst venture to intimate some doubts, and to express my suspicion of secret intrigues ; for when she perceived my suspicion she said with a royal air, ' I am not easily duped ; ' and thus she put an end to all my attempts at refutation." Swedenborg did not always comply with the requests of those who sought information about the deceased. We give here a notable instance of the rational limitation which was imposed upon these enquiries. The following question was written down by Senator Count Rudenskold, at the request of a foreign Minister : — " Pro Memoria (from 1771.) *'It is hoped that by means of M. de Sweden- borg, information may be obtained of what has become of the Prince of Saxe Coburg Saalfeld, named John William, who was lost in the year 1745, without any one having the least knowledge of his fate. Neither his age, nor anything else respecting his person, has been communicated." The following memorable answer was given by Assessor Emanuel Swedenborg with his own hand : — ''No one can find out anything concerning this, since the departed themselves do not know in what manner they died or perished in this world ; for death to them is not death, but an entrance into the other life, and a continuation of the former. They also fully believe and think that there is no death at all ; where- fore if any one is asked about his decease in the world, it seems to him as if he was asked about a thing which has not happened. Besides it is difficult to meet with any one who departed this life twenty-seven years ago ; for he is then firmly established. in some society, I 13° MEMORIALS TO THE DIET. A.D. ,761.1 AGAINST DESPOTISM AND PAPACY. 131 I '? which it is difficult for me to enter. Should I ask the angels on this subject, they have no such know- ledge at all, and as to interrogating the Lord Himself concerning it, it is too small a matter. For the rest I desire for you the Lord's blessing." But neither Swedenborg's spiritual intercourse, nor the laborious works that he was composing, were an excuse to him for neglecting the affairs of this world when opportunity required, and accordingly in 1761 we find him taking part in the deliberations of the Diet which met in January of that year. Three memorials are preserved which he presented to the Swedish parliament : one, at the opening of the Diet, congratulating the House upon its meeting, counsel- ling the redress of grievances which might otherwise enable the disaffected to impair and destroy the constitution, and especially deprecating that systematic calumny which is not less destructive to the stability of governments than to public and private character. In this paper the quiet sage expresses his preference for that mixed form of monarchy which then prevailed in Sweden, and he ends as he began it, with a power- ful appeal to the members to obviate change by the prosecution of useful reforms. In the next memorial (whether these were spoken by himself from his place we do not know) he insists upon some of the same topics, but mainly upon the preservation of the liberties of the people, and upon the French in preference to the English alliance ; the latter being incompatible, as he said, with the bond between England and Hanover, which had formerly belonged to Sweden. He forcibly expresses the evils of despotic governments, in which full play is given to the hereditary vices of the sovereign, and denounces absolutism as alike injurious to the ruler and the people, observing that as for the latter, " it is unlawful for any one to deliver over his life and property to the arbitrary power of an individual ; for of these God alone is Lord and Master, and we are only their administrators upon earth." Especially alluding to the danger in which a country stands that is thus subject to an individual, from the subtle power of the papacy, he has the following, which may serve as a specimen of his style in these documents : — " It would be tedious to enumerate all the mis- fortunes and the grievous and dreadful consequences which might happen here in the north under a despotic government ; I will mention therefore only one — popish darkness, — and will endeavour to exhibit it in its true light. "We know from experience how the Babylonian whore, which signifies the popish religion, fascinated and bewitched the reigning princes of Saxony, Cassel, and Zweibriicken ; also the king of England shortly before the house of Hanover was called to the British throne ; and how it is still dallying with the Pretender ; how in Prussia likewise it tampered with the present king, then crown-prince, through his own father : not to mention King Sigismund and Queen Christina in Sweden. We