No More Learning

This leads me to that central figure, which he has established in his
Academy, as the organ through which every considered opinion shall be
announced, and whose biography he has likewise so labored, that the
historic facts are lost in the light of Plato's mind. Socrates and
Plato are the double star, which the most powerful instruments will
not entirely separate. Socrates, again, in his traits and genius, is
the best example of that synthesis which constitutes Plato's
extraordinary power. Socrates, a man of humble stem, but honest enough;
of the commonest history; of a personal homeliness so remarkable, as
to be a cause of wit in others,--the rather that his broad good nature
and exquisite taste for a joke invited the sally, which was sure to
be paid. The players personated him on the stage; the potters copied
his ugly face on their stone jugs. He was a cool fellow, adding to his
humor a perfect temper, and a knowledge of his man, be he who he might
whom he talked with, which laid the companion open to certain defeat
in any debate,--and in debate he immoderately delighted. The young men
are prodigiously fond of him, and invite him to their feasts, whither
he goes for conversation. He can drink, too; has the strongest head
in Athens; and, after leaving the whole party under the table, goes
away, as if nothing had happened, to begin new dialogues with somebody
that is sober. In short, he was what our country-people call an old
one.

He affected a good many citizen-like tastes, was monstrously fond of
Athens, hated trees, never willingly went beyond the walls, knew the
old characters, valued the bores and philistines, thought everything
in Athens a little better than anything in any other place. He was
plain as a Quaker in habit and speech, affected low phrases, and
illustrations from cocks and quails, soup-pans and sycamore-spoons,
grooms and farriers, and unnameable offices,--especially if he talked
with any superfine person. He had a Franklin-like wisdom. Thus, he
showed one who was afraid to go on foot to Olympia, that it was no
more than his daily walk within doors, if continuously extended, would
easily reach.

Plain old uncle as he was, with his great ears,--an immense talker,--the
rumor ran, that, on one or two occasions, in the war with Boeotia, he
had shown a determination which had covered the retreat of a troop;
and there was some story that, under cover of folly, he had, in the
city government, when one day he chanced to hold a seat there, evinced
a courage in opposing singly the popular voice, which had well-nigh
ruined him. He is very poor; but then he is hardy as a soldier, and
can live on a few olives; usually, in the strictest sense, on bread
and water, except when entertained by his friends. His necessary
expenses were exceedingly small, and no one could live as he did. He
wore no undergarment; his upper garment was the same for summer and
winter; and he went barefooted; and it is said that, to procure the
pleasure, which he loves, of talking at his ease all day with the most
elegant and cultivated young men, he will now and then return to his
shop, and carve statues, good or bad, for sale. However that be, it
is certain that he had grown to delight in nothing else than this
conversation; and that, under his hypocritical pretense of knowing
nothing, he attacks and brings down all the fine speakers, all the
fine philosophers of Athens, whether natives, or strangers from Asia
Minor and the islands. Nobody can refuse to talk with him, he is so
honest, and really curious to know; a man who was willingly confuted,
if he did not speak the truth, and who willingly confuted others,
asserting what was false; and not less pleased when confuted than when
confuting; for he thought not any evil happened to men, of such a
magnitude as false opinion respecting the just and unjust. A pitiless
disputant, who knows nothing, but the bounds of whose conquering
intelligence no man had ever reached; whose temper was imperturbable;
whose dreadful logic was always leisurely and sportive; so careless
and ignorant as to disarm the weariest, and draw them, in the
pleasantest manner, into horrible doubts and confusion. But he always
knew the way out; knew it, yet would not tell it. No escape; he drives
them to terrible choices by his dilemmas, and tosses the Hippiases and
Gorgiases, with their grand reputations, as a boy tosses his balls.
The tyrannous realist! -Meno has discoursed a thousand times, at length,
on virtue, before many companies, and very well, as it appeared to
him; but, at this moment, he cannot even tell what it is,--this
cramp-fish of a Socrates has so bewitched him.

