AMONG eminent persons, those who are most dear to men are not of the class
which the economist calls producers: they have nothing in their hands; they
have not cultivated corn, nor made bread; they have not led out a colony,
nor invented a loom. A higher class, in the estimation and love of this
city-building market-going race of mankind, are the poets, who, from the
intellectual kingdom, feed the thought and imagination with ideas and
pictures which raise men out of the world of corn and money, and console
them for the shortcomings of the day and the meanness of labor and traffic.
Then, also, the philosopher has his value, who flatters the intellect of
this laborer by engaging him with subtleties which instruct him in new
faculties. Others may build cities; he is to understand them and keep them
in awe. But there is a class who lead us into another region,- the world of
morals or of will. What is singular about this region of thought is its
claim. Wherever the sentiment of right comes in, it takes precedence of
every thing else. For other things, I make poetry of them; but the moral
sentiment makes poetry of me.

I have sometimes thought that he would render the greatest service to modern
criticism, who should draw the line of relation that subsists between
Shakespeare and Swedenborg. The human mind stands ever in perplexity,
demanding intellect, demanding sanctity, impatient equally of each without
the other. The reconciler has not yet appeared. If we tire of the saints,
Shakespeare is our city of refuge. Yet the instincts presently teach that
the problem of essence must take precedence of all others;- the questions of
Whence? What? and Whither? and the solution of these must be in a life, and
not in a book. A drama or poem is a proximate or oblique reply; but Moses,
Menu, Jesus, work directly on this problem. The atmosphere of moral
sentiment is a region of grandeur which reduces all material magnificence to
toys, yet opens to every wretch that has reason the doors of the universe.
Almost with a fierce haste it lays its empire on the man. In the language of
the Koran, "God said, The heaven and the earth and all that is between them,
think ye that we created them in jest, and that ye shall not return to us?"
It is the kingdom of the will, and by inspiring the will, which is the seat
of personality, seems to convert the universe into a person;-

"The realms of being to no other bow,
Not only all are thine, but all are Thou."

All men are commanded by the saint. The Koran makes a distinct class of
those who are by nature good, and whose goodness has an influence on others,
and pronounces this class to be the aim of creation: the other classes are
admitted to the feast of being, only as following in the train of this. And
the Persian poet exclaims to a soul of this kind,-

"Go boldly forth, and feast on being's banquet;
Thou art the called,- the rest admitted with thee."

The privilege of this caste is an access to the secrets and structure of
nature by some higher method than by experience. In common parlance, what
one man is said to learn by experience, a man of extraordinary sagacity is
said, without experience, to divine. The Arabians say, that Abul Khain, the
mystic, and Abu Ali Seena, the philosopher, conferred together; and, on
parting, the philosopher said, "All that he sees, I know"; and the mystic
said, "All that he knows, I see." If one should ask the reason of this
intuition, the solution would lead us into that property which Plato denoted
as Reminiscence, and which is implied by the Bramins in the tenet of
Transmigration. The soul having been often born, or, as the Hindoos say,
"travelling the path of existence through thousands of births," having
beheld the things which are here, those which are in heaven and those which
are beneath, there is nothing of which she has not gained the knowledge: no
wonder that she is able to recollect, in regard to any one thing, what
formerly she knew. "For, all things in nature being linked and related, and
the soul having heretofore known all, nothing hinders but that any man who
has recalled to mind, or according to the common phrase has learned, one
thing only, should of himself recover all his ancient knowledge, and find
out again all the rest, if he have but courage and faint not in the midst of
his researches. For inquiry and learning is reminiscence all."*(17) How much
more, if he that inquires be a holy and godlike soul For by being
assimilated to the original soul, by whom and after whom all things subsist,
the soul of man does then easily flow into all things, and all things flow
into it: they mix; and he is present and sympathetic with their structure
and law.

This path is difficult, secret and beset with terror. The ancients called it
ecstasy or absence,- a getting out of their bodies to think. All religious
history contains traces of the trance of saints,- a beatitude, but without
any sign of joy; earnest, solitary, even sad; "the flight," Plotinus called
it, "of the alone to the alone"; Muesiz, the closing of the eyes,- whence
our word, Mystic. The trances of Socrates, Plotinus, Porphyry, Behmen,
Bunyan, Fox, Pascal, Guyon, Swedenborg, will readily come to mind. But what
as readily comes to mind is the accompaniment of disease. This beatitude
comes in terror, and with shocks to the mind of the receiver.

"It o'erinforms the tenement of clay,"

and drives the man mad; or gives a certain violent bias which taints his
judgment. In the chief examples of religious illumination somewhat morbid
has mingled, in spite of the unquestionable increase of mental power. Must
the highest good drag after it a quality which neutralizes and discredits
it?-

"Indeed, it takes
From our achievements, when performed at height,
The pith and marrow of our attribute."

Shall we say, that the economical mother disburses so much earth and so much
fire, by weight and meter, to make a man, and will not add a pennyweight,
though a nation is perishing for a leader? Therefore the men of God
purchased their science by folly or pain. If you will have pure carbon,
carbuncle, or diamond, to make the brain transparent, the trunk and organs
shall be so much the grosser: instead of porcelain they are potter's earth,
clay, or mud.

In modern times no such remarkable example of this introverted mind has
occurred as in Emanuel Swedenborg, born in Stockholm, in 1688. This man, who
appeared to his contemporaries a visionary and elixir of moonbeams, no doubt
led the most real life of any man then in the world: and now, when the royal
and ducal Frederics, Christians and Brunswicks of that day have slid into
oblivion, he begins to spread himself into the minds of thousands. As
happens in great men, he seemed, by the variety and amount of his powers, to
be a composition of several persons,- like the giant fruits which are
matured in gardens by the union of four or five single blossoms. His frame
is on a larger scale and possesses the advantages of size. As it is easier
to see the reflection of the great sphere in large globes, though defaced by
some crack or blemish, than in drops of water, so men of large calibre,
though with some eccentricity or madness, like Pascal or Newton, help us
more than balanced mediocre minds.