are well aware, too, how this whore is still going her rounds through the courts of reformed Christendom. If, therefore, Sweden were an absolute monarchy, and this whore, who understands so well how to dissemble, and to attire herself as a goddess, were to intrude herself into the cabinet of a future monarch, is there any reason why she should not as easily delude and infatuate him, as she did the above- mentioned kings and princes of Christendom ? What opposition would there be, what means of self- protection, especially if the army, which is now upon a standing footing, were at the disposal of the monarch ? What could bishops and priests, together with the peasantry, do, against force, against the determination of the sovereign, and against the crafty cunning of the Jesuits? Would not all heavenly light be dissipated ; would not a night of barbarian i3« DESPOTISM AND PAPACY. darkness overspread the land ; and if they would not be martyrs, must not the people bow down the neck to Satan, and become worshippers of images and idolaters ? * " The dread of this and every other slavery, which I need not here describe, must hang over us for the future, should there take place any alteration in our excellent constitution, or any suspension of our mvaluable liberty. The only guarantee and counter ch^eck agamst such calamities would be oath and conscience. Certainly if there were an oath, and the majority were sufficiently conscientious to respect it, civil and religious liberty, and all that is valuable, might, indeed, m every kingdom remain inviolate; but, on the other hand, we must bear in mind that the papal chair can dissolve all oaths, and absolve every conscience, by virtue of the keys of St. Peter. It is easy for a monarch to assert, and with every appearance of truth, that he has no thought of, or desire for, absolute rule ; but what each fosters in his heart and keeps studiously apart from the outward man, is known only to God, to himself, and to his private friends, through whom, however, what is hidden occasionally manifests itself I shudder when I reflect what may happen, and probably will happen, if private interests, subverting the general welfare into a gross darkness, should here attain the ascendency. I must observe, also, that I see no difference between a king in Sweden who possesses absolute power and an idol; for all turn themselves, heart and soul, m the same way to the one as to the other obey his will, and worship what passes from his mouth." The third memorial is upon the subject of finance, and laments the depreciation of the Swedish paper money m consequence of the suspension of cash payments. The wary senator concludes by saying that "if an empire could subsist with a representative A.D. 1761.] MEMORIAL ON SWEDISH FINANCE. 133 currency without a real currency, it would be an empire without its parallel in the world." We have no further details of Swedenborg's parliamentary career; only we, learn from Count Hopken, (for many years Prime Minister of Sweden, and during that time until the revolution in 1772 the second person in the kingdom,) that " the most solid memorials, and the best penned, at the Diet of 176 1, on matters of finance, were presented by Swedenborg ; in one of which he refuted a large work in 4to on the same subject, quoted the corresponding passages of it, and all in less than one sheet." It appears also that he was a member of the Secret Committee of the Diet, an office to which only the most sage and virtuous were elected. When we consider the mountain of obloquy which rested at that day on a spirit seer, who moreover announced in his own person a new com- mission from the x\lmighty, we must grant that there was a wise deportment in Swedenborg, an extra- ordinary helpfulness for the public service, to maintain him in such a position in the assembly of his nation ; nor can it fail to reflect credit upon Sweden herself that she so far appreciated her remarkable son as not to accuse him of any disqualifying madness in the exercise of his public functions. That tolerance of the seer in the statesman heralds a new code of sanity, in which the clearest sight and the most uncommon gifts will no longer be held to be less sound, than dull routine of eye and understanding, provided the stranger accompaniments are backed by virtue and common sense. ** During the sittings of the Imperial Diet," says Robsahra, "he took great interest in hearing what was done in his absence in the House of Nobles, in which, as the head of his family, he had a right to a seat ; but when he perceived that hatred, envy and self-interest reigned there, he was seldom after seen m the House. In conversation