This hard-headed humorist, whose strange conceits, drollery, and
_bon-hommie_, diverted the young patricians, whilst the rumor of
his sayings and quibbles gets abroad every day, turns out, in a sequel,
to have a probity as invincible as his logic and to be either insane,
or, at least, under cover of this play, enthusiastic in his religion.
When accused before the judges of subverting the popular creed, he
affirms the immortality of the soul, the future reward and punishment;
and, refusing to recant, in a caprice of the popular government, was
condemned to die, and sent to the prison. Socrates entered the prison,
and took away all ignominy from the place, which could not be a prison,
whilst he was there. Crito bribed the jailor; but Socrates would not
go out by treachery. "Whatever inconvenience ensue, nothing is to be
preferred before justice. These things I hear like pipes and drums,
whose sound makes me deaf to everything you say. " The fame of this
prison, the fame of the discourses there, and the drinking of the
hemlock, are one of the most precious passages in the history of the
world.

The rare coincidence, in one ugly body, of the droll and the martyr,
the keen street and market debater with the sweetest saint known to
any history at that time, had forcibly struck the mind of Plato, so
capacious of these contrasts; and the figure of Socrates, by a
necessity, placed itself in the foreground of the scene, as the fittest
dispenser of the intellectual treasurers he had to communicate. It was
a rare fortune, that this Aesod of the mob, and this robed scholar,
should meet, to make each other immortal in their mutual faculty. The
strange synthesis, in the character of Socrates, capped the synthesis
in the mind of Plato. Moreover, by this means, he was able, in the
direct way, and without envy, to avail himself of the wit and weight
of Socrates, to which unquestionably his own debt was great; and these
derived again their principal advantage from the perfect art of Plato.

It remains to say, that the defect of Plato in power is only that which
results inevitably from his quality. He is intellectual in his aim;
and, therefore, in expression, literary. Mounting into heaven, driving
into the pit, expounding the laws of the state, the passion of love,
the remorse of crime, the hope of the parting soul,--he is literary,
and never otherwise. It is almost the sole deduction from the merit
of Plato, that his writings have not,--what is, no doubt, incident
to this regnancy of intellect in his work,--the vital authority which
the screams of prophets and the sermons of unlettered Arabs and Jews
possess. There is an interval; and to cohesion, contact is necessary.

I know not what can be said in reply to this criticism, but that we
have come to a fact in the nature of things: an oak is not an orange.
The qualities of sugar remain with sugar, and those of salt, with salt.

In the second place, he has not a system. The dearest defenders and
disciples are at fault. He attempted a theory of the universe, and his
theory is not complete or self-evident. One man thinks he means this,
and another, that: he has said one thing in one place, and the reverse
of it in another place. He is charged with having failed to make the
transition from ideas to matter. Here is the world, sound as a nut,
perfect, not the smallest piece of chaos left, never a stitch nor an
end, not a mark of haste, or botching, or second thought; but the
theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches.

The longest wave is quickly lost in the sea. Plato would willingly
have a Platonism, a known and accurate expression for the world, and
it should be accurate. It shall be the world passed through the mind
of Plato,--nothing less. Every atom shall have the Platonic tinge;
every atom, every relation or quality you knew before, you shall know
again and find here, but now ordered; not nature, but art. And you
shall feel that Alexander indeed overran, with men and horses, some
countries of the planet; but countries, and things of which countries
are made, elements, planet itself, laws of planet and of men, have
passed through this man as bread into his body, and become no longer
bread, but body: so all this mammoth morsel has become Plato. He has
clapped copyright on the world. This is the ambition of individualism.
But the mouthful proves too large. Boa constrictor has good will to
eat it, but he is foiled. He falls abroad in the attempt; and biting,
gets strangled: the bitten world holds the biter fast by his own teeth.
There he perishes: unconquered nature lives on, and forgets him. So
it fares with all: so must it fare with Plato. In view of eternal
nature, Plato turns out to be philosophical exercitations. He argues
on this side, and on that. The acutest German, the lovingest disciple,
could never tell what Platonism was; indeed, admirable texts can be
quoted on both sides of every great question from him.

