Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/201

XV ] thoroughly. He then reminded her that no one had ever perceived in him "an inclination to the marvellous, or a weakness tending to credulity." So it was with him, he continued, till he heard from a friend and student of his that the latter had been present when a letter was read by an Austrian ambassador from a Mecklenburg ambassador who had been with the Queen of Sweden when Swedenborg told her the secret.

This impressed Kant. "For it can scarcely be believed that one ambassador should communicate to another for public use a piece of information, which related to the Queen of the court where he resided, and which he himself together with a distinguished company had the opportunity of witnessing, if it were not true."

He resolved to investigate further, communicating again with his friend and persuading him to interview the Austrian ambassador once more on the subject, with the result that the event was again confirmed. "Professor Schlegel also had declared to him that it could by no means be doubted."

Kant wrote to Swedenborg himself, who promised to answer, but either he did not or the letter did not arrive. Kant did not give up, but when a friend of his was going to Stockholm he commissioned him to investigate these matters, especially, it would seem, the Stockholm fire. (The Queen would presumably not be easy to interview in those days.)

This friend was the English merchant Green, of whom Kant thought so highly that a biographer of the latter writes, "Kant discovered in Green a man possessed of much knowledge and of so clear an understanding that he often avowed to me that he never penned a sentence in his 'Critique of Pure Reason' without reading it to Green, and subjecting it to his unbiassed understanding unfettered to any system."

Green, according to Kant, not only saw Swedenborg, whom he found "a reasonable, polite and open-hearted man," and also a man of learning, but he "examined all, not only in Stockholm but also, about two months ago, in Gothenburg where he is well acquainted with the most respectable houses, and where he could obtain the most authentic and complete information, for, as only a very short time has elapsed since 1759 most of the inhabitants are still alive who were eye-witnesses of the occurrence."