he freely expressed his T34 HATRED, ENVY AND SELF-INTEREST, POLITICAL. disapprobation of the discord that prevailed in the Diet, and adhered to neither of the parties there, but loved truth and justice in all his feelings and actions." ^ The discord to which Robsahm alludes as so dis- tasteful to Swedenborg, was doubtless that produced by the factions of the Hats and Caps, the former designating the French, the latter the Russian intrigue in Sweden. These parties kept the nation in a constant ferment, and the thraldom of the king Adolphus Frederic, by the nobles, was carried to an extent that produced a threat of abdication in 1768 A counter-revolution took place in the reign of his son, Gustavus III., who in 1772, supported by the army and the body of the people, reestablished the relative powers of the various branches of government nearly as before 1680. To return from this digression, we now recite an anecdote which makes it appear that Swedenborg had passed into Holland before July, 1762. "I u^s in Amsterdam," said an informant of Jung Stilling, " in the year 1762 in a company in which Swedenborg was present, on the very day that Peter the Third - Emperor of Russia, died. In the midst of our con- versation Swedenborg's countenance changed, and it was ev-ident that his soul was no longer there, and that something extraordinary was passing in him. As soon as he came to himself again, he was asked what had happened to him. He would not at first com- • municate it, but at length, after being repeatedly pressed, he said, * This very hour, the Emperor Peter HI. has died m his prison,'— mentioning at the same time the manner of his death. * Gentlemen will please to note down the day, that they may be able to compare it with the intelligence of his death in the newspapers.* The latter subsequentlv announced the Emperor s death as having taken place on that A.D. 1762-63.1 THE GODHEAD OF CHRIST. 13s In 1763* our author published at Amsterdam the following six works :— i. T/ie Doctrine of the New Jerusalem respecting the Lord. 2. The Doctrine of the New Jerusalem respecting the Sacred Scripture. 3. TJu Doctrine of the New Jerusalem respecting Faith. 4. The Doctrine of Life for the New Jerusalem. 5. Continua- tion respecting the Last Judgment and the Destruction of Babylon, 6. Angelic Wisdom concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom. We have now to devote a brief attention to the contents of these The Doctrine of the Lord contains our author's scriptural induction of the divinity of Christ, of the personality of the divine nature, and of the fact and meaning of the incarnation. The theist asks the question. What is God? but Swedenborg, the deeper and more childlike question. Who is God? one which seems very infantine to our theological artificiality and old want of innocence. In this work the Godhead of our Saviour is made to rest upon the whole breadth of Scripture authority ; and is presented as the last principle and the highest theory of the Christian faith. The author does not proceed by the erection of particular texts into standards, but elicits his results from the general face of revelation. His views of the Trinity are given with clearness, and their substance is, that there is a trinity (not of persons, but) of person, in the Godhead, and that Christ is the Person in whom the trinal fulness dwells. In this creed. Deity is the essential and infinite Man, presented to the perceptive love of the eariiest races, but to the senses of the latest. If God can be in contact with our highest faculties,— can create Himself into the sphere of our hearts and minds,— * It was in this year that Swedenborg's article on Inlaying (above, p. 41) appeared in the Transactions of the Royal Academy at Stockholm : probably he had communicated it to that body before he set out on his voyage to Holland* / 136 WHO IS GOD? there is no limiting His power to descend to our other faculties, and to become extant as a man among men, — as a part of the world among other parts.