Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/131

X ] and are and move—and yet what is more remote from the sphere of the understanding?" 9

In vain, he said, did the mind strive to know the Deity's nature beyond what it had pleased Him to reveal "in proportion to each man's individual exertions."

How should those exertions be applied? Swedenborg scored man's wish to mount at once "from the lowest sphere to the highest." Man, he said, no sooner learns the rudiments of geometry than he wants to square the circle, the rudiments of mechanics than he looks for perpetual motion, the rudiments of chemistry than he wants to make gold. And as for the love of the world, who does not strive for honor after honor and for estate upon estate? "Can you point out any considerable number in civil society who place a check or limit to efforts of this kind . . . ?"

Every son of earth still desires to touch the heavens with his finger, he concluded, but there is an order in these things. The progress must be made step by step, by degrees. When nature seems to have left us altogether in the dark, he reaflirmed, we need science in tracing out her steps. And this science he called his Doctrine of Series and Degrees or of Order. The people who don't know this ladder of nature and make their leaps without it, he said, will be found flat on the earth in some obscure cavern, "for instance in some occult position . . ." 10

Resolutely rationalist, he admitted that even the doctrine of degrees was not enough with which to understand the reciprocal action of soul and body. "A knowledge of anatomy, pathology and psychology, nay even of physics and of the auras of the world" was necessary, for unless we "mount from phenomena thus, we shall in every age have to build new systems, which in their turn will tumble to the ground . . ." 11

Uncertain, really, of his scheme, wavering in his terms and filling in blank spaces imaginatively much as ancient geographers used to fill in blanks on the map with fancy figures, Swedenborg nevertheless committed himself to a system.

As a physicist we know he had decided that there were four kinds of "forces of the nature of the universe." 12 (The first, or the universal, and the source of gravity; the second, or the magnetic, and