Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/130

114 Once when he was young, Swedenborg had tried hard to meet Leibnitz, in vain. Now, in effect, he had accepted what, as Aldous Huxley has told this age, Leibnitz called "the Perennial Philosophy"—"the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being." 8

That metaphysic, psychology, and ethic Swedenborg tried to work out for himself in the last part of his book, but not without grave misgivings. At the beginning of this part he makes one of his rare personal appearances. He speaks of his doubts as to whether the human soul was "accessible to any reach of mind." If it were, he said, it must be either by way of philosophy "or, more immediately, by the anatomy of the human body. But, upon making the attempt, I found myself as far from my object as ever; for no sooner did I seem to have mastered the subject than I found it again eluding my grasp, though it never absolutely disappeared from my view. Thus my hopes were not destroyed but deferred; and I frequently reproached myself with stupidity in being ignorant of that which was yet everywhere most really present to me; since by reason of the soul it is that we hear, see, feel, perceive, remember, imagine, think, desire, will; or that we are, move and live.

"The soul it is because of which, by which, and out of which, the visible corporeal kingdom principally exists; to the soul it is that we are to ascribe whatever excites our admiration and astonishment in the anatomy of the body; the body being constructed according to the image of the soul's nature, or according to the form of its operations. Thus did I seem to see, and yet not to see, the very object with the desire of knowing which I was never at rest. But at length I awoke as from a deep sleep, when I discovered that nothing is farther removed from the human understanding than what at the same time is really present to it; and that nothing is more present to it than what is universal, prior and superior; since this enters into every particular and into everything posterior and inferior. What is more omnipresent than the Deity—in him we live