Page:Immanuel Kant - Dreams of a Spirit-Seer - tr. Emanuel Fedor Goerwitz (1900).djvu/160

142 It is difficult to conceive that a man deserving to be characterised as "a fool on earth," and as "lacking in this world's intelligence" should have been invited by the Swedish House of Knights and Nobles to sit as a member of a private Commission on Exchange. The fact is also to be borne in mind that, at this date, Swedenborg's Arcana had not only been entirely published and circulated, but that his own authorship of the work, printed anonymously, was now publicly revealed. In the same year, 1761, in which he was writing several of his minor treatises, on the Spiritual World, and on the Sacred Scriptures, on Faith, and on the Last Judgment, he was engaged in a political controversy with Councillor Nordencranz in defence of Von Hoepken and the Swedish Government, and sent a Memorial to the Diet on The Maintenance of the Country and the Preservation of its Freedom (Documents I., 510–538). Swedenborg filled the office for many years of Assessor of the Royal College of Mines, was one of the Founders of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Stockholm, was a member of the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, and of the Society of Sciences at Upsala. Christian Wolf and foreign men of learning addressed him by letter, in order to obtain his ideas on subjects which they found it difficult to fathom. [See also Sir Samuel Sandel's Eulogy over Swedenborg in the House of Nobles, in the name of the Royal Academy of Sciences, October 7th, 1772.]

40 (p. 76).—Swedenborg states that the things recorded in his "Memorabilia" are not "visions" properly so called, but scenes beheld in the most perfect state of bodily wakefulness and which "I have now experienced for several years." Arcana, 1885. He describes two other kinds of vision which he rarely experienced, one as being "taken out of the body" or reduced to a certain state between sleeping and waking: during his continuance in this state he cannot but know that he is wide awake. This is such as is mentioned in Cor. xiii., 3. The other kind of vision is that which is called "being carried by the spirit into another place," I. Kings xviii. 12; II. Kings ii. 16; Acts viii., 39. The experience is described, Arcana, 1883–84. Of dreams Swedenborg says:

"Visions of the night are so called because they are obscure revelations. Revelations are made variously: 1, by Dreams; 2, by Visions of the Night; 3, by Visions of the Day; 4, by Speech which the man hears within him; 5, by Speech heard without by a