Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/98

82 were questions which Swedenborg at first felt were answered by the conception of the Infinite releasing the energy of the "natural point." He says, "[The point] . . . is a kind of medium between the Infinite and the finite, for it is by mediation of this point that finite things exist from the Infinite." 3 In short, in the second chapter the nexus or connection between the Uncreated and the created was this purely mathematical point.

When he went abroad in 1733, he took with him the all-but-finished manuscript of his book. He corrected the manuscript of the Principia in three days, early in June of that year. And, whether then or before he left Stockholm, he made a summary of the book. It did not contain the first chapter of the printed version, the reason no doubt being that it had not yet been written.

When he wrote it, probably in Dresden in 1733, he now hinted that the "nexus" or connection between the Infinite and the finite is "the Infinite and Only Begotten" 4 (Jesus Christ).

This might have been a bit of window-dressing for so rationalistic a book as the Principia, but for the fact that in 1734, probably in Leipzig, he elaborated this hint into a short, fervent book, Of the Infinite. . . in which he maintains that the nexus is not "mathematical" at all. Reason can only discover that there is a nexus, not its real nature. Using some dubious teleological sleight-of-words, he tries to hang on to his rational thesis that the "point" is the beginning of the finite world, and yet that the nexus between that world and the Infinite is Christ who is both God and man. It is not convincing even to himself, and he takes refuge in the authority of the Bible.

Why has the deist become a theist?

In the course of his argument he seems to feel that he has some explaining to do, and he suggests that he has met someone or some "other minds," which have come to the same result as he has, but who have gone further, superadding "new results, of which I knew nothing yet which are nowise at variance with mine," so that, as he says, he is bound to believe them.5 So it is from these other minds, it would seem, that he has found an agreement between revelation and reasoning.

The clue to their identity may lie in the new word "nexus," which was a favorite term of the Protestant mystics of the sixteenth and