* Nay, by the rules of the soundest philosophy, we ought to look for Him in this field, and hence the question H^^o He IS ? Which man is the Lord ? becomes para- mount. Now when the first bond was broken— when the eldest religion perished— from that moment was another bond required, and an incarnation was necessary. This was seen by the ancient people, and as a part of the divine logic of creation, they expected the Messiah, and loved to have posterity because the stream of childhood ran towards the second Adam, Who was to be born in the fulness of time. He came at the end of the Jewish church, when the last link of the old covenant was broken, and He Himself con- stituted a new and everlasting covenant, uniting man by his very senses with an object "divinely sensual"— with God Himself manifest in the flesh. There had been upon this earth a succession of churches, each with its own bond, or its peculiar religion. The Adamic church— the Adam of Genesis —was a church of celestial love, with wisdom radiat- ing from the inmost heart, in harmony, with the paradisal creation, and naming the creatures after Its own truth. This was Eden, the only heaven which has yet existed upon earth. To this elevated church the Lord was a divinely angelic man, seen by celestial perceptions, and even represented to the senses; for the senses opened into heaven. This church descended through many periods, which are typified in the W^ord as the posterity of Adam, a definite genealogy of celestial-spiritual states; and its consummation was • If God can he hrs/in'/ua/e, surely He can also be imanmte • for spirit IS more botlily than flesh. To deny the possibility of the Incarnation, is a denial throughout the soul of the possibility of God s presence, and a resolution of all the religious ideas into a Deihc selfishness, such perhaps as Fichte preached. A.D. 1763.1 THE SUCCESSION OF CHURCHES. 137 the flood, when it perished, and only Noah and his sons — a lower or spiritual church — survived that suffocation whereby the race was extinguished so far as breathing the highest atmosphere of love was concerned; the Noachists however living in a new dispensation, to respire a secondary religion. Every such declension is a veritable drowning, in which the higher perceptions cease, and a certain prepared remnant of the universal humanity survives to people a new dr)^ land on a lower level. The celestial church had for its spring spontaneous love ; the spiritual church, on the other hand, conscience. Even the latter, however, did not stand, but its decay is written from Noah to Abraham, when "the angel of Jehovah " was no longer manifested to any faculty. The two realities of the church, love, and conscience as a ground of faith, having been destroyed in the soul, a church of formalities was the only descent remaining, and this was the Jewish dispensation, which however was not a church, but only the representation of one. Obedience was the spring of this last covenant, and so long as the people kept it, natural and national blessings were given them from on high. At length. even obedience came to an end, and neither victories in war, nor harvests divinely given, nor terrors denounced by prophets, nor actual evil fortune, could keep the people to their bond. The basis of creation could no longer support the falling super- structure. The resources of finite humanity were exhausted, and it only remained for Him who was the Creator, to become the Redeemer— for Him who was the Alpha, to become the Omega of His work. He came into the world by the world's ways of birth, that He might absorb the world, and be under it sustaining as above it creating, — that is to say, be All in all, the First and the Last. The infinite entered the real world by the real means — by the gates of generation, and the Lord became incarnate through 138 INCARNATION AND REDEMPTION. A.D. 1763.1 GOD IS AN INFINITE MAN. 139 if the Virgin Mary. All His progress also was real, and through mundane laws; and thus His sensual and maternal humanity was united with His divinity by the like trials— by the like education,— as we our- selves experience in the regeneration. Swedenborg's view of the Lord's life is indeed totally practical, and the life of every regenerating man is an image of that process whereby the maternal humanity became a divme humanity, the Son of God, God with us, Jesus Christ, God and man. The subject cannot be thought of from metaphysical postulates, but only from a life m harmony with it, that is to say, from the process whereby each man subdues his own sensuality and evil, unites his outward with his inward mmd, and finally becomes a spiritual person even in whatever pertains to the exercise of his senses. In the Lord however all that which in us is finite, was, and is, infinite ; and thus instead, like us of only subduing those hellish minds which are mimediate to ourselves, His redeeming victories over selfishness and worldliness, subjugated all that is hellish— m the language of Swedenborg, all the hells : and now holds them, for whosoever lives in, and to Him, in everlasting subjugation. This is redemption, and this was the final purpose for which the Lord assumed humanity, and appeared upon this earth. His operations upon which extend through all systems of worlds, and from eternity to eternity. These