Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/70

56 had given him introductions to scientists which led to other acquaintances. He haunted mathematicians and astronomers, met De la Hire, Varignon, Cassini and several kind librarians, but although he cautiously gave hints about his method of finding longitude, the French were not interested. For Cassini, the astronomer, had a method of his own.

In Paris he may have met with the writings of Malebranche, whom he was later to quote with so much approval. Malebranche too was a Platonist, and John Norris, whom Emanuel had read, had based much of his work on that of the Frenchman. One can only guess at this. Emanuel was so busy with tracing the laws of physical events that any excursions he may have made into the realm of ultimate causes were probably with hasty curiosity, a little spiritual sight-seeing on the side.

He left Paris in the early summer of 1714 and returned to the Netherlands where he again saw his friend Baron Palmquist. It was a short stay. Baron Palmquist had a letter for him from his father who urged him to prepare for an academic career. The Bishop had also written personally to the Baron begging him to persuade his son to return. The study trip had already consumed four years.

But Emanuel did not hurry. On the way he stopped in Hanover, hoping to meet Leibnitz, probably the great mathematician more than the great philosopher, but Leibnitz was in Vienna. And, having arrived in Rostock on the Baltic Sea, Emanuel settled down there. Writing to Benzelius he said, "I am right glad to have come to a place where I have peace and time to assemble together all my works and meditata which previously have been without order and scattered here and there on some slips . . . I promised d:father to give out a specimen academicum, for which I will choose some inventions which I have in Mechanicis."

Already, he said, he had a list of mechanical inventions now reduced to order so that they might be published, including all the calculations necessary, and in astronomy too he had things to show.

"Oh how I wish that I could lay the whole before your eyes, dearest brother, and the eyes of Herr Professor Elfvius! But since I cannot do it with the machines themselves, I will yet in a short time