His youth and training could not fail to be extraordinary. Such a boy could
not whistle or dance, but goes grubbing into mines and mountains, prying
into chemistry and optics, physiology, mathematics and astronomy, to find
images fit for the measure of his versatile and capacious brain. He was a
scholar from a child, and was educated at Upsala. At the age of twenty-eight
he was made Assessor of the Board of Mines by Charles XII. In 1716, he left
home for four years and visited the universities of England, Holland, France
and Germany. He performed a notable feat of engineering in 1718, at the
siege of Frederikshald, by hauling two galleys, five boats and a sloop, some
fourteen English miles overland, for the royal service. In 1721 he journeyed
over Europe to examine mines and smelting works. He published in 1716 his
Daedalus Hyperboreus, and from this time for the next thirty years was
employed in the composition and publication of his scientific works. With
the like force he threw himself into theology. In 1743, when he was
fifty-four years old, what is called his illumination began. All his
metallurgy and transportation of ships overland was absorbed into this
ecstasy. He ceased to publish any more scientific books, withdrew from his
practical labors and devoted himself to the writing and publication of his
voluminous theological works, which were printed at his own expense, or at
that of the Duke of Brunswick or other prince, at Dresden, Leipsic, London,
or Amsterdam. Later, he resigned his office of Assessor: the salary attached
to this office continued to be paid to him during his life. His duties had
brought him into intimate acquaintance with King Charles XII, by whom he was
much consulted and honored. The like favor was continued to him by his
successor. At the Diet of 1751, Count Hopken says, the most solid memorials
on finance were from his pen. In Sweden he appears to have attracted a
marked regard. His rare science and practical skill, and the added fame of
second sight and extraordinary religious knowledge and gifts, drew to him
queens, nobles, clergy, shipmasters and people about the ports through which
he was wont to pass in his many voyages. The clergy interfered a little with
the importation and publication of his religious works, but he seems to have
kept the friendship of men in power. He was never married. He had great
modesty and gentleness of bearing. His habits were simple; he lived on
bread, milk and vegetables; he lived in a house situated in a large garden;
he went several times to England, where he does not seem to have attracted
any attention whatever from the learned or the eminent; and died at London,
March 29, 1772, of apoplexy, in his eighty-fifth year. He is described, when
in London, as a man of a quiet, clerical habit, not averse to tea and
coffee, and kind to children. He wore a sword when in full velvet dress,
and, whenever he walked out, carried a gold-headed cane. There is a common
portrait of him in antique coat and wig, but the face has a wandering or
vacant air.

The genius which was to penetrate the science of the age with a far more
subtle science; to pass the bounds of space and time, venture into the dim
spirit-realm, and attempt to establish a new religion in the world,- began
its lessons in quarries and forges, in the smelting-pot and crucible, in
ship-yards and dissecting-rooms. No one man is perhaps able to judge of the
merits of his works on so many subjects. One is glad to learn that his books
on mines and metals are held in the highest esteem by those who understand
these matters. It seems that he anticipated much science of the nineteenth
century; anticipated, in astronomy, the discovery of the seventh planet,-
but, unhappily, not also of the eighth; anticipated the views of modern
astronomy in regard to the generation of earths by the sun; in magnetism,
some important experiments and conclusions of later students; in chemistry,
the atomic theory; in anatomy, the discoveries of Schlichting, Monro and
Wilson; and first demonstrated the office of the lungs. His excellent
English editor magnanimously lays no stress on his discoveries, since he was
too great to care to be original; and we are to judge, by what he can spare,
of what remains.

A colossal soul, he lies vast abroad on his times, uncomprehended by them,
and requires a long focal distance to be seen; suggests, as Aristotle,
Bacon, Selden,*(18) Humboldt, that a certain vastness of learning, or quasi
omnipresence of the human soul in nature, is possible. His superb
speculation, as from a tower, over nature and arts, without ever losing
sight of the texture and sequence of things, almost realizes his own
picture, in the "Principia," of the original integrity of man. Over and
above the merit of his particular discoveries, is the capital merit of his
self-equality. A drop of water has the properties of the sea, but cannot
exhibit a storm. There is beauty of a concert, as well as of a flute;
strength of a host, as well as of a hero; and, in Swedenborg, those who are
best acquainted with modern books will most admire the merit of mass. One of
the missouriums and mastodons of literature, he is not to be measured by
whole colleges of ordinary scholars. His stalwart presence would flutter the
gowns of an university. Our books are false by being fragmentary: their
sentences are bonmots, and not parts of natural discourse; childish
expressions of surprise or pleasure in nature; or, worse, owing a brief
notoriety to their petulance, or aversion from the order of nature;- being
some curiosity or oddity, designedly not in harmony with nature and
purposely framed to excite surprise, as jugglers do by concealing their
means. But Swedenborg is systematic and respective of the world in every
sentence; all the means are orderly given; his faculties work with
astronomic punctuality, and this admirable writing is pure from all pertness
or egotism.

Swedenborg was born into an atmosphere of great ideas. It is hard to say
what was his own: yet his life was dignified by noblest pictures of the
universe. The robust Aristotelian method, with its breadth and adequateness,
shaming our sterile and linear logic by its genial radiation, conversant
with series and degree, with effects and ends, skilful to discriminate power
from form, essence from accident, and opening, by its terminology and
definition, high roads into nature, had trained a race of athletic
philosophers. Harvey had shown the circulation of the blood; Gilbert had
shown that the earth was a magnet; Descartes, taught by Gilbert's magnet,
with its vortex, spiral and polarity, had filled Europe with the leading
thought of vortical motion, as the secret of nature. Newton, in the year in
which Swedenborg was born, published the "Principia," and established the
universal gravity. Malpighi,*(19) following the high doctrines of
Hippocrates, Leucippus*(20) and Lucretius, had given emphasis to the dogma
that nature works in leasts,- "tota in minimis existit natura." Unrivalled
dissectors, Swammerdam, Leuwenhoek, Winslow, Eustachius, Heister, Vesalius,
Boerhaave,*(21) had left nothing for scalpel or microscope to reveal in
human or comparative anatomy: Linnaeus, his contemporary, was affirming, in
his beautiful science, that "Nature is always like herself"; and, lastly,
the nobility of method, the largest application of principles, had been
exhibited by Leibnitz*(22) and Christian Wolff, in cosmology; whilst Locke
and Grotius had drawn the moral argument. What was left for a genius of the
largest calibre but to go over their ground and verify and unite? It is easy
to see, in these minds, the origin of Swedenborg's studies, and the
suggestion of his problems. He had a capacity to entertain and vivify these
volumes of thought. Yet the proximity of these geniuses, one or other of
whom had introduced all his leading ideas, makes Swedenborg another example
of the difficulty, even in a highly fertile genius, of proving originality,
the first birth and annunciation of one of the laws of nature.

He named his favorite views the doctrine of Forms, the doctrine of Series
and Degrees, the doctrine of Influx, the doctrine of Correspondence. His
statement of these doctrines deserves to be studied in his books. Not every
man can read them, but they will reward him who can. His theologic works are
valuable to illustrate these. His writings would be a sufficient library to
a lonely and athletic student; and the "Economy of the Animal Kingdom" is
one of those books which, by the sustained dignity of thinking, is an honor
to the human race. He had studied spars and metals to some purpose. His
varied and solid knowledge makes his style lustrous with points and shooting
spiculae of thought, and resembling one of those winter mornings when the
air sparkles with crystals. The grandeur of the topics makes the grandeur of
the style. He was apt for cosmology, because of that native perception of
identity which made mere size of no account to him. In the atom of magnetic
iron he saw the quality which would generate the spiral motion of sun and
planet.