are the stages through which the Lord presented Himself according to our need, first as God-angel, and lastly as a God-man. ^ The trinity then is in, and from, Jesus Christ, the new name of our God. The Father is His divine love ; the Son is His divine wisdom, that is to say, the divinely human form in which He is self-adapted to His creatures, or a personal God ; the Holy Spirit is the influence which He communicates to individuals and churches. This trinity is imaged in the soul body, and operation of every man. The Father is inaccessible to us out of Christ, even as our own souls are not to be reached by others but through our bodies. All worship therefore is to be directed to Jesus Christ alone ; and in the heavens the wisest angels know no other father. Thus there is oneness and body in our adoration. The Divine Love and Wisdom^ which we notice next, furnishes the rational counterpart to the Doctrine of tJie Lord. It is a treatise on the divine attributes, in which affirmation and self-evidence are the method, and the truly human testifies of the divine. Man, it is clear, must think of God as a man — must think from his own experience towards divine virtues — from his own deeds towards God's deeds, which are creation. The must in this case is a necessity of our being, which is the same thing as to say, that it is God's ordinance, and the true method. It is there- fore a verity substantial as our souls, nay consubstantial with their Maker. No idealism here intervenes, but we touch the solidity of eternal truth, and in our minds and bodies we have an attestation and vision of the Creator. But if God be the infinite man, the universe which proceeds from Him must represent man in an image, and all the creatures must likewise so represent. Mineral, vegetable and animal forms, nay atmospheres, planets and suns, are then nothing less than so many means and tendencies to man, on different stages of the transit, and finite man resumes them all, proclaims visibly their end, and may connect them with their fountain. It is throughout a system of correspondences, all depending upon the activity of a personal God, as the substance of the latter depends upon the intervention of God in history, as Jesus Christ. Remove from the centre of the system the position that God is a man, and He becomes necessarily unintelligible to mankind ; He has made them think of Him otherwise than as He is ; they com 140 THE DOCTRINE OF DISCRETE DEGREES. municate with Him by no religion, but the beginning of their knowledge is darkness, its object a mere notion, and their love falls into a void : there is in short no correspondence between the Creator and any creature. Maintain however that master position, and humanity is the way to the Divine Humanity, the high road of the living truth. The path by which God passes through heaven into nature is laid down in distinct or discrete degrees^ and "the doctrine of degrees" furnishes a principal instrument with Swedenborg in these elucidations. Degrees are the separate steps of forms or substances, the measured walk of the creative forces ; thus the will in one degree is the understanding in the next, and the body in the third : the animal in the highest is the vegetable in the second, and the mineral in > the lowest : and all these are one, like soul and body; and are united, and each uses the lower, by the handles of its harmony with inferior utilities ; just as a man is united with, and makes use of, the various instruments which extend the powers of his mind and arms through nature. The world therefore is full of interval and freedom, and in the movements of each creature, whereby it lays hold of whatever supports it, the whole becomes actively one, and marches forward in the realms of use, where it meets the Omnipotent again. The Doctrine of Discrete Degrees is of inexhaustible interest, and merits long consideration. It furnishes a divinely revealed distinction between Man and Animals; a barrier that cannot be overpassed, and will be an impregnable position in the coming time against the assaults of materialism, which places all natures in the same plane. It exhibits the steps by which the Creator evolves the Creation from Himself. It is the key to the effects of Man's regeneration in the natural w^orld, which if it takes place, opens in him the higher or ce}^slial and spiritual degrees, A.D. 1763.] THE DOCTRINE OF DISCRETE DEGREES. I4I though unconsciously to himself while here ; but consciously when he enters the spiritual world. On the other hand, if his native spiritual and celestial degrees are not opened, and evil of life keeps them shut, he remains an infernal natural man after