Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/43

IV ] For several years he was under the influence of Moraeus, so that when in 1703 he went to live with his favorite sister Anna, who had just married the young college librarian Eric Benzelius, he entered no alien realm in the world of science which so absorbed his brother-in-law.

Benzelius, as Emanuel was to write to him from London, became his "father and better than a brother," and Benzelius, as a later dedication was to testify, 4 led him into the paths of science. The college librarian, reported from all sides to have been a brilliant man, a true teacher and a friend of the young, kept Emanuel in his house for seven years. No doubt his influence was crucial. In that "other-worldly" notebook of Swedenborg's, where he tells the truth about his feelings, he describes this brother-in-law as haughty of exterior but full of inner goodness. There is, at any rate, a painting of the young Benzelius which shows him as a quick, impatient man. He looks as if he were about to rush out of the frame, just pausing with his head cocked a bit on one side as if willing to listen to what is being said but with a faint superciliousness, or at least pessimism, as to what it is going to be. It is a "modern" face, not cast in any stiff, traditional mold.

He was to end as Archbishop, but he never lost his love for science. Undoubtedly he had had something to do with the victory which science had won in Upsala about four years before Emanuel was enrolled as a student. Eric Benzelius had been in England where the new ideas were already established, and when the fifteen-year-old boy entered the librarian's household he came into an atmosphere where all his bright curiosity had something to feed on, something moreover that was still upsetting, revolutionary, almost contraband—the right of science to go its own experimental way, irrespective of bishops.

It had not won the right without a fight—one that has to be refought every few hundred years. Sometimes it is called the fight for freedom of speech. In Upsala it lasted from 1663 till 1689, and then it was called, heavily, the fight between Aristotelianism and Cartesianism. 5 It provided the mental climate in which the whole of Emanuel's generation had to live and try to think.

Three hundred years or so later the battle was on again in the United States, but then it was called Fundamentalism vs. the