These things we are forced to say, if we must consider the effort of
Plato, or of any philosopher, to dispose of Nature,--which will not
be disposed of. No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest success
in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains. But there is an
injustice in assuming this ambition for Plato. Let us not seem to treat
with flippancy his venerable name. Men, in proportion to their
intellect, have admitted his transcendent claims. The way to know him,
is to compare him, not with nature, but with other men. How many ages
have gone by, and he remains unapproached! A chief structure of human
wit, like Karnac, or the mediaeval cathedrals, or the Etrurian remains,
it requires all the breadth of human faculty to know it. I think it
is truliest seen, when seen with the most respect. His sense deepens,
his merits multiply, with study. When we say, here is a fine collection
of fables; or, when we praise the style; or the common sense; or
arithmetic; we speak as boys, and much of our impatient criticism of
the dialectic, I suspect, is no better. The criticism is like our
impatience of miles when we are in a hurry; but it is still best that
a mile should have seventeen hundred and sixty yards. The great-eyed
Plato proportioned the lights and shades after the genius of our life.



PLATO: NEW READINGS


The publication, in Mr. Bohn's "Serial Library," of the excellent
translations of Plato, which we esteem one of the chief benefits the
cheap press has yielded, gives us an occasion to take hastily a few
more notes of the elevation and bearings of this fixed star; or, to
add a bulletin, like the journals, of Plato at the latest dates.

Modern science, by the extent of its generalization, has learned to
indemnify the student of man for the defects of individuals, by tracing
growth and ascent in races; and, by the simple expedient of lighting
up the vast background, generates a feeling of complacency and hope.
The human being has the saurian and the plant in his rear. His arts
and sciences, the easy issue of his brain, look glorious when
prospectively beheld from the distant brain of ox, crocodile, and fish.
It seems as if nature, in regarding the geologic night behind her,
when, in five or six millenniums, she had turned out five or six men,
as Homer, Phidias, Menu, and Columbus, was nowise discontented with
the result. These samples attested the virtue of the tree. These were
a clear amelioration of trilobite and saurus, and a good basis for
further proceeding. With this artist time and space are cheap, and she
is insensible of what you say of tedious preparation. She waited
tranquilly the flowing periods of paleontology, for the hour to be
struck when man should arrive. Then periods must pass before the motion
of the earth can be suspected; then before the map of the instincts
and the cultivable powers can be drawn. But as of races, so the
succession of individual men is fatal and beautiful, and Plato has the
fortune, in the history of mankind, to mark an epoch.

Plato's fame does not stand on a syllogism, or on any masterpieces of
the Socratic, or on any thesis, as, for example, the immortality of
the soul. He is more than an expert, or a school-man, or a geometer,
or the prophet of a peculiar message. He represents the privilege of
the intellect, the power, namely, of carrying up every fact to
successive platforms, and so disclosing, in every fact, a germ of
expansion. These expansions are in the essence of thought. The
naturalist would never help us to them by any discoveries of the extent
of the universe, but is as poor, when cataloguing the resolved nebula
of Orion, as when measuring the angles of an acre. But the Republic
of Plato, by these expansions, may be said to require, and so to
anticipate, the astronomy of Laplace. The expansions are organic. The
mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates
the rose. In ascribing to Plato the merit of announcing them, we only
say, here was a more complete man, who could apply to nature the whole
scale of the senses, the understanding, and the reason. These
expansions, or extensions, consist in continuing the spiritual sight
where the horizon falls on our natural vision, and, by this second
sight, discovering the long lines of law which shoot in every direction.
Everywhere he stands on a path which has no end, but runs continuously
round the universe. Therefore, every word becomes an exponent of nature.
Whatever he looks upon discloses a second sense, and ulterior senses.
His perception of the generation of contraries, of death out of life,
and life out of death,--that law by which, in nature, decomposition
is recomposition, and putrefaction and cholera are only signals of a
new creation; his discernment of the little in the large, and the large
in the small; studying the state in the citizen, and the citizen in
the state; and leaving it doubtful whether he exhibited the Republic
as an allegory on the education of the private soul; his beautiful
definitions of ideas, of time, of form, of figure, of the line,
sometimes hypothetically given, as his defining of virtue, courage,
justice, temperance; his love of the apologue, and his apologues
themselves; the cave of Trophonius; the ring of Gyges; the charioteer
and two horses; the golden, silver, brass, and iron temperaments;
Theuth and Thamus; and the visions of Hades and the Fates--fables which
have imprinted themselves in the human memory like the signs of the
zodiac; his soliform eye and his boniform soul; his doctrine of
assimilation; his doctrine of reminiscence; his clear vision of the
laws of return, or reaction, which secure instant justice throughout
the universe, instanced everywhere, but specially in the doctrine,
"what comes from God to us, returns from us to God," and in Socrates'
belief that the laws below are sisters of the laws above.

