Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/88

72 one for the cosmological part of the Principia. His conclusions were as follows:

If we briefly summarize the ideas which were first given expression by Swedenborg, and afterwards, though usually in a much modified form—consciously or unconsciously—taken up by other authors in cosmology, we find them to be:

The planets of our solar system originate from the solar matter—taken up by Buffon, Kant, Laplace, and others.

The earth and the other planets have gradually removed themselves from the sun and received a gradually lengthened time of revolution, a view again expressed by G. H. Darwin.

The earth's time of rotation, that is to say the day's length, has been gradually increased, a view again expressed by G. H. Darwin. The suns are arranged around the milky way, taken up by Wright, Kant, and Lambert.

There are still greater systems, in which the milky ways are arranged, taken up by Lambert.

(Another list could be made, and a much more extensive one, of the creative writers and artists who have used, or praised, or acknowledged their debt to Swedenborg's ideas: such as, for instance, William Blake, Goethe, Heine, Balzac, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James, Sr., Oliver Wendell Holmes, Tennyson, the Brownings, Thoreau, Coventry Patmore, and many others.)

Arrhenius was not so interested in Swedenborg's account of the origin of matter, which seemed to him largely "philosophical," but in these days, since the "indivisible" atom has been dissolved into energy, Swedenborg's views on physics are of great interest.

Modern scientists tell us, for instance, that, in the world of relativity, matter is no longer considered "material" in the old sense, but as a local characteristic of a geometrical field of motion.3 In the Principia Swedenborg wrote: "Although pure motion does not necessarily require anything substantial as the basis of its existence, there still pertain to it both form and space, which are attributes of motion." 4

Swedenborg's framework of first principles began with positing an Infinite and Indefinable Something beyond our space and time. It might be called Unmanifested Energy. To manifest itself, to start in space-time on the voyage to becoming matter, the "