The thoughts in which he lived were, the universality of each law in nature;
the Platonic doctrine of the scale or degrees; the version or conversion of
each into other, and so the correspondence of all the parts; the fine secret
that little explains large, and large, little; the centrality of man in
nature, and the connection that subsists throughout all things: he saw that
the human body was strictly universal, or an instrument through which the
soul feeds and is fed by the whole of matter; so that he held, in exact
antagonism to the skeptics, that "the wiser a man is, the more will he be a
worshipper of the Deity." In short, he was a believer in the
Identity-philosophy, which he held not idly, as the dreamers of Berlin or
Boston, but which he experimented with and established through years of
labor, with the heart and strength of the rudest Viking that his rough
Sweden ever sent to battle.

This theory dates from the oldest philosophers, and derives perhaps its best
illustration from the newest. It is this, that Nature iterates her means
perpetually on successive planes. In the old aphorism, nature is always
self-similar. In the plant, the eye or germinative point opens to a leaf,
then to another leaf, with a power of transforming the leaf into radicle,
stamen, pistil, petal, bract, sepal, or seed. The whole art of the plant is
still to repeat leaf on leaf without end, the more or less of heat, light,
moisture and food determining the form it shall assume. In the animal,
nature makes a vertebra, or a spine of vertebrae, and helps herself still by
a new spine, with a limited power of modifying its form,- spine on spine, to
the end of the world. A poetic anatomist, in our own day, teaches that a
snake, being a horizontal line, and man, being an erect line, constitute a
right angle; and between the lines of this mystical quadrant all animated
beings find their place: and he assumes the hair-worm, the span-worm, or the
snake, as the type or prediction of the spine. Manifestly, at the end of the
spine, Nature puts out smaller spines, as arms; at the end of the arms, new
spines, as hands; at the other end, she repeats the process, as legs and
feet. At the top of the column she puts out another spine, which doubles or
loops itself over, as a span-worm, into a ball, and forms the skull, with
extremities again: the hands being now the upper jaw, the feet the lower
jaw, the fingers and toes being represented this time by upper and lower
teeth. This new spine is destined to high uses. It is a new man on the
shoulders of the last. It can almost shed its trunk and manage to live
alone, according to the Platonic idea in the Timaeus. Within it, on a higher
plane, all that was done in the trunk repeats itself. Nature recites her
lesson once more in a higher mood. The mind is a finer body, and resumes its
functions of feeding, digesting, absorbing, excluding and generating, in a
new and ethereal element. Here in the brain is all the process of
alimentation repeated, in the acquiring, comparing, digesting and
assimilating of experience. Here again is the mystery of generation
repeated. In the brain are male and female faculties; here is marriage, here
is fruit. And there is no limit to this ascending scale, but series on
series. Every thing, at the end of one use, is taken up into the next, each
series punctually repeating every organ and process of the last. We are
adapted to infinity. We are hard to please, and love nothing which ends; and
in nature is no end, but every thing at the end of one use is lifted into a
superior, and the ascent of these things climbs into daemonic and celestial
natures. Creative force, like a musical composer, goes on unweariedly
repeating a simple air or theme, now high, now low, in solo, in chorus, ten
thousand times reverberated, till it fills earth and heaven with the chant.

Gravitation, as explained by Newton, is good, but grander when we find
chemistry only an extension of the law of masses into particles, and that
the atomic theory shows the action of chemistry to be mechanical also.
Metaphysics shows us a sort of gravitation operative also in the mental
phenomena; and the terrible tabulation of the French statists brings every
piece of whim and humor to be reducible also to exact numerical ratios. If
one man in twenty thousand, or in thirty thousand, eats shoes or marries his
grandmother, then in every twenty thousand or thirty thousand is found one
man who eats shoes or marries his grandmother. What we call gravitation, and
fancy ultimate, is one fork of a mightier stream for which we have yet no
name. Astronomy is excellent; but it must come up into life to have its full
value, and not remain there in globes and spaces. The globule of blood
gyrates around its own axis in the human veins, as the planet in the sky;
and the circles of intellect relate to those of the heavens. Each law of
nature has the like universality; eating, sleep or hybernation, rotation,
generation, metamorphosis, vortical motion, which is seen in eggs as in
planets. These grand rhymes or returns in nature,- the dear, best-known face
startling us at every turn, under a mask so unexpected that we think it the
face of a stranger, and carrying up the semblance into divine forms,-
delighted the prophetic eye of Swedenborg; and he must be reckoned a leader
in that revolution, which, by giving to science an idea, has given to an
aimless accumulation of experiments, guidance and form and a beating heart.

I own with some regret that his printed works amount to about fifty stout
octavos, his scientific works being about half of the whole number; and it
appears that a mass of manuscript still unedited remains in the royal
library at Stockholm. The scientific works have just now been translated
into English, in an excellent edition.

Swedenborg printed these scientific books in the ten years from 1734 to
1744, and they remained from that time neglected; and now, after their
century is complete, he has at last found a pupil in Mr. Wilkinson, in
London, a philosophic critic, with a coequal vigor of understanding and
imagination comparable only to Lord Bacon's, who has restored his master's
buried books to the day, and transferred them, with every advantage, from
their forgotten Latin into English, to go round the world in our commercial
and conquering tongue. This startling reappearance of Swedenborg, after a
hundred years, in his pupil, is not the least remarkable fact in his
history. Aided it is said by the munificence of Mr. Clissold, and also by
his literary skill, this piece of poetic justice is done. The admirable
preliminary discourses with which Mr. Wilkinson has enriched these volumes,
throw all the contemporary philosophy of England into shade, and leave me
nothing to say on their proper grounds.

The "Animal Kingdom" is a book of wonderful merits. It was written with the
highest end,- to put science and the soul, long estranged from each other,
at one again. It was an anatomist's account of the human body, in the
highest style of poetry. Nothing can exceed the bold and brilliant treatment
of a subject usually so dry and repulsive. He saw nature "wreathing through
an everlasting spiral, with wheels that never dry, on axles that never
creak," and sometimes sought "to uncover those secret recesses where Nature
is sitting at the fires in the depths of her laboratory"; whilst the picture
comes recommended by the hard fidelity with which it is based on practical
anatomy. It is remarkable that this sublime genius decides peremptorily for
the analytic, against the synthetic method; and, in a book whose genius is a
daring poetic synthesis, claims to confine himself to a rigid experience.

He knows, if he only, the flowing of nature, and how wise was that old
answer of Amasis*(23) to him who bade him drink up the sea,- "Yes,
willingly, if you will stop the rivers that flow in." Few knew as much about
nature and her subtle manners, or expressed more subtly her goings. He
thought as large a demand is made on our faith by nature, as by miracles.
"He noted that in her proceeding from first principles through her several
subordinations, there was no state through which she did not pass, as if her
path lay through all things." "For as often as she betakes herself upward
from visible phenomena, or, in other words, withdraws herself inward, she
instantly as it were disappears, while no one knows what has become of her,
or whither she is gone: so that it is necessary to take science as a guide
in pursuing her steps."

