Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/110

Rh "It seems to me that the chief reason is that the country is a Republic . . . in which the Lord seems to take greater pleasure than in countries governed by sovereigns . . ." In republics, he dryly wrote, "no one feels in duty bound to accord any human being honor or veneration, but think the lesser as well as the greater just as good as kings and emperors, as indeed is evident from the native bent and disposition of every one in Holland."

Why was this so pleasing to God? Swedenborg thought that if the worship of God flowed from each man's free will, then "fear or caution don't make them lose their courage or free, rational thoughts"; furthermore people who have been oppressed by sovereign power are bred in flatteries and falsities, that is, to speak and act differently from the way they think, then "they carry that into church services and extend their flattery to the Lord himself, which certainly must be most displeasing to him . . ."

Any sincere, simple Christian of a pietist or Quaker tinge might have referred thus personally to his God, but Swedenborg was neither; he did not even know what Quakerism was. After being in Copenhagen, where a dismal form of pietism was then in court favor, he noted that "people here are so infected with pietism or quakerismo that they think it pleasing to God to commit suicide."

Swedenborg's form of worship was more constructive—also much more difficult. He knew that. In 1738, after he had been studying physiology abroad for two years, he wrote:

"To complete the single science of the soul, all the sciences are required that the world has ever eliminated or developed." With less than all, the man who undertook this would founder. "The points which he requires, but of which unhappily he is ignorant, he must perforce obtain from himself or produce by the keenness of his own mind, that is to say, he must use his imagination to supply the place of real knowledge, and how prone to error the imagination is if left to her own guidance . . . is perfectly well known . . ." 20

He would not leave anything to imagination. "Whatever results we are now to arrive at in treating of the brain must be confirmed by all that depends upon that brain . . . the whole body, including all the viscera, organs, parts, solids, fluids, also by records of the