More striking examples are his moral conclusions. Plato affirms the
coincidence of science and virtue; for vice can never know itself and
virtue; but virtue knows both itself and vice. The eye attested that
justice was best, as long as it was profitable; Plato affirms that it
is profitable throughout; that the profit is intrinsic, though the
just conceal his justice from gods and men; that it is better to suffer
injustice, than to do it; that the sinner ought to covet punishment;
that the lie was more hurtful than homicide; and that ignorance, or
the involuntary lie, was more calamitous than involuntary homicide;
that the soul is unwillingly deprived of true opinions; and that no
man sins willingly; that the order of proceeding of nature was from
the mind to the body; and, though a sound body cannot restore an unsound
mind, yet a good soul can, by its virtue, render the body the best
possible. The intelligent have a right over the ignorant, namely, the
right of instructing them. The right punishment of one out of tune,
is to make him play in tune; the fine which the good, refusing to
govern, ought to pay, is, to be governed by a worse man; that his
guards shall not handle gold and silver, but shall be instructed that
there is gold and silver in their souls, which will make men willing
to give them everything which they need. This second sight explains
the stress laid on geometry. He saw that the globe of earth was not
more lawful and precise than was the supersensible; that a celestial
geometry was in place there, as a logic of lines and angles here below;
that the world was throughout mathematical; the proportions are constant
of oxygen, azote, and lime; there is just so much water, and slate,
and magnesia; not less are the proportions constant of moral elements.

This eldest Goethe, hating varnish and falsehood, delighted in revealing
the real at the base of the accidental; in discovering connection,
continuity, and representation, everywhere; hating insulation; and
appears like the god of wealth among the cabins of vagabonds, opening
power and capability in everything he touches. Ethical science was new
and vacant, when Plato could write thus:--"Of all whose arguments are
left to the men of the present time, no one has ever yet condemned
injustice, or praised justice, otherwise than as respects the repute,
honors, and emoluments arising therefrom; while, as respects either
of them in itself, and subsisting by its own power in the soul of the
possessor, and concealed both from gods and men, no one has yet
sufficiently investigated, either in poetry or prose writings,--how,
namely, that the one is the greatest of all the evils that the soul
has within it, and justice the greatest good. "

His definition of ideas, as what is simple, permanent, uniform, and
self-existent, forever discriminating them from the notions of the
understanding, marks an era in the world. He was born to behold the
self-evolving power of spirit, endless generator of new ends; a power
which is the key at once to the centrality and the evanescence of
things. Plato is so centered, that he can well spare all his dogmas.
Thus the fact of knowledge and ideas reveals to him the fact of
eternity; and the doctrine of reminiscence he offers as the most
probable particular explication. Call that fanciful,--it matters not;
the connection between our knowledge and the abyss of being is still
real, and the explication must be not less magnificent.