The pursuing the inquiry under the light of an end or final cause gives
wonderful animation, a sort of personality to the whole writing. This book
announces his favorite dogmas. The ancient doctrine of Hippocrates, that the
brain is a gland; and of Leucippus, that the atom may be known by the mass;
or, in Plato, the macrocosm by the microcosm; and, in the verses of
Lucretius,-

Ossa videlicet e pauxillis atque minutis
Ossibus sic et de pauxillis atque minutis
Visceribus viscus gigni, sanguenque creari
Sanguinis inter se multis coeuntibus guttis;
Ex aurique putat micis consistere posse
Aurum, et de terris terram concrescere parvis;
Ignibus ex igneis, humorem humoribus esse.

"The principle of all things, entrails made
Of smallest entrails; bone, of smallest bone;
Blood, of small sanguine drops reduced to one;
Gold, of small grains; earth, of small sands compacted;
Small drops to water, sparks to fire contracted";

and which Malpighi had summed in his maxim that "nature exists entire in
leasts,"- is a favorite thought of Swedenborg. "It is a constant law of the
organic body that large, compound, or visible forms exist and subsist from
smaller, simpler and ultimately from invisible forms, which act similarly to
the larger ones, but more perfectly and more universally; and the least
forms so perfectly and universally as to involve an idea representative of
their entire universe." The unities of each organ are so many little organs,
homogeneous with their compound: the unities of the tongue are little
tongues; those of the stomach, little stomachs; those of the heart are
little hearts. This fruitful idea furnishes a key to every secret. What was
too small for the eye to detect was read by the aggregates; what was too
large, by the units. There is no end to his application of the thought.
"Hunger is an aggregate of very many little hungers, or losses of blood by
the little veins all over the body." It is a key to his theology also. "Man
is a kind of very minute heaven, corresponding to the world of spirits and
to heaven. Every particular idea of man, and every affection, yea, every
smallest part of his affection, is an image and effigy of him. A spirit may
be known from only a single thought. God is the grand man."

The hardihood and thoroughness of his study of nature required a theory of
forms also. "Forms ascend in order from the lowest to the highest. The
lowest form is angular, or the terrestrial and corporeal. The second and
next higher form is the circular, which is also called the
perpetual-angular, because the circumference of a circle is a perpetual
angle. The form above this is the spiral, parent and measure of circular
forms: its diameters are not rectilinear, but variously circular, and have a
spherical surface for centre; therefore it is called the perpetual-circular.
The form above this is the vortical, or perpetual-spiral: next, the
perpetual-vortical, or celestial: last, the perpetual-celestial, or
spiritual."

Was it strange that a genius so bold should take the last step also, should
conceive that he might attain the science of all sciences, to unlock the
meaning of the world? In the first volume of the "Animal Kingdom," he
broaches the subject in a remarkable note:- "In our doctrine of
Representations and Correspondences we shall treat of both these symbolical
and typical resemblances, and of the astonishing things which occur, I will
not say in the living body only, but throughout nature, and which correspond
so entirely to supreme and spiritual things that one would swear that the
physical world was purely symbolical of the spiritual world; insomuch that
if we choose to express any natural truth in physical and definite vocal
terms, and to convert these terms only into the corresponding and spiritual
terms, we shall by this means elicit a spiritual truth or theological dogma,
in place of the physical truth or precept: although no mortal would have
predicted that any thing of the kind could possibly arise by bare literal
transposition; inasmuch as the one precept, considered separately from the
other, appears to have absolutely no relation to it. I intend hereafter to
communicate a number of examples of such correspondences, together with a
vocabulary containing the terms of spiritual things, as well as of the
physical things for which they are to be substituted. This symbolism
pervades the living body."

The fact thus explicitly stated is implied in all poetry, in allegory, in
fable, in the use of emblems and in the structure of language. Plato knew
it, as is evident from his twice bisected line in the sixth book of the
Republic. Lord Bacon had found that truth and nature differed only as seal
and print; and he instanced some physical propositions, with their
translation into a moral or political sense. Behmen, and all mystics, imply
this law in their dark riddle-writing. The poets, in as far as they are
poets, use it; but it is known to them only as the magnet was known for
ages, as a toy. Swedenborg first put the fact into a detached and scientific
statement, because it was habitually present to him, and never not seen. It
was involved, as we explained already, in the doctrine of identity and
iteration, because the mental series exactly tallies with the material
series. It required an insight that could rank things in order and series;
or rather it required such rightness of position that the poles of the eye
should coincide with the axis of the world. The earth had fed its mankind
through five or six millenniums, and they had sciences, religions,
philosophies, and yet had failed to see the correspondence of meaning
between every part and every other part. And, down to this hour, literature
has no book in which the symbolism of things is scientifically opened. One
would say that as soon as men had the first hint that every sensible
object,- animal, rock, river, air,- nay, space and time, subsists not for
itself, nor finally to a material end, but as a picture-language to tell
another story of beings and duties, other science would be put by, and a
science of such grand presage would absorb all faculties: that each man
would ask of all objects what they mean: Why does the horizon hold me fast,
with my joy and grief, in this centre? Why hear I the same sense from
countless differing voices, and read one never quite expressed fact in
endless picture-language? Yet whether it be that these things will not be
intellectually learned, or that many centuries must elaborate and compose so
rare and opulent a soul,- there is no comet, rock-stratum, fossil, fish,
quadruped, spider, or fungus, that, for itself, does not interest more
scholars and classifiers than the meaning and upshot of the frame of things.

But Swedenborg was not content with the culinary use of the world. In his
fifty-fourth year these thoughts held him fast, and his profound mind
admitted the perilous opinion, too frequent in religious history, that he
was an abnormal person, to whom was granted the privilege of conversing with
angels and spirits; and this ecstasy connected itself with just this office
of explaining the moral import of the sensible world. To a right perception,
at once broad and minute, of the order of nature, he added the comprehension
of the moral laws in their widest social aspects; but whatever he saw,
through some excessive determination to form in his constitution, he saw not
abstractly, but in pictures, heard it in dialogues, constructed it in
events. When he attempted to announce the law most sanely, he was forced to
couch it in parable.

Modern psychology offers no similar example of a deranged balance. The
principal powers continued to maintain a healthy action, and to a reader who
can make due allowance in the report for the reporter's peculiarities, the
results are still instructive, and a more striking testimony to the sublime
laws he announced than any that balanced dulness could afford. He attempts
to give some account of the modus of the new state, affirming that "his
presence in the spiritual world is attended with a certain separation, but
only as to the intellectual part of his mind, not as to the will part"; and
he affirms that "he sees, with the internal sight, the things that are in
another life, more clearly than he sees the things which are here in the
world."

