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Updated: June 19, 2025
Wisdom and love are one; and in Swedenborg's Paradise the wife is "the love of the wisdom of the wise." "Our reason," said Fenelon, "is derived from the clearness of our ideas." But our wisdom, we might add in other words, all that is best in our soul and our character, is to be found above all in those ideas that are not yet clear.
He could not understand rudeness; he was too finely framed for that; he could know it only as Swedenborg's most celestial angels perceived evil, as something distressful, angular. The ill-will that seemed nearly always to go with adverse criticism made him distrust criticism, and the discomfort which mistaken or blundering praise gives probably made him shy of all criticism.
No one can read "Science and Health" intelligently unless his mind is first prepared for it by some one whose mind has been prepared for it by some one else. It requires a deal of explanation; and like the Plan of Salvation, no one would ever know anything about it if it wasn't elucidated by an educated person. Swedenborg's philosophy is "Science and Health" multiplied by forty.
It was Swedenborg's account of the other worlds, Heaven and Hell. He closed it on his finger as I entered, and without recollecting to remove his hat, he made a step or two towards me with his splay, creaking boots. With a quick glance at the door, he said 'Glad to see you alone for a minute very glad. But his countenance, on the contrary, looked very anxious.
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.
He then repeats the Swedenborg stories, and thinks it would be useful to posterity if some one would investigate them while witnesses are alive and memories are fresh. In fact, Kant asks for psychical research. As for Swedenborg's so costly book, Kant laughs at it. There is in it no evidence, only assertion.
I may as well premise, however, that it does not seem to me worth while to enter here at any length into Swedenborg's descriptions of the inhabitants of other worlds, because what he has to say on this subject is entirely imaginative. And even where his mysticism went beyond what his scientific attainments suggested, a psychological interest attaches to the workings of his imagination.
What a lovely trinity of souls; what a fair star they form, according to Swedenborg's beautiful idea. I doubt not there is a path of descent, like that of Jacob's ladder, from their Father's bosom to your heart, and they ascend and descend, like those angels of his dream. Dear Mary, just imagine my husband in reality, as faintly shadowed in his productions.
Swedenborg's Illumination was not, like that of so many others, who have founded a new religion, a sudden influx of spiritual consciousness, but rather a gradual leading up to the inevitable goal, by virtue of serious thought, deep study, and a high order of mentality. But that the Swedish seer received, in full measure, the blessing of cosmic consciousness, is beyond doubt.
3. the modest suggestion that the first and second may not be so incompatible as they appear still it ought never to be forgotten that the merit and value of Swedenborg's system do only in a very secondary degree depend on any one of the three.
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