He has indicated every eminent point in speculation. He wrote on the
scale of the mind itself, so that all things have symmetry in his
tablet. He put in all the past, without weariness, and descended into
detail with a courage like that he witnessed in nature. One would say,
that his forerunners had mapped out each a farm, or a district, or an
island, in intellectual geography, but that Plato first drew the sphere.
He domesticates the soul in nature; man is the microcosm. All the
circles of the visible heaven represent as many circles in the rational
soul. There is no lawless particle, and there is nothing casual in the
action of the human mind. The names of things, too, are fatal, following
the nature of things. All the gods of the Pantheon are, by their names,
significant of a profound sense. The gods are the ideas. Pan is speech,
or manifestation; Saturn, the contemplative; Jove, the regal soul; and
Mars, passion. Venus is proportion; Calliope, the soul of the world;
Aglaia, intellectual illustration.

These thoughts, in sparkles of light, had appeared often to pious and
to poetic souls; but this well-bred, all-knowing Greek geometer comes
with command, gathers them all up into rank and gradation, the Euclid
of holiness, and marries the two parts of nature. Before all men, he
saw the intellectual values of the moral sentiment. He describes his
own ideal, when he paints in Timaeus a god leading things from disorder
into order. He kindled a fire so truly in the center, that we see the
sphere illuminated, and can distinguish poles, equator, and lines of
latitude, every arc and node; a theory so averaged, so modulated, that
you would say, the winds of ages had swept through this rhythmic
structure, and not that it was the brief extempore blotting of one
short-lived scribe. Hence it has happened that a very well-marked
class of souls, namely those who delight in giving a spiritual, that
is, an ethico-intellectual expression to every truth by exhibiting an
ulterior end which is yet legitimate to it, are said to Platonize.
Thus, Michel Angelo is a Platonist, in his sonnets. Shakspeare is a
Platonist, when he writes, "Nature is made better by no mean, but
nature makes that mean," or,

"He that can endure
To follow with allegiance a fallen lord,
Does conquer him that did his master conquer,
And earns a place in the story. "

Hamlet is a pure Platonist, and 'tis the magnitude only of Shakspeare's
proper genius that hinders him from being classed as the most eminent
of this school. Swedenborg, throughout his prose poem of "Conjugal
Love," is a Platonist.

His subtlety commended him to men of thought. The secret of his popular
success is the moral aim, which endeared him to mankind. "Intellect,"
he said, "is king of heaven and of earth;" but, in Plato, intellect
is always moral. His writings have also the sempiternal youth of poetry.
For their arguments, most of them, might have been couched in sonnets;
and poetry has never soared higher than in the Timaeus and the Phaedrus.
As the poet, too, he is only contemplative. He did not, like Pythagoras,
break himself with an institution. All his painting in the Republic
must be esteemed mythical, with intent to bring out, sometimes in
violent colors, his thought. You cannot institute, without peril of
charlatan.

It was a high scheme, his absolute privilege for the best (which, to
make emphatic, he expressed by community of women), as the premium
which he would set on grandeur. There shall be exempts of two kinds:
first, those who by demerit have put themselves below
protection,--outlaws; and secondly, those who by eminence of nature
and desert are out of the reach of your rewards; let such be free of
the city, and above the law. We confide them to themselves; let them
do with us as they will. Let none presume to measure the irregularities
of Michel Angelo and Socrates by village scales.

In his eighth book of the Republic, he throws a little mathematical
dust in our eyes. I am sorry to see him, after such noble superiorities,
permitting the lie to governors. Plato plays Providence a little with
the baser sort, as people allow themselves with their dogs and cats.




III. SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC.

Among eminent persons, those who are most dear to men are not the class
which the economists call producers; they have nothing in their hands;
they have not cultivated corn, nor made bread; they have not led out
a colony, nor invented a loom. A higher class, in the estimation and
love of this city-building, market-going race of mankind, are the
poets, who, from the intellectual kingdom, feed the thought and
imagination with ideas and pictures which raise men out of the world
of corn and money, and console them for the shortcomings of the day,
and the meannesses of labor and traffic. Then, also, the philosopher
has his value, who flatters the intellect of this laborer, by engaging
him with subtleties which instruct him in new faculties. Others may
build cities; he is to understand them, and keep them in awe. But there
is a class who lead us into another region,--the world of morals, or
of will. What is singular about this region of thought, is, its claim.
Wherever the sentiment of right comes in, it takes precedence of
everything else. For other things, I make poetry of them; but the moral
sentiment makes poetry of me.