Having adopted the belief that certain books of the Old and New Testaments
were exact allegories, or written in the angelic and ecstatic mode, he
employed his remaining years in extricating from the literal, the universal
sense. He had borrowed from Plato the fine fable*(24) of "a most ancient
people, men better than we and dwelling nigher to the gods"; and Swedenborg
added that they used the earth symbolically; that these, when they saw
terrestrial objects, did not think at all about them, but only about those
which they signified. The correspondence between thoughts and things
henceforward occupied him. "The very organic form resembles the end
inscribed on it." A man is in general and in particular an organized justice
or injustice, selfishness or gratitude. And the cause of this harmony he
assigned in the Arcana: "The reason why all and single things, in the
heavens and on earth, are representative, is because they exist from an
influx of the Lord, through heaven." This design of exhibiting such
correspondences, which, if adequately executed, would be the poem of the
world, in which all history and science would play an essential part, was
narrowed and defeated by the exclusively theologic direction which his
inquiries took. His perception of nature is not human and universal, but is
mystical and Hebraic. He fastens each natural object to a theologic notion;-
a horse signifies carnal understanding; a tree, perception; the moon, faith;
a cat means this; an ostrich that; an artichoke this other;- and poorly
tethers every symbol to a several ecclesiastic sense. The slippery Proteus
is not so easily caught. In nature, each individual symbol plays innumerable
parts, as each particle of matter circulates in turn through every system.
The central identity enables any one symbol to express successively all the
qualities and shades of real being. In the transmission of the heavenly
waters, every hose fits every hydrant. Nature avenges herself speedily on
the hard pedantry that would chain her waves. She is no literalist. Every
thing must be taken genially, and we must be at the top of our condition to
understand any thing rightly.

His theological bias thus fatally narrowed his interpretation of nature, and
the dictionary of symbols is yet to be written. But the interpreter whom
mankind must still expect, will find no predecessor who has approached so
near to the true problem.

Swedenborg styles himself in the title-page of his books, "Servant of the
Lord Jesus Christ"; and by force of intellect, and in effect, he is the last
Father in the Church, and is not likely to have a successor. No wonder that
his depth of ethical wisdom should give him influence as a teacher. To the
withered traditional church, yielding dry catechisms, he let in nature
again, and the worshipper, escaping from the vestry of verbs and texts, is
surprised to find himself a party to the whole of his religion. His religion
thinks for him and is of universal application. He turns it on every side;
it fits every part of life, interprets and dignifies every circumstance.
Instead of a religion which visited him diplomatically three or four times,-
when he was born, when he married, when he fell sick and when he died, and,
for the rest, never interfered with him,- here was a teaching which
accompanied him all day, accompanied him even into sleep and dreams; into
his thinking, and showed him through what a long ancestry his thoughts
descend; into society, and showed by what affinities he was girt to his
equals and his counterparts; into natural objects, and showed their origin
and meaning, what are friendly, and what are hurtful; and opened the future
world by indicating the continuity of the same laws. His disciples allege
that their intellect is invigorated by the study of his books.

There is no such problem for criticism as his theological writings, their
merits are so commanding, yet such grave deductions must be made. Their
immense and sandy diffuseness is like the prairie or the desert, and their
incongruities are like the last deliration. He is superfluously explanatory,
and his feeling of the ignorance of men, strangely exaggerated. Men take
truths of this nature very fast. Yet he abounds in assertions, he is a rich
discoverer, and of things which most import us to know. His thought dwells
in essential resemblances, like the resemblance of a house to the man who
built it. He saw things in their law, in likeness of function, not of
structure. There is an invariable method and order in his delivery of his
truth, the habitual proceeding of the mind from inmost to outmost. What
earnestness and weightiness,- his eye never roving, without one swell of
vanity, or one look to self in any common form of literary pride! a
theoretic or speculative man, but whom no practical man in the universe
could affect to scorn. Plato is a gownsman; his garment, though of purple,
and almost sky-woven, is an academic robe and hinders action with its
voluminous folds. But this mystic is awful to Caesar. Lycurgus himself would
bow.

The moral insight of Swedenborg, the correction of popular errors, the
announcement of ethical laws, take him out of comparison with any other
modern writer and entitle him to a place, vacant for some ages, among the
lawgivers of mankind. That slow but commanding influence which he has
acquired, like that of other religious geniuses, must be excessive also, and
have its tides, before it subsides into a permanent amount. Of course what
is real and universal cannot be confined to the circle of those who
sympathize strictly with his genius, but will pass forth into the common
stock of wise and just thinking. The world has a sure chemistry, by which it
extracts what is excellent in its children and lets fall the infirmities and
limitations of the grandest mind.

That metempsychosis which is familiar in the old mythology of the Greeks,
collected in Ovid and in the Indian Transmigration, and is there objective,
or really takes place in bodies by alien will,- in Swedenborg's mind has a
more philosophic character. It is subjective, or depends entirely upon the
thought of the person. All things in the universe arrange themselves to each
person anew, according to his ruling love. Man is such as his affection and
thought are. Man is man by virtue of willing, not by virtue of knowing and
understanding. As he is, so he sees. The marriages of the world are broken
up. Interiors associate all in the spiritual world. Whatever the angels
looked upon was to them celestial. Each Satan appears to himself a man; to
those as bad as he, a comely man; to the purified, a heap of carrion.
Nothing can resist states: every thing gravitates: like will to like: what
we call poetic justice takes effect on the spot. We have come into a world
which is a living poem. Every thing is as I am. Bird and beast is not bird
and beast, but emanation and effluvia of the minds and wills of men there
present. Every one makes his own house and state. The ghosts are tormented
with the fear of death and cannot remember that they have died. They who are
in evil and falsehood are afraid of all others. Such as have deprived
themselves of charity, wander and flee: the societies which they approach
discover their quality and drive them away. The covetous seem to themselves
to be abiding in cells where their money is deposited, and these to be
infested with mice. They who place merit in good works seem to themselves to
cut wood. "I asked such, if they were not wearied? They replied, that they
have not yet done work enough to merit heaven."

He delivers golden sayings which express with singular beauty the ethical
laws; as when he uttered that famed sentence, that "In heaven the angels are
advancing continually to the springtime of their youth, so that the oldest
angel appears the youngest": "The more angels, the more room": "The
perfection of man is the love of use": "Man, in his perfect form, is
heaven": "What is from Him, is Him": "Ends always ascend as nature
descends." And the truly poetic account of the writing in the inmost heaven,
which, as it consists of inflexions according to the form of heaven, can be
read without instruction. He almost justifies his claim to preternatural
vision, by strange insights of the structure of the human body and mind. "It
is never permitted to any one, in heaven, to stand behind another and look
at the back of his head; for then the influx which is from the Lord is
disturbed." The angels, from the sound of the voice, know a man's love; from
the articulation of the sound, his wisdom; and from the sense of the words,
his science.

