Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/140



HE well-set-up, rather plump Swedish scholar who lived in Amsterdam from about May, 1739, to about October, 1740, was anything but an idle dreamer, however. It is doubtful whether he gave himself much time to enjoy the golden, liquid shadows of Rembrandt's city. He was there chiefly because it was one of the few places where books could be published without censorship; because it was a place where he could consult the works of great anatomists, and—at least equally important for him—where he could read the books of those men who, like himself, had been driven to ask the eternal questions about body, soul, and God. Amsterdam had been the city of Spinoza.

The first part of The Economy of the Animal Kingdom was published in July, 1740, the second part was in print at the beginning of September and out in January, 1741. Swedenborg left Amsterdam in October, 1740, for Stockholm, but while he had been seeing his book through the press he had not confined himself to this. Besides writing a couple of minor works, he had revised and added to the manuscript of his great work on the brain; he had made many extracts from anatomical works; and he had probably begun to make the collection of extracts from philosophical authors which fill another volume of his manuscript.1

Not all the extracts were strictly philosophical—he cites from Aristotle that "men solid of flesh are dull of intellect, while men soft of flesh are gifted." 2 There seems to be a sigh of the sedentary here, but Swedenborg's appetite for work was as great as his powers of sight-seeing, and no man who was soft-fleshed in any feeble way could have done what he accomplished when he returned to Sweden.

He was back at his exacting job in the Board of Mines on November 3, 1740, and in almost constant attendance there throughout the next two or three years, except when he sat in parliament as a