Page:Immanuel Kant - Dreams of a Spirit-Seer - tr. Emanuel Fedor Goerwitz (1900).djvu/119

 Rh he coincides with my system; as poets sometimes, when they are raving, are believed to prophesy, or at least profess that they do, when, now and then, events bear them out.

I come to the point, the works of my hero. If many authors who are now forgotten, or, at least, in future will be without fame, deserve no small credit because, in the composition of big works, they took no heed of the expenditure of their reason, Mr. Swedenborg doubtless should carry highest honours among them all. For, surely, his bottle in the lunar world is quite full, and is inferior to none among all those which Ariosto has seen there, filled with the reason that was lost here, and which the owners one day will have to seek again; so utterly empty of the last drop of reason is his big work. Nevertheless, such a wonderful agreement we find there with what reason can obtain on the same subject by the most subtle investigations, that the reader will pardon me if I discover here that rare play of imagination which so many other collectors have found in the plays of nature, when, for example, in spotted marble they make out the Holy Family, or in stalactite formations they make out monks, baptismal fonts, and church organs, or even as the banterer Liscow discovered on the frosted window-pane the number of the beast and the triple crown, all of which nobody else sees but he whose head is filled with it beforehand.

The big work of this author comprises eight volumes quarto full of nonsense. He puts them before the world