In the "Conjugal Love," he has unfolded the science of marriage. Of this
book one would say that with the highest elements it has failed of success.
It came near to be the Hymn of Love, which Plato attempted in the "Banquet";
the love, which, Dante says, Casella*(25) sang among the angels in Paradise;
and which, as rightly celebrated, in its genesis, fruition and effect, might
well entrance the souls, as it would lay open the genesis of all
institutions, customs and manners. The book had been grand if the Hebraism
had been omitted and the law stated without Gothicism, as ethics, and with
that scope for ascension of state which the nature of things requires. It is
a fine Platonic development of the science of marriage; teaching that sex is
universal, and not local; virility in the male qualifying every organ, act,
and thought; and the feminine in woman. Therefore in the real or spiritual
world the nuptial union is not momentary, but incessant and total; and
chastity not a local, but a universal virtue; unchastity being discovered as
much in the trading, or planting, or speaking, or philosophizing, as in
generation; and that, though the virgins he saw in heaven were beautiful,
the wives were incomparably more beautiful, and went on increasing in beauty
evermore.

Yet Swedenborg, after his mode, pinned his theory to a temporary form. He
exaggerates the circumstance of marriage; and though he finds false
marriages on earth, fancies a wiser choice in heaven. But of progressive
souls, all loves and friendships are momentary. Do you love me? means, Do
you see the same truth? If you do, we are happy with the same happiness: but
presently one of us passes into the perception of new truth;- we are
divorced, and no tension in nature can hold us to each other. I know how
delicious is this cup of love,- I existing for you, you existing for me; but
it is a child's clinging to his toy; an attempt to eternize the fireside and
nuptial chamber; to keep the picture-alphabet through which our first
lessons are prettily conveyed. The Eden of God is bare and grand: like the
out-door landscape remembered from the evening fireside, it seems cold and
desolate whilst you cower over the coals, but once abroad again, we pity
those who can forego the magnificence of nature for candle-light and cards.
Perhaps the true subject of the "Conjugal Love" is Conversation whose laws
are profoundly set forth. It is false, if literally applied to marriage. For
God is the bride or bridegroom of the soul. Heaven is not the pairing of
two, but the communion of all souls. We meet, and dwell an instant under the
temple of one thought, and part, as though we parted not, to join another
thought in other fellowships of joy. So far from there being anything divine
in the low and proprietary sense of Do you love me? it is only when you
leave and lose me by casting yourself on a sentiment which is higher than
both of us, that I draw near and find myself at your side; and I am repelled
if you fix your eye on me and demand love. In fact, in the spiritual world
we change sexes every moment. You love the worth in me; then I am your
husband: but it is not me, but the worth, that fixes the love; and that
worth is a drop of the ocean of worth that is beyond me. Meantime I adore
the greater worth in another, and so become his wife. He aspires to a higher
worth in another spirit, and is wife or receiver of that influence.

Whether from a self-inquisitorial habit that he grew into from jealousy of
the sins to which men of thought are liable, he has acquired, in
disentangling and demonstrating that particular form of moral disease, an
acumen which no conscience can resist. I refer to his feeling of the
profanation of thinking to what is good, "from scientifics." "To reason
about faith, is to doubt and deny." He was painfully alive to the difference
between knowing and doing, and this sensibility is incessantly expressed.
Philosophers are, therefore, vipers, cockatrices, asps, hemorrhoids,
presters, and flying serpents; literary men are conjurors and charlatans.

But this topic suggests a sad afterthought, that here we find the seat of
his own pain. Possibly Swedenborg paid the penalty of introverted faculties.
Success, or a fortunate genius, seems to depend on a happy adjustment of
heart and brain; on a due proportion, hard to hit, of moral and mental
power, which perhaps obeys the law of those chemical ratios which make a
proportion in volumes necessary to combination, as when gases will combine
in certain fixed rates, but not at any rate. It is hard to carry a full cup;
and this man, profusely endowed in heart and mind, early fell into dangerous
discord with himself. In his Animal Kingdom he surprised us by declaring
that he loved analysis, and not synthesis; and now, after his fiftieth year,
he falls into jealousy of his intellect; and though aware that truth is not
solitary nor is goodness solitary, but both must ever mix and marry, he
makes war on his mind, takes the part of the conscience against it, and, on
all occasions, traduces and blasphemes it. The violence is instantly
avenged. Beauty is disgraced, love is unlovely, when truth, the half part of
heaven, is denied, as much as when a bitterness in men of talent leads to
satire and destroys the judgment. He is wise, but wise in his own despite.
There is an air of infinite grief and the sound of wailing all over and
through this lurid universe. A vampyre sits in the seat of the prophet and
turns with gloomy appetite to the images of pain. Indeed, a bird does not
more readily weave its nest, or a mole bore into the ground, than this seer
of the souls substructs a new hell and pit, each more abominable than the
last, round every new crew of offenders. He was let down through a column
that seemed of brass, but it was formed of angelic spirits, that he might
descend safely amongst the unhappy, and witness the vastation of souls and
hear there, for a long continuance, their lamentations: he saw their
tormentors, who increase and strain pangs to infinity; he saw the hell of
the jugglers, the hell of the assassins, the hell of the lascivious; the
hell of robbers, who kill and boil men; the infernal tun of the deceitful;
the excrementitious hells; the hell of the revengeful, whose faces resembled
a round, broad cake, and their arms rotate like a wheel. Except Rabelais and
Dean Swift nobody ever had such science of filth and corruption.

These books should be used with caution. It is dangerous to sculpture these
evanescing images of thought. True in transition, they become false if
fixed. It requires, for his just apprehension, almost a genius equal to his
own. But when his visions become the stereotyped language of multitudes of
persons of all degrees of age and capacity, they are perverted. The wise
people of the Greek race were accustomed to lead the most intelligent and
virtuous young men, as part of their education, through the Eleusinian
mysteries, wherein, with much pomp and graduation, the highest truths known
to ancient wisdom were taught. An ardent and contemplative young man, at
eighteen or twenty years, might read once these books of Swedenborg, these
mysteries of love and conscience, and then throw them aside for ever. Genius
is ever haunted by similar dreams, when the hells and the heavens are opened
to it. But these pictures are to be held as mystical, that is, as a quite
arbitrary and accidental picture of the truth,- not as the truth. Any other
symbol would be as good; then this is safely seen.