death, and is not a living but a " dead man ; " and though he still survives, and has his own delights of evil, he is said to be " lost." The whole subject is so important that we leave it to Swedenborg himself to state it from the Divine Love and Wisdom. "These three degrees with the angels are named CELESTIAL, SPIRITUAL, and NATURAL; and for them the celestial degree is the degree of love, the spiritual degree is the degree of wisdom, and the natural degree is the degree of uses. The cause why these degrees are so named is, that the heavens are distinguished into two kingdoms, and the one kingdom is named the celestial, and the other the spiritual kingdom ; to which is added a third kingdom, which is occupied by men in the world, and this is the natural kingdom. And the angels of whom the celestial kingdom consists, are in love ; and the angels of whom the spiritual kingdom consists, are in wisdom ; but men in the world are in uses : and therefore these kingdoms are conjoined. How it is to be understood that men are in uses will be declared in the next Part. "It has been told me out of heaven, that in the Lord from eternity. Who is Jehovah, before the assumption of the Human in the world, there were the two prior degrees actually, and the third degree in potency, such also as they are with the angels ; but that after the assumption of the Human in the world. He also put on the third degree, which is called the natural, and that by this He was made man like to a man in the world ; yet with the difference that this degree, like the prior degree, is infinite and » 142 THE DOCTRINE OF DISCREIj: DEGREES. uncreate; but that those degrees in angel and in man are finited and created For the Divine, which had filled all spaces apart from space (Nos. 69 to 72), penetrated to the very ultimates of nature. But before the assumption of the Human, the Divine influx into the natural degree was mediate through the angelic heavens, but after the assumption immediate from Himself. Which is the cause that all the churches in the world before His Advent were representative of spiritual and celestial things, but after His Advent they were made natural, spiritual and celestial, and representative worship was abolished. This again was the cause that the sun of the angelic heaven, which, as was said above, is the prime pro- ceeding of His Divine Love and Divine \\'isdom, after the assumption of the Human shone forth in more eminent beam and splendour than before the assumption. This also is understood by these words in Isaiah : * In that day the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days* (xxx. 26). These things are said of the state 'of heaven and the church after the Lord's advent into the world. And in the Apocalypse: *The face of the Son of Man was as the sun shineth in his strength ' (i. 16). And elsewhere, as in Isaiah Ix. 20 ; 2 Sam. xxiii. 3, 4 : Matt. xvii. i, 2. The mediate illustration of men through the angelic heaven, which existed before the coming of the Lord, may be compared to the light of the moon which is the mediate light of the sun ; and forasmuch as this light after His coming was made immediate, it is said in Isaiah that *the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun ; ' and by Da\'id : * In His day shall the righteous flourish, and abundance of peace until there is no longer any moon ' (Ps. Ixxii. 7) : this also is spoken of the Lord." •*So long as man lives in the world, he knows A.D.1763.] DEVOLUTION OF LIVING FORMS. M3 nothing of the opening of these degrees within him. The cause is that he is then in the natural degree, which is the uUimate, and out of that he then thinks,' wills, speaks and acts; and the spiritual degree' which is interior, does not communicate with the natural degree by continuity, but by correspondences ; and communication by correspondences is not sensibly felL Nevertheless when a man has put off the natural degree, which is the case when he dies, he then comes into that degree which has been opened with him in the world ; he in whom the spiritual degree has been opened, into the spiritual degree : he in whom the celestial degree, into the celestial. He who comes after death into the spiritual degree*, no longer thinks, wills, speaks and acts naturally, but spiritually; and he who comes into the celestial degree, thinks, wills, speaks and acts according to his degree. And because communication between the three degrees is possible only through correspond- ences, therefore the differences of love, wisdom and use according to these degrees are such that they have no community with each other through any kind of continuity. From these things it is plain that