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.