Swedenborg's system of the world wants central spontaneity; it is dynamic,
not vital, and lacks power to generate life. There is no individual in it.
The universe is a gigantic crystal, all whose atoms and laminae lie in
uninterrupted order and with unbroken unity, but cold and still. What seems
an individual and a will, is none. There is an immense chain of
intermediation, extending from centre to extremes, which bereaves every
agency of all freedom and character. The universe, in his poem, suffers
under a magnetic sleep, and only reflects the mind of the magnetizer. Every
thought comes into each mind by influence from a society of spirits that
surround it, and into these from a higher society, and so on. All his types
mean the same few things. All his figures speak one speech. All his
interlocutors Swedenborgize. Be they who they may, to this complexion must
they come at last. This Charon ferries them all over in his boat; kings,
counsellors, cavaliers, doctors, Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Hans Sloane, King
George II, Mahomet, or whomsoever, and all gather one grimness of hue and
style. Only when Cicero comes by, our gentle seer sticks a little at saying
he talked with Cicero, and with a touch of human relenting remarks, "one
whom it was given me to believe was Cicero"; and when the soi disant Roman
opens his mouth, Rome and eloquence have ebbed away,- it is plain theologic
Swedenborg like the rest. His heavens and hells are dull; fault of want of
individualism. The thousand-fold relation of men is not there. The interest
that attaches in nature to each man, because he is right by his wrong, and
wrong by his right; because he defies all dogmatizing and classification, so
many allowances and contingencies and futurities are to be taken into
account; strong by his vices, often paralyzed by his virtues;- sinks into
entire sympathy with his society. This want reacts to the centre of the
system. Though the agency of "the Lord" is in every line referred to by
name, it never becomes alive. There is no lustre in that eye which gazes
from the centre and which should vivify the immense dependency of beings.

The vice of Swedenborg's mind is its theological determination. Nothing with
him has the liberality of universal wisdom, but we are always in a church.
That Hebrew muse, which taught the lore of right and wrong to men, had the
same excess of influence for him it has had for the nations. The mode, as
well as the essence, was sacred. Palestine is ever the more valuable as a
chapter in universal history, and ever the less an available element in
education. The genius of Swedenborg, largest of all modern souls in this
department of thought, wasted itself in the endeavor to reanimate and
conserve what had already arrived at its natural term, and, in the great
secular Providence, was retiring from its prominence, before Western modes
of thought and expression. Swedenborg and Behmen both failed by attaching
themselves to the Christian symbol, instead of to the moral sentiment, which
carries innumerable christianities, humanities, divinities, in its bosom.

The excess of influence shows itself in. the incongruous importation of a
foreign rhetoric. "What have I to do," asks the impatient reader, "with
jasper and sardonyx, beryl and chalcedony; what with arks and passovers,
ephahs and ephods; what with lepers and emerods; what with heave-offerings
and unleavened bread, chariots of fire, dragons crowned and horned, behemoth
and unicorn? Good for Orientals, these are nothing to me. The more learning
you bring to explain them, the more glaring the impertinence. The more
coherent and elaborate the system, the less I like it. I say, with the
Spartan, 'Why do you speak so much to the purpose, of that which is nothing
to the purpose?'*(26) My learning is such as God gave me in my birth and
habit, in the delight and study of my eyes and not of another man's. Of all
absurdities, this of some foreigner proposing to take away my rhetoric and
substitute his own, and amuse me with pelican and stork, instead of thrush
and robin; palm-trees and shittim-wood, instead of sassafras and hickory,-
seems the most needless."

Locke said, "God, when he makes the prophet, does not unmake the man."
Swedenborg's history points the remark. The parish disputes in the Swedish
church between the friends and foes of Luther and Melancthon, concerning
"faith alone" and "works alone," intrude themselves into his speculations
upon the economy of the universe, and of the celestial societies. The
Lutheran bishop's son, for whom the heavens are opened, so that he sees with
eyes and in the richest symbolic forms the awful truth of things, and utters
again in his books, as under a heavenly mandate, the indisputable secrets of
moral nature,- with all these grandeurs resting upon him, remains the
Lutheran bishop's son; his judgments are those of a Swedish polemic, and his
vast enlargements purchased by adamantine limitations. He carries his
controversial memory with him in his visits to the souls. He is like Michael
Angelo, who, in his frescoes, put the cardinal who had offended him to roast
under a mountain of devils; or like Dante, who avenged, in vindictive
melodies, all his private wrongs; or perhaps still more like Montaigne's
parish priest, who, if a hail-storm passes over the village, thinks the day
of doom is come, and the cannibals already have got the pip. Swedenborg
confounds us not less with the pains of Melancthon and Luther and Wolfius,
and his own books, which he advertises among the angels.

Under the same theologic cramp, many of his dogmas are bound. His cardinal
position in morals is that evils should be shunned as sins. But he does not
know what evil is, or what good is, who thinks any ground remains to be
occupied, after saying that evil is to be shunned as evil. I doubt not he
was led by the desire to insert the element of personality of Deity. But
nothing is added. One man, you say, dreads erysipelas,- show him that this
dread is evil: or, one dreads hell,- show him that dread is evil. He who
loves goodness, harbors angels, reveres reverence and lives with God. The
less we have to do with our sins the better. No man can afford to waste his
moments in compunctions. "That is active duty," say the Hindoos, "which is
not for our bondage; that is knowledge, which is for our liberation: all
other duty is good only unto weariness."

Another dogma, growing out of this pernicious theologic limitation, is his
Inferno. Swedenborg has devils. Evil, according to old philosophers, is good
in the making. That pure malignity can exist is the extreme proposition of
unbelief. It is not to be entertained by a rational agent; it is atheism; it
is the last profanation. Euripides rightly said,-

"Goodness and being in the gods are one;
He who imputes ill to them makes them none."

To what a painful perversion had Gothic theology arrived, that Swedenborg
admitted no conversion for evil spirits! But the divine effort is never
relaxed; the carrion in the sun will convert itself to grass and flowers;
and man, though in brothels, or jails, or on gibbets, is on his way to all
that is good and true. Burns, with the wild humor of his apostrophe to poor
"auld Nickie Ben,"

"O wad ye tak a thought, and mend!"

has the advantage of the vindictive theologian. Every thing is superficial
and perishes but love and truth only. The largest is always the truest
sentiment, and we feel the more generous spirit of the Indian Vishnu,- "I am
the same to all mankind. There is not one who is worthy of my love or
hatred. They who serve me with adoration,- I am in them, and they in me. If
one whose ways are altogether evil serve me alone, he is as respectable as
the just man; he is altogether well employed; he soon becometh of a virtuous
spirit and obtaineth eternal happiness."