there are three degrees of altitude for roan, and that they may be opened successively." One other extract on the evolution, nature and position of animal life in both the worlds : a subject treated in the obverse by Darwin and his school. "I heard two Presidents of the English Royal Societ}% Sir Hans Sloane and Martin Folkes, con- versing together in the spiritual world concerning the existence of seeds and ova, and concerning the pro- ductions out of these in earths. The former ascribed the whole to nature, and contended that power and force for producing such effects by means of the heat of the sun had been committed to nature by creation. The other maintained that the force is continuous from God the Creator in nature. To settle the con- 144 THE DOCTRINE OF THE WORD. A.D.1763.J THE BIBLE AND THE WORD. tention, a beautiful bird was shown to Sir Hans Sloane, and he was asked to look at it carefully, and to notice whether it differed in the smallest particular from a similar bird on earth. He held it in his hand, examined it, and said that there was no 'differ- ence. He knew all the time that it was no other than an affection of a certain angel represented outside of him as a bird, and that it would vanish or cease with his affection ; which also happened. Sir Hans Sloane was convinced by this experiment, that nature con- tributes absolutely nothing to the production of vegetables and animals, but that that which flows in from the spiritual world into the natural does all. He said that if that bird in its minimal parts were filled in with corresponding matters from the world, and so were fixed, it would be a durable bird, like the birds on earth. And that the case is similar with those things which are from hell. To this he added, that if he had known what he now knew of the spiritual world, he would have ascribed to nature no more than this, that it subserves the spiritual which is from God, for fixing those thingti which inflow continually into nature." The Doctrine of the Sacred Scripture is the doctrine of the Lord, and of the manhood of God, in its middle form, for the Word is the wisdom whereby both the world was made and man is regenerated. It is a law of divine order, that whatever is omnipresent and all prevalent, is also in time centred in its own form ; for no creative attribute is lost by difi"usion, but reappears in fuller splendour when its orb is complete. This is the order of the incarnation. And so also when the Word has created all things, and moved through humanity, when deep has called unto deep, and speech has overflowed from human tongues, the same Word takes at last a form among its creatures, and appears among our words as the Book of God. Its form in this case is determined by MS those to whom it comes. It is given in the lowest speech, that it may contain all speech, and be adequate to the whole purpose of redeeming mankind. Such a Word IS the Bible. Before the present Bible, how- ^ever, there existed an ancient AVord, (still extant according to Swedenborg, in Great Tartary,) of which the Book of Jashur, the Wars of Jehovah, and the li-nunciations formed part : this was the divine voice to an earlier humanity. The Word which we now possess IS written in four styles. The first is by pure correspondences thrown into a historical series: of this character are the first eleven chapters of Genesis narrating down to the call of Abraham. The second . style is the historical, consisting of true historical facts ; but containing a spiritual sense. The third style is the prophetical The fourth style is that of the Psalms, between the prophetical style and common speech. • It is the divine sense within the letter that constitutes the holiness of the Bible: those books that are wanting in this sense are not divine. The following books are the present Word. " The five books of Moses, the book of Joshua, the book of Judges, the two books of Samuel, the two books of Kings * the Psalms of David, the Prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, the Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk* ^phaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi ; and in the New Testament, the four Evangelists, Matthew Mark, Luke, John ; and lastly the Apocalypse." ' The Word exists in the heavens equally as upon the earth, but m its spiritual and celestial sense. Its stupendous powers and properties are there evident examples of which are given by Swedenborg. If it is read m holy moods, heaven sympathizes; the devout mmd enters it as a Shekinah, and is angel-haunted • when love and innocence read it upon earth, its inward, hfe is perused equivalently by special angels K ■\ -,«,v ^ f borg, .4re unknown in hcave„"^%h'"^' ^^^'^^"- I samts Mith earthly nam« h?,^ . ^^''^^ "« no ^ more or less. God's T, 11 ^1"' T'^' ^l"""'. scarlet Moses, Davd or lohn , ^°'>'' ''"' Abraham. ourselves, en itled J nn' ^ P''""- """rtals like ■ their office's £ a ?de°nd'X'°r'"^'=^?''