Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/92

76 me that your journey abroad was given up, so much the more disappointed was I at your last letter in which you say the French journey is again determined upon." 12

Unge was a man who liked to have a relative in an influential position, and there is no denying that Emanuel was now apparently throwing worldly prudence overboard. At forty-eight, with an assured and envied position, he was taking three or four years off—and for what?

'For what, indeed! The family, if not the Board of Mines, must have suspected that there was very little trace of metallurgy in his plans. Even the connection with philosophy must have seemed tenuous if it were known that he intended to study anatomy.

A mining engineer, chemist, physicist, to leave his country to study anatomy, a science so disreputable that it couldn't be studied properly in respectable Sweden, a study with the whiff of body-snatching about it. To leave not only his country but his good secure job with heaven knows what machinations likely to go on against him in his absence—it was in truth a very strange project. He did not intend to be a doctor.

If Swedenborg's contemporaries had known what we know, as perhaps some of them did; if they had known that this voyage to France was taken in obedience to a religious impulse, then they might have asked much the same questions that our contemporaries do when they hear that someone who doesn't "need to" has endangered his worldly prospects for the sake of "God."

Was he successful in his work?

There is no evidence to show that he wasn't. He functioned well in the kind of work he had himself chosen; he had the feeling that he was useful to the country, and, though he had annoyances due to envious or stupid colleagues, they were no more than any very intelligent man experiences in the business of working with other men, especially if they are bureaucrats.

Was he unsuccessful as an author? Had the great Opera Philosophica et Mineralia been a failure?

This was far from being the case. From scientific journals of the highest standing in Europe came long and grateful reviews, especially of the tomes on iron and copper.13 The physics of the