For the anomalous pretension of Revelations of the other world,- only his
probity and genius can entitle it to any serious regard. His revelations
destroy their credit by running into detail. If a man say that the Holy
Ghost has informed him that the Last judgment (or the last of the judgments)
took place in 1757; or that the Dutch, in the other world, live in a heaven
by themselves, and the English in a heaven by themselves; I reply that the
Spirit which is holy is reserved, taciturn, and deals in laws. The rumors of
ghosts and hobgoblins gossip and tell fortunes. The teachings of the high
Spirit are abstemious, and, in regard to particulars, negative. Socrates's
Genius did not advise him to act or to find, but if he purposed to do
somewhat not advantageous, it dissuaded him. "What God is," he said, "I know
not; what he is not, I know." The Hindoos have denominated the Supreme
Being, the "Internal Check." The illuminated Quakers explained their Light,
not as somewhat which leads to any action, but it appears as an obstruction
to any thing unfit. But the right examples are private experiences, which
are absolutely at one on this point. Strictly speaking, Swedenborg's
revelation is a confounding of planes,- a capital offence in so learned a
categorist. This is to carry the law of surface into the plane of substance,
to carry individualism and its fopperies into the realm of essences and
generals,- which is dislocation and chaos.

The secret of heaven is kept from age to age. No imprudent, no sociable
angel ever dropt an early syllable to answer the longings of saints, the
fears of mortals. We should have listened on our knees to any favorite, who,
by stricter obedience, had brought his thoughts into parallelism with the
celestial currents and could hint to human ears the scenery and circumstance
of the newly parted soul. But it is certain that it must tally with what is
best in nature. It must not be inferior in tone to the already known works
of the artist who sculptures the globes of the firmament and writes the
moral law. It must be fresher than rainbows, stabler than mountains,
agreeing with flowers, with tides and the rising and setting of autumnal
stars. Melodious poets shall be hoarse as street ballads when once the
penetrating key-note of nature and spirit is sounded,- the earth-beat,
sea-beat, heart-beat, which makes the tune to which the sun rolls, and the
globule of blood, and the sap of trees.

In this mood we hear the rumor that the seer has arrived, and his tale is
told. But there is no beauty, no heaven: for angels, goblins. The sad muse
loves night and death and the pit. His Inferno is mesmeric. His spiritual
world bears the same relation to the generosities and joys of truth of which
human souls have already made us cognizant, as a man's bad dreams bear to
his ideal life. It is indeed very like, in its endless power of lurid
pictures, to the phenomena of dreaming, which nightly turns many an honest
gentleman, benevolent but dyspeptic, into a wretch, skulking like a dog
about the outer yards and kennels of creation. When he mounts into the
heaven, I do not hear its language. A man should not tell me that he has
walked among the angels; his proof is that his eloquence makes me one. Shall
the archangels be less majestic and sweet than the figures that have
actually walked the earth? These angels that Swedenborg paints give us no
very high idea of their discipline and culture: they are all country
parsons: their heaven is a fete champetre, an evangelical picnic, or French
distribution of prizes to virtuous peasants. Strange, scholastic, didactic,
passionless, bloodless man, who denotes classes of souls as a botanist
disposes of a carex, and visits doleful hells as a stratum of chalk or
hornblende! He has no sympathy. He goes up and down the world of men, a
modern Rhadamanthus in gold-headed cane and peruke, and with nonchalance and
the air of a referee, distributes souls. The warm, many-weathered,
passionate-peopled world is to him a grammar of hieroglyphs, or an
emblematic freemason's procession. How different is Jacob Behmen! he is
tremulous with emotion and listens awe-struck, with the gentlest humanity,
to the Teacher whose lessons he conveys; and when he asserts that, "in some
sort, love is greater than God," his heart beats so high that the thumping
against his leathern coat is audible across the centuries. 'Tis a great
difference. Behmen is healthily and beautifully wise, notwithstanding the
mystical narrowness and incommunicableness. Swedenborg is disagreeably wise,
and with all his accumulated gifts, paralyzes and repels.

It is the best sign of a great nature that it opens a foreground, and, like
the breath of morning landscapes, invites us onward. Swedenborg is
retrospective, nor can we divest him of his mattock and shroud. Some minds
are for ever restrained from descending into nature; others are for ever
prevented from ascending out of it. With a force of many men, he could never
break the umbilical cord which held him to nature, and he did not rise to
the platform of pure genius.

It is remarkable that this man, who, by his perception of symbols, saw the
poetic construction of things and the primary relation of mind to matter,
remained entirely devoid of the whole apparatus of poetic expression, which
that perception creates. He knew the grammar and rudiments of the
Mother-Tongue,- how could he not read off one strain into music? Was he like
Saadi, who, in his vision, designed to fill his lap with the celestial
flowers, as presents for his friends; but the fragrance of the roses so
intoxicated him that the skirt dropped from his hands? or is reporting a
breach of the manners of that heavenly society? or was it that he saw the
vision intellectually, and hence that chiding of the intellectual that
pervades his books? Be it as it may, his books have no melody, no emotion,
no humor, no relief to the dead prosaic level. In his profuse and accurate
imagery is no pleasure, for there is no beauty. We wander forlorn in a
lack-lustre landscape. No bird ever sang in all these gardens of the dead.
The entire want of poetry in so transcendent a mind betokens the disease,
and like a hoarse voice in a beautiful person, is a kind of warning. I
think, sometimes, he will not be read longer. His great name will turn a
sentence. His books have become a monument. His laurel so largely mixed with
cypress, a charnel-breath so mingles with the temple incense, that boys and
maids will shun the spot.

Yet in this immolation of genius and fame at the shrine of conscience, is a
merit sublime beyond praise. He lived to purpose: he gave a verdict. He
elected goodness as the clue to which the soul must cling in all this
labyrinth of nature. Many opinions conflict as to the true centre. In the
shipwreck, some cling to running rigging, some to cask and barrel, some to
spars, some to mast; the pilot chooses with science,- I plant myself here;
all will sink before this; "he comes to land who sails with me." Do not rely
on heavenly favor, or on compassion to folly, or on prudence, on common
sense, the old usage and main chance of men: nothing can keep you,- not
fate, nor health, nor admirable intellect; none can keep you, but rectitude
only, rectitude for ever and ever! And with a tenacity that never swerved in
all his studies, inventions, dreams, he adheres to this brave choice. I
think of him as of some transmigrating votary of Indian legend, who says
"Though I be dog, or jackal, or pismire, in the last rudiments of nature,
under what integument or ferocity, I cleave to right, as the sure ladder
that leads up to man and to God."

Swedenborg has rendered a double service to mankind, which is now only
beginning to be known. By the science of experiment and use, he made his
first steps: he observed and published the laws of nature; and ascending by
just degrees from events to their summits and causes, he was fired with
piety at the harmonies he felt, and abandoned himself to his joy and
worship. This was his first service. If the glory was too bright for his
eyes to bear, if he staggered under the trance of delight, the more
excellent is the spectacle he saw, the realities of being which beam and
blaze through him, and which no infirmities of the prophet are suffered to
obscure; and he renders a second passive service to men, not less than the
first, perhaps, in the great circle of being,- and, in the retributions of
spiritual nature, not less glorious or less beautiful to himself.

 

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Philosophy & Classics

The Uncle Taz Library

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