°" ^^'^^ ■ put off. the men ' iftr^l v '^'\'"<^ '"*'8"'^ n^e so for a time and a „,; '•'^°'^'' °'"' '"-■««" "<= only •. after GodWn heart" for ^J!%^^'='>: """^ '^ "'^ "«" best. Holin'ss if not Tntolv d""' Th ''f "^^ ^°'' chosen people of God.^vere d ^scn bcT'uso^tl,?' ''" the worst of Deonl/> fr.r ,„ ,"'"■". occiuse they were bottom. In admft,?;/ thf r'™P"u" ^^'""^ ^' 'be Word, we nd ouSf of ,hf n-. ,"'" ^'^'"'''^ °f 'he idiosyncrasies and we fnL .P'"''^ *'""="' ^"^ their was ^,roduced throuRh fhTm h "' "'" ^'^^ ^^'°'d in the lowest stratuAtan'&tor"""'' °""' , moJesofTntSSvlol' '° •"'=""°" "^^ -^"0"^ \y Swedenb^';?^^^:'-;;--. eu.) r.^^^^^^ • letter of the Scrintnm o„ i i • i , ^^^ ^"^ the experienced' I "C'in^^rtS:? s^l'Thf ^'^° that they cLmtr""':>''^irh' 'mVt^T ''•'"? philosophy. We Mn ^„i., t ' metaphysica reader,ZswedeSorrha^3t°r:?^ """ify '° the the experimental or reaf and Mhw" t^'I '.^^"^^ '"''"n much in the Bible°uS\h"e'sSw cfv^S^fLt^ !? for with a scientific aim ' '^ '°°''ed iLnZ JhTEoltK""' 'It' Swedenborg's Chr^ndofarfRr^^^^^ and hfothSostiri'hC'" '^- '""'"e^ "f P-"' wntmgs merely, and not wrTtte„' b V^°l'?^: iM » aiiii if) ii| ii iimry, Our crotchet of the abstract nobleness of spirits receives there a rude shock. Our fathers' souls are no better than our- selves ; no less mean and no less bodily ; and their occupations are often more unworthy than our own. A large part of their doings reads like police reports. Even the angels are but good men in a favouring sphere : we may not worship* them, for they do not deserve it; at best, they are of our brethren, the prophets. It is very matter-of-fact. Death is no change in substantials. The same problems recur after it, and man is left to solve them. Nothing but goodness and truth are thriving. There is no rest be- yond the tomb but in the peace of God which was rest before it This is the last extension of ethics, and while it deprives the grave of every vulgar terror, it lends it the terrors of this wicked world, which itself is the reign and empire of the dead. Moreover while the D/ary abolishes our si)iritual presumptions, it justifies to nearly the whole extent the low senti- mental credence on ghostly subjects, as well as the traditions and the fears of simple mankind. The -'S«p«ppaMmi r i 'id . 1*1 - .1 fr' A.U. X747-1764.J swedenborg's spiritual diary, 155 earthly soul cleaves to the ground and gravitates earthwards, dragging the chain of the impure affections contracted in the world ; spirits haunt their old re- membered places, attached by undying ideas : hatred, - revenge, pride and lust persist in their cancerous spreading, and wear away the incurable heart strings : infidelity denies God most in spirit and the spiritual world ; nay, staked on death it ignores eternity in the eternal state with gnashing teeth and hideous clenches : and the proof of spirit and immortal life IS farther off than ever. The regime of the workhouse, the hospital and the madhouse is erected into a remorseless universe, self-fitted with steel fingers and awful chirurgery ; and no hope lies either in sorrow or poverty, but only in one divine religion, which hell excludes with all its might. Human nature quails before such tremendous moralities: freedom tries to abjure the Hfe that it is, and calls upon the mountains and rocks to cover and to crush it. A new phase appears in the final state ; the, memory of the skies is lost; baseness accepts its lot, and vile uses are compulsory : wasting ensues to compressed limb and ' faculty, and the evil spirit descends to his mineral estate, a living atom of the second death. Impossi- bility is the stone of his heart, and crookedness the partner of his understanding. He is still associated with his like in male and female company, and he and his, in the charry light of hell, which is the very falsity of evil, are not unhandsome to themselves. Such is the illusive varnish which in mercy drapes the essential ill-favour of devils and satans. We cannot dismiss the jDiary without observing ' how true Swedenborg is to himself in a record whose publication he did not contemplate. His public words are at one with his secret thoughts ; he is as grave in heart as in deportment. To one who has perused the work, the question of sincerity never more occurs : he would as soon moot the sincerity of a tree. And mmim0fif » tf * ) * ' >> j i j i' ti i i i ' i ■■"■Cs' ■'-/> ..V*