Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/319

XXIII ] meantime, sent a paper on the process of inlaying marble tables to the Swedish Academy of Sciences, of which he was a member.

In 1763 and 1764 his new theological works, the Four Doctrines, appeared in Amsterdam, but in the same years he published two books of "angelic wisdom" (meaning that "angels" had dictated them to him), one called The Divine Providence and another Divine Love and Wisdom.2 These two are perhaps the most beautiful of his works, not too tangled up with Bible exigesis. In them he showed himself to be a worthy descendant of Plato, through Plotinus and the Areopagite. And, indeed, with very few changes, the "Lord" of Swedenborg in these books could be the Brahman of the Upanishads or the Nirmanakaya of the Sutras or the Krishna of the Bhagavad-Gita.

But, in The Apocalypse Revealed, published in Amsterdam in 1766, he returned to his special explanation of the Bible by means of "internal sense" and "correspondences." It was not his first boring into the Apocalypse; he had already treated of it in an unfinished manuscript of vast proportions, The Apocalypse Explained. One was enlivened with "memorable relations." In the same year he sent an old love of his to press again; it was his New Method of Finding the Longitude of Places on Land and at Sea.3

Swedenborg, in his late seventies and with the travel conditions of that time, spared himself no trouble. As censorship prevented his getting his works published in Sweden (or even importing them, except with difficulty) he went back and forth. After returning to Amsterdam in 1763, he went over to England, hopefully delivering the printed books to the Royal Society, then he returned to Sweden over Denmark in 1764. In 1765 he took the Apocalypse to Holland, visited England from there in 1766, and returned to Stockholm the same year.4

Great traveler as he was, even on this earth, it is mainly from his diary observations on what he felt he saw in the other world that we learn what he thought of various nations. For, according to him, especially just before the "Last Judgment," the spirits had clustered together in nations and in cities, following their inveterate habits.

The Dutch, whom he loved with a kind of exasperated affection,