The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative men [Vol. 4]

SWEDENBORG

As has been said in the Introduction to this volume, it is almost certain that the little book by Sampson Reed, The Growth of the Mind, first interested Mr. Emerson in the writings of Swedenborg. That book was published in Boston when Mr. Emerson was twenty-three years old. A few years later he wrote in his journal:—

CHARDON ST., 9TH OCTOBER, 1829.

I am glad to see that Interpretations of Scripture like those of the New Jerusalem Church can be accepted in our community. The most spiritual and sublime sense is put upon various historical passages of the New Testament. The interpretation of the passages is doubtless wholly false. The Apostle John in Patmos and our Saviour in his talking meant no

such things as the commentator says he meant. But the sentiment which the commentator puts into their mouths is nevertheless true and eternal. The wider that sentiment can be spread and the more effect it can have on men's lives, the better. And if the fool-part of man must have the lie, if truth is a pill that can't go down till 't is sugared with superstition, why then I will forgive the last in (the) belief that the truth will enter into the Soul natively, and so assimilantly that it will become part of the soul and so remain, when the falsehood grows dry and lifeless, and peels off.

In his first letter to Carlyle, Emerson tells him that he is sending him The Growth of the Mind, and the former, in his answer, says, "a faithful thinker, that Swedenborgian druggist of yours, with really deep ideas, who makes me too pause and think, were it only to consider what manner of man he must be, and what manner of thing, after all, Swedenborgianism must be. 'Through the smallest window look well, and you can look out into the Infinite.'"

To this Emerson answered:—

NOVEMBER, 1834.

Swedenborgianism, if you should be fortunate in your first meetings, has many points of attraction for you: for instance, this article, 'The poetry of the Old Church is the reality of the New,' which is to be literally understood, for they esteem, in common with all the Trismegisti, the Natural World as strictly the symbol or exponent of the Spiritual, and part for part. … It is only when they come to their descriptive theism, if I may say so, and then to their drollest heaven, and to some autocratic, not moral, decrees of God, that the mythus loses me. In general, too, they receive the fable instead of the moral of their AEsop. They are to me,

however, deeply interesting, as a sect which I think must contribute more than all other sects to the new faith which must arise out of all.

The value which Mr. Emerson set upon Swedenborg was a notable case of his taking people and things "by their best handle." His recoil from all the parson and sexton and controversial elements of Swedenborg's writing, the Hebraism and prosiness of expression and the wearisome length, is sanely expressed with a kindly humour. But the perception by Swedenborg, though no poet, of the meaning of things, the rhyme of matter and spirit, delighted the poet.

Dr. Garnett says, "Nothing can be more generous than his trampling down of prejudice in recognizing the true inspiration of Swedenborg, or more crushing than his criticism of the purely mechanical element in that seer."

As a contrast and showing the difference in the temperament and the method of the men, part of Carlyle's comment on Emerson's estimate of Swedenborg already quoted may be recalled: "Missed the consummate flower and divine ultimate elixir of Philosophy, say you? By Heaven, in clutching at it, and almost getting it, he has tumbled into Bedlam,—which is a terrible miss, if it were never so near! A miss ••ully as good as a mile, I should say!"—Mr. Leslie Stephen, quoting this passage, says: "Emerson would apparently reply not by denying the truth of the remark, but by declaring it to be irrelevant. Swedenborg, like other prophets, fell into absurdities when he became a system-monger, and Emerson could condemn some of the results sharply enough. He was not the less grateful for the inspiration because associated with absurdities which might qualify the prophet for Bedlam." (Studies in Biography.)

Page 94, note 1. In a fragment of verse on the Poet's gifts he said:—

But over all his crowning grace, Wherefor thanks God his daily praise, Is the purging of his eye To see the people of the sky: From blue mount and headland dim Friendly hands stretch forth to him, Him they beckon, him advise Of heavenlier prosperities

Than the wine-fed feasters know. Poems, Appendix.

Page 95, note 1. This story, and the poetical quotation before it, would seem, from the context in the journal, to be from the Akhlak-i-Jalaly, referred to in the notes on "Plato; or, the Philosopher."

