Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/69

V] against the godless French, "I design within space of three or four months to be in French because I desire the understanding of that fashonable and useful tongue."

About the end of 1712 he left England but he did not go straight to Paris. He stopped in the Netherlands for about five months, undoubtedly still concerned with longitude by the moon. He visited the splendid observatory at Leyden, and in that town he took lodgings with lensgrinders (there were no better men at the craft in Europe), learning the trade and purchasing the necessary tools. It is hardly probable that he remained so long in the Netherlands without looking into the works of that other lensgrinder, Baruch Spinoza, who, like the Cambridge Platonists but in his own austere way, also saw the universe as one Substance, essentially divine, expressing facets of the same Energy in both matter and mind.

What Emanuel wrote home about, however, was his new friend, Baron Palmquist, a Swedish diplomat by trade but a mathematician by preference, "who had me at his house every day; with whom I sat and discoursed on algebra every day." They also talked about founding a Swedish Scientific Society, but on the whole the stay does not seem to have helped the longitude project because in August Emanuel wrote to Benzelius that he had left the Netherlands and gone to Paris in order to study more science and to further his invention.

He was grimly determined. "At this place [that being royal Paris] I avoid the company of Swedes and of all those from whom I have the least discouragement in my studies." He had been in Paris about a year before he went on a sight-seeing tour. "At the end in Paris I made a universel visitation over the whole of Paris in company with some others, in order to see all that could be seen there." He also sat in Versailles in the great park, looked at the gods and goddesses. in marble, and was moved to write Latin verses about them.

He was ill for six weeks when he first came to Paris, he did not say of what, but except for his last illness this seems to have been the only serious one he ever had. Not only was he remarkably strong, so that even in his old age much younger men couldn't keep up with his pace, but he had no more time to be ill than to go sightseeing in the ordinary sense. He was greedy for learning. Benzelius