philosophy of consciousness.* It is the affirmed seership of Swedenborg that gives to his dogmas the positive character of facts; on such ground alone he himself demanded the acceptance of them. If that point cannot be established, they fall back into the same category with other religious opinions; their worth must be found in them, not without them; and to the consentient testimonies of our human consciousness, enriched and unfolded by the suggestive phenomena of time and space, we must still have recourse for whatever additional ideas we can now gain of God and Eternity.

It appears to us, that in the temperament, the education and the circumstances of Swedenborg, we find a sufficient explanation of his mental phenomena, without the supposition of any supernatural interference; and if so, we are forbidden by the first law of philosophising, to admit it, independently of certain facts which prove to us that it was impossible. He had, to begin with, an hereditary predisposition to visionary states of mind, which showed itself in early childhood, and which, it is said, still subsists in some descendants of his family now living. This was connected with a peculiarity in his respiratory functionsa power of almost suspended breathing during intense meditation-which was perhaps a physical condition and accompaniment of his occasional trances and ecstacies.† Thus prepared by nature, the earliest studies and speculations of his mind led on by inevitable sequence to the very beliefs in which it found ultimate rest. whole system of Theology published only a year before his death, is the completion and last development of thoughts, that had been struggling for utterance, and constantly becoming more clear and positive, from the commencement of his philosophical career. We do not find any new element of belief supervening on his mind-any conception of God and the Soul materially different from what he had long entertained when the persuasion took possession of him, that he had got direct insight

His

Among other passages, see his 'Biography,' p. 264, and the general spirit of his Introductory Remarks to the Outlines of an Argument on the Infinite.'

+ Wilkinson's Biography,' p. 78.

into the invisible worlds. His ideas were not changed; they only shone in a new light, and acquired the distinctness and fixity of objective realities. No man's dogmas ever stood in closer relation to the contemporaneous thought of his age than Swedenborg's. We can trace the most remarkable among them to the impulse of reaction against the hard Trinitarianism, the repulsive Calvinism, the vague and heartless Naturalism, which he encountered every where in the learned and philosophical circles of that day. An inspiration from God would not have reflected so exactly the lights and shadows of the world without. Swedenborg found himself in the frequent dilemma of devout and earnest minds. He could not believe with the orthodox; he abhorred the negations of the philosophers. His whole existence was a struggle to solve the vast problem which filled his thoughts. Reason did not, and could not, give him full satisfaction. The craving void could only be filled up by assumptions. Faith acting on a temperament already predisposed, transformed itself into vision; and intense concentration of mind on a particular order of ideas, invested them with such vividness, that they could no more be distinguished from outward objects. He alludes in his 'True Christian Religion,' (31,) to the tendency of such profound speculations to render the intellect delirious and involve it in denial of God, and how the Lord had saved him from that awful state by elevating him into the sphere of light where angels dwell. We have in these words an unconscious admission of the process which had converted the philosopher into the seer. That he saw what he narrated-angels and the spirits of the departed and the scenes of the invisible world-we have no doubt. Nor would this be a phenomenon without frequent parallel. Cases innumerable are on record, and most satisfactorily attested, of persons who have had a fixed impression of spectral appearances which they could not dispel, and who were at the same time conscious that it was all an illusion. It was the peculiarity of Swedenborg's case, not that such appearances were steady and permanent (for that is not uncommon), but that harmonizing with the previous tendencies and aspirations of his mind, they commanded his belief as realities, and were reverentially welcomed as

celestial visitants-and stirred up all the faculties of his being-action, intellect, imagination, science-sound as before when this influence did not light upon them-into a sympathetic exertion of creative power.*

That Swedenborg's visions were but the reflection of his mental idiosyncrasy, and consequently bring no superhuman sanction to his theological dogmas, is evident from a variety of facts. The only conceivable purpose of an intromission into the invisible world, is to reveal the unknown but it is remarkable, and, as we think, conclusive as to the real nature of his visitations-that the only persons with whom Swedenborg had spiritual intercourse, and of whose condition beyond the grave he could bring any

:

* In Dr. Abercrombie's' Inquiries into the Intellectual Powers,' some examples of spectral illusion are adduced, which bear considerable analogy to the case of Swedenborg-particularly one of" a gentleman of high mental endowments, upwards of eighty years of age, of a spare habit, enjoying uninterrupted health, who (at the time of the publication of the work) had been for ten years liable to almost daily visitations from spectral figures. They appeared to him at various times of the day, both night and morning; they continued before him for some time, and he saw them almost equally well with his eyes open or shut,-in full daylight or in darkness." (P. 350.) This last circumstance is constantly referred to by Swedenborg, as a proof that he could be under no delusion, and that the appearances were objective realities. In a recent number of the Zoist (January 1850) is an anticle by the Rev. George Sandby, Vicar of Flixton, Suffolk, which expresses views respecting Swedenborg nearly identical in their substantial result (we offer no opinion on the Mesmeric part of the theory) with those to which we had ourselves previously come from studying his writings and life. "I feel more than ever assured,' says this gentleman-" that an ecstatic dreamer can fancy almost anything; and that the embodiment of those fancies does come out in such bold and clearly-defined relief, that the dreamer becomes so deceived himself that at last his wildest flights of imagination assume in his eyes the garb of the holiest inspiration."-" Upon examining the details of his life and of his physical condition, I am strongly led to believe, that Swedenborg, by longsustained self-meditation, had brought himself up unconsciously into a quasimesmeric trance of frequent occurrence, under which the reflective powers of a superior mind became considerably exalted, and the ardent wishes of his quickened sensibility were embodied under forms congenial to his studies." (P. 430.) Swedenborg's trances were accompanied by remarkable physical affections. (Wilkinson, p. 152.) His diet was peculiar, consisting largely of coffee, taken strong and sweet. He was very irregular in his sleep, sometimes lying in bed for days together in a state apparently of suspended animation, at other times writing continuously night and day. A gentleman on terms of intimate friendship with a clergyman now deceased, who was a follower of Swedenborg, and believed, like him, that he enjoyed spiritual converse-has assured us, that this individual was accustomed to prepare himself for intercourse with the invisible world, by fasting and seclusion for several days in a darkened room.

report, were those whom he had known on earth, or with whose character and opinions he was familiar from history and literature-of whom therefore he possessed already in his mind the needful materials for working up the personal appearance, and conjecturing the fate. He very frankly confessed this limit to his spiritual vision, without seeming to be aware of the inference to which it led. When the Queen of Sweden once asked him, whether he could speak with every one deceased, he answered, No, but only with such as he had known in this world, either personally, or from their actions and writings; adding, with incredible simplicity, "It may be supposed that a person whom I never knew, and of whom I could form no idea, I neither could nor would wish to speak with."-(Wilkinson, p. 230.) The boundary of his divine knowledge ran most exactly parallel with that of his human ignorance. He had no intimation of the death of a sister, till informed by a friend, although many days previously, on his own theory, she must have entered the world of spirits, with which he was daily conversant. In his voyages among the planets, he discerns only such as Astronomy had then brought to light. Of the four telescopic planets, of Herschel and Neptune, he does not appear to have had a suspicion. He sometimes intermingled in his visions, images of the living with those of the dead. He did not perceive the inconsistency of this phenomenon with the assumption on which his whole belief was based, till a question was put to him by a friend, when he had recourse to a special explanation to account for it. He told his friend, ab Indagine, that every one had his Familiar Spirit, Spiritus Consocius; and that this spirit (the exact counterpart of the individual) could withdraw into the extra-mundane state, and converse there among other spirits, without the living man being at all conscious of it. In that state he said he had seen the surviving Queen of Sweden in deep colloquy with her deceased husband, and had himself disputed with Dr. Ernesti of Leipsic, one of the most determined opponents of his supernatural claims.*

We draw the same inference from the marked way in which he carried his personal predilections and antipathies

*Tafel's Sammlung,' Erst. Abth. p. 122.

into his revelations of the unseen. He never, for example, disguises his decided preference of Leibnitz to Wolfius, and generally exhibits the latter in some disadvantageous predicament. It matters not where he is, in Mars or Saturn, or amongst the fixed stars-he is always ready to do battle against the Trinity, and set their inhabitants right on that great controversy. He detects Monks and Jesuits pursuing their mischievous vocation as wandering missionaries, and scattering false doctrine among the remotest of the stellar worlds.*

A few facts such as these seem to us to settle the question of the claim of his visions to be received as divine revelations. It is not a little remarkable that Swedenborg has given an exact description, and even furnished the true explanation, of his own mental condition. "They," says he, "who think much on religious subjects, and are so intent upon them as to see them as it were inwardly in themselves, begin also to hear spirits speaking with them; for religious subjects, of whatever kind, when man dwells upon them from himself, and does not break the current of his thoughts with various useful occupations, penetrate interiorly, become fixed there, occupy the whole spirit of the man, and thus enter into the spiritual world, and act upon the spirits who dwell there. Such persons are visionaries and enthusiasts." "Enthu

siastic spirits (i. e. such as act on these visionaries) are distinguished from other spirits by this peculiarity, that they believe themselves to be the Holy Spirit, and their dictates to be divine oracles.-I have occasionally conversed with spirits of this kind, and on such occasions the wicked principles and motives which they infused into their worshippers were discovered to me. They dwell together towards the left, in a desert place."+ What a reasoning madman is this! What a sentence of deep wisdom has he here pronounced on his own hallucination!

See Heaven and Hell.'

Heaven and Hell,' 249. The whole paragraph, which is too long to extract, is well worth perusal. In somewhat fewer words he has described the same mental phenomenon elsewhere ('De Commercio Animæ et Corporis,' p. 6), in deriding the Atheistic dreamers about cosmogonies: "Hallucinantur sicut cerebrosi, qui vident larvas ut homines, phantasmata ut luces, ac entia rationis ut effigies reales."