Page 96, note 1. The quotation came from Plato's Meno, where, as also in the Phaedrus, the doctrine of Reminiscence is brought forward, and here is reconciled with that of the Universal Mind.

Page 97, note 1. From Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel.

Page 97, note 2. Shakspeare, Hamlet, Act I., Scene iv.

Page 102, note 1. John Selden (1584-1654), jurist, antiquarian, orientalist, author. His Table-Talk was published in 1681.

Page 104, note 1. William Gilbert (1540-1603), physician to Queen Elizabeth, was a man of great scientific attainments. He wrote on the magnet and explained that the

Earth was a vast magnet. On his recumbent statue in Trinity Church, Colchester, is engraved Magneticarum virtutum primus indagator Gilbertus.

René des Cartes (1596-1650), born in France but passing much of his life in Germany, Holland, and Sweden. Dr. Alfred Weber in his History of Philosophy says of him that he should be regarded as "a geometrician with a taste for metaphysics rather than a philosopher with leanings toward mathematics," and that those who regard him as the author of the psychological method are right in so far as observation is one of the phases and the preparatory stage … in the Cartesian method, but err in regarding it as more than a kind of provisional scaffolding for deductive reasoning which is the soul of his philosophy. The schoolman had said Credo ut intelligam. Descartes said Dubito ut intelligam. Self-evidence alone was needed to make man certain of anything. Cogito ergo sum was his formula, and he held that the idea of God in the human mind implied the existence of the perfect Being. The Vortex in his philosophy was a collection of material particles forming a fluid or ether endowed with a rapid, rotatory motion about an axis and filling all space, by which Descartes accounted for the motions of the Universe.

Page 104, note 2. Marcello Malpighi of Bologna (1628-1694) is considered a founder of microscopic anatomy. At the age of seventeen he studied Aristotle and the use of the microscope. Having studied medicine, he held chairs in the universities of Pisa, Messina, and for twenty-five years at Bologna. He was physician to Innocent XII. His investigations of anatomical structure and physiological processes were crowned with great success. He discovered the capillary circulation and the minute secreting structure of the various glands.

Leucippus in the fifth century B. C. held an atomic theory, later expounded by Lucretius in his poem De Rerum Natura.

Page 104, note 3. This statement, which, seen with after-lights, seems so rash, did not seem very startling half a century ago before the improvement of the microscope, and the general use resulting therefrom.

Swammerdam, a brilliant Dutch naturalist of the seventeenth century, especially noted for his minute studies of the viscera, and system of injection of vessels. Leuwenhoek, his countryman and contemporary, made notable discoveries with regard to capillary circulation and the blood corpuscles of man and animals; also in botany and entomology.

Winslow, a Dane, but worked in Paris, and wrote on purely descriptive anatomy. Eustachius of Salerno, a brilliant investigator of human structure, especially of the ear and the viscera, though less reputed than the great Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius, who was persecuted for daring to teach the real facts of human anatomy in face of the mistaken authority of Galen. Heister was also an anatomist.

Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738), born in Holland and educated at the University of Leyden, to which his name and teachings later gave great fame. He studied philosophy and medicine and became a distinguished practitioner and writer mainly on medical subjects. His character and great abilities won him great and lasting honors throughout Europe.

Page 105, note 1. Natura semper sibi similis is an expression of Malpighi's, though here given as the faith of the great Swedish botanist and scholar who gave his name to and took for his device the delicate little twin-flowered Linnaea of northern forests of the Old and New Worlds. Mr. Emerson delighted to find this rare flower among the older woods near Walden.

The maxim of the broad and high-minded Leibnitz (1646-1715), Everything is for the best in the best of possible worlds, would have recommended him: and his theory of monads, each a mirror of the universe; their effort; the continuity of unorganized and organized creation, and "preestablished harmony," seemed to lead the way to the Evolution doctrines of the nineteenth century.

Page 108, note 1. Oken and Goethe saw in the skull a few modified vertebrae. To Oken the whole trunk with all its systems was repeated in the head with due modifications.

Page 109, note 1. Mr. Emerson wrote in his journal while crossing the Atlantic on his return from Europe in 1833:—

"I believe in this life. I believe it continues. As long as I am here I plainly read my duties as with a pencil of fire. They speak not of death. They are woven of immortal thread."

