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_ Among eminent persons, those who are most dear to men are not the class
which the economists call 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 meannesses 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
everything 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 shall 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, "traveling 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." 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." The
trances of Socrates, Plotinus, Porphyry, Behmen, Bunyan, Fox, Pascal,
Guion, 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 metre, 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, Cristierns, 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 advantage 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
Fredericshall, 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, Liepsic, 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; and 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 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 earth 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 local distance to be seen; suggest, as
Aristotle, Bacon, Selden, Humboldt, that a certain vastness of learning,
or _quasi_ omnipresence of the human soul in nature, is possible.
His superb speculations, 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 _bon mots_, 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 a 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. 'Tis 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, following the high doctrines of Hippocrates, Leucippus, and
Lucretius, had given emphasis to the dogma that nature works in
leasts,--"_tota in minimis existit natura_." Unrivalled dissectors,
Swammerdam, Leeuwenhoek, Winslow, Eustachius, Heister, Vesalius,
Boerhaave, 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 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 original 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 spicula
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
animate beings find their place; and he assumes the hair-worm, the
span-worm, or the snake, as the type of 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. Everything, 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 everything, 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 grandeur, 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 rations. 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 octaves, 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 co-equal vigor of
understanding and imagination comparable only to Lord Bacon's, who has
produced 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 recess is 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 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 doctrines 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.
Lib. I. 835.
"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 entirely
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 the 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 spark 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 center; 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,--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 vocalterms, 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 anything 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 of 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
proportions, with their translation into a moral and 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 has 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 center? 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 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 organizd 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 the 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.
Everything must be taken genially, and we must be at the top of our
condition to understand anything 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 worshiper, 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 feelings 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 skywoven, 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 attracts 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; everything 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 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 the 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 outdoor
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 eliminated. 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 of
receiver of that influence.
Whether 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
conjurers 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 surprises 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 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
heard 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 forever. 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 those 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 center 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,
counselors, cavaliers, doctors, Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Hans Sloane,
King George II., Mahomet, or whosoever, 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 center 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 center, and which should vivify
the immense dependency of beings.
The vice of Swedenborg's mind is its theologic 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 man, 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?' 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, purposing 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
Michel 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 hailstorm passes over the
village, thinks the day of doom has 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
crysipelas,--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 this 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 old Nickie Ben,"
"O wad ye tak a thought, and mend!"
has the advantage of the vindictive theologian. Everything 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 hath 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'
Genius did not advise him to act or to find, but if he proposed 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 anything 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 heavens,
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_, and 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, distributing 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 forever restrained from descending into nature;
others are forever 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 laurels
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
center. 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 forever 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 transmigratory 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. _
Read next: Lecture IV. Montaigne; or, the Skeptic
Read previous: Lecture II. Plato; or, the Philosopher
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