Page:Immanuel Kant - Dreams of a Spirit-Seer - tr. Emanuel Fedor Goerwitz (1900).djvu/41

 Rh office of the pure reason itself, so was Swedenborg dogmatical, this being the office of experience. But the dogmas of Swedenborg's experience lie, unlike other dogmas, according to Swedenborg's repeated asseverations, subject always to the verdicts of "sound reason," and the soundest reason in Kant is, as we see, that wherein his fundamental principles are identical with those of Swedenborg.

Professor Vaihinger's simile of the fermenting must and clarified wine is too happy a one to be rejected altogether, even if the application be somewhat faulty. Not alone with Swedenborg, but with all investigators, including especially a man like Kant, the crude facts of experience are what truly constitute the fermenting "must," so long as they have not, by reduction and clarifaction from error, become settled into the wine of a thoroughly rational, harmonious, and consistent system. The process of the reduction of experimental knowledge into rational intelligence is what is constantly going on. But it would be a mistake to conceive of Swedenborg as merely the collector of crude experiences, however truly his visa et audita may impress a hasty reader as such: his knowledges are also elsewhere in his own works reduced to the "wine" of a system as profound, as clear, and as steady as that of any of his contemporaries. That so able a judge as Professor Vaihinger should find them in the clear and vigorous depth of Kant's best reasoning, is only another tribute to their universal and enduring value.

2em