The notion of the plane of daemonic life, between those of mortal and celestial, is told of in the Symposium of Plato, and the image is used in the poem "Initial, Daemonic, and Celestial Love."

Page 111, note 1. Dr. James J. Garth Wilkinson, "the editor of Swedenborg, the annotator of Fourier, and the champion of Hahnemann, has brought to physics and to physiology a native vigor with a catholic perception of relations equal to the highest attempts, and a rhetoric like the armory of the invincible knights of old. There is in the action of his mind a long Atlantic roll not known except in deepest waters, and only lacking what ought to accompany such powers, a manifest centrality."(English Traits.)

Page 112, note 1. Among some notes for a lecture on

Swedenborg is the following: "His brilliant treatment of natural philosophy, Miltonic, sensuous."

Page 112, note 2. The "flowing of nature" is the old doctrine of Heracleitus. The answer of Amasis, King of Egypt, is related in "The Banquet" in Plutarch's Morals.

Page 113, note 1. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Lib. I., 835.

Page 118, note 1. This paragraph suggests some lines by Samuel Daniel which are copied in Mr. Emerson's journal of 1830:—

"The recluse hermit oft-times more doth know Of the world's inmost wheels than worldlings can. As man is of the world, the heart of man Is an epitome of God's great book Of creatures, and men need no farther look."

Also the last verse in Emerson's "Sphinx":—

Thorough a thousand voices Spoke the universal dame: "Who telleth one of my meanings Is master of all I am."

Page 120, note 1. In the Timaeus it is told that Solon heard from Egyptian priests this account of the great Athenians of the first State, which was destroyed by an earthquake thousands of years earlier.

Page 121, note 1. In the journal of 1845 Mr. Emerson made these notes, headed Symbolism, the first paragraph referring to a lady visiting occasionally in Concord, whose singing always pleased him. He had little ear for musical notes, but much for expressive rendering.

'B. R.'s music taught us what song should be; how slight

and thin its particular meaning; you would not be hard and emphatic on the burden of a song, as tira-lira, etc., Lillibulero, etc.

"The world is enigmatical, everything said and everything known and done, and must not be taken literally, but genially. We must be at the top of our condition to understand anything rightly."

Page 122, note 1. Before the passage which follows in the text, I find in some stray leaves about Swedenborg these sentences:—

"The fascination which his mind has for those bred in the old churches, in woeful Calvinism, in sentimental Christianism, is this, that they come to a mind which believes the world has a meaning, a meaning that can be known, and which the good only can know. Swedenborg is to furnish a key to the eternal and universal engine, an explanation of the sky, of the sea, of their tenants, of our doing and suffering, of our weapons and means. What! and no longer to receive certain cold results from catechism and priest, but I am to be a party to every result by seeing its reason and these results are no longer remote at arm's length, at life's length."

Page 124, note 1. Among fragmentary notes for a lecture are these with reference to the Swedenborgian sect:—

"What I mean by popular religion the Swedenborgians have not conceived, but it is true that who would see truly must forsake a great as well as a little conventionalism; that of Christendom as well as that of his parish."

"Fascination of Swedenborg.

"I cannot flatter the Swedenborgian by finding in him any resemblance to the genius and tendency of the great man whose name he bears."

"Very dangerous study to any but a mind of great elasticity

and power. Like Napoleon as military leader, a master of such extraordinary extent of Nature and not to be acted on by any other, that he must needs be a god to the young and enthusiastic."

"Exceeding good behavior of the Sect a few years ago: he was pilloried in a pamphlet of garbled extracts:—the Swedenborgians circulated his book."

"Their excellent spirit of superior tactics—nothing vulgar in their propagandism; they treated men respectfully and had the manners of people holding valuable truth."

Page 127, note 1. Casella, Dante's friend, the beautiful singer, whom meeting, in Purgatory, he besought to sing. Casella began Amor che nella mente mi ragiona, and all the souls flocked to hear.

Page 129, note 1. The poems "Give All to Love" and "To Rhea" are in this strain, and also the verses "You shall not love me for what daily spends," etc., among the "Fragments on Life" in the Appendix to the Poems.

Page 132, note 1.