I have sometimes thought that he would render the greatest service to
modern criticism, who shall draw the line of relation that subsists
between Shakespeare and Swedenborg. The human mind stands ever in
perplexity, demanding intellect, demanding sanctity, impatient equally
of each without the other. The reconciler has not yet appeared. If we
tire of the saints, Shakespeare is our city of refuge. Yet the instincts
presently teach, that the problem of essence must take precedence of
all others,--the questions of Whence? What? and Whither? and the
solution of these must be in a life, and not in a book. A drama or
poem is a proximate or oblique reply; but Moses, Menu, Jesus, work
directly on this problem. The atmosphere of moral sentiment is a region
of grandeur which reduces all material magnificence to toys, yet opens
to every wretch that has reason, the doors of the universe. Almost
with a fierce haste it lays its empire on the man. In the language of
the Koran, "God said, the heaven and the earth, and all that is between
them, think ye that we created them in jest, and that ye shall not
return to us? " It is the kingdom of the will, and by inspiring the
will, which is the seat of personality, seems to convert the universe
into a person:--

"The realms of being to no other bow,
Not only all are thine, but all are Thou. "

All men are commanded by the saint. The Koran makes a distinct class
of those who are by nature good, and whose goodness has an influence
on others, and pronounces this class to be the aim of creation: the
other classes are admitted to the feast of being, only as following
in the train of this. And the Persian poet exclaims to a soul of this
kind:

"Go boldly forth, and feast on being's banquet;
Thou art the called,--the rest admitted with thee. "

The privilege of this caste is an access to the secrets and structure
of nature, by some higher method than by experience. In common parlance,
what one man is said to learn by experience, a man of extraordinary
sagacity is said, without experience, to divine. The Arabians say,
that Abul Khain, the mystic, and Abu Ali Seena, the Philosopher,
conferred together; and, on parting, the philosopher said, "All that
he sees, I know;" and the mystic said, "All that he knows, I see. " If
one should ask the reason of this intuition, the solution would lead
us into that property which Plato denoted as Reminiscence, and which
is implied by the Bramins in the tenet of Transmigration. The soul
having been often born, or, as the Hindoos say, "traveling the path
of existence through thousands of births," having beheld the things
which are here, those which are in heaven, and those which are beneath,
there is nothing of which she has not gained the knowledge: no wonder
that she is able to recollect, in regard to any one thing, what formerly
she knew. "For, all things in nature being linked and related, and
the soul having heretofore known all, nothing hinders but that any man
who has recalled to mind, or, according to the common phrase, has
learned one thing only, should of himself recover all his ancient
knowledge, and find out again all the rest, if he have but courage,
and faint not in the midst of his researches. For inquiry and learning
is reminiscence all. " How much more, if he that inquires be a holy and
godlike soul! For, by being assimilated to the original soul, by whom,
and after whom, all things subsist, the soul of man does then easily
flow into all things, and all things flow into it: they mix: and he
is present and sympathetic with their structure and law.

This path is difficult, secret, and beset with terror. The ancients
called it ecstasy or absence,--a getting out of their bodies to think.
All religious history contains traces of the trance of saints,--a
beatitude, but without any sign of joy, earnest, solitary, even sad;
"the flight," Plotinus called it, "of the alone to the alone. " The
trances of Socrates, Plotinus, Porphyry, Behmen, Bunyan, Fox, Pascal,
Guion, Swedenborg, will readily come to mind. But what as readily comes
to mind, is the accompaniment of disease. This beatitude comes in
terror, and with shocks to the mind of the receiver. "It o'erinforms
the tenement of clay," and drives the man mad; or, gives a certain
violent bias, which taints his judgment. In the chief examples of
religious illumination, somewhat morbid, has mingled, in spite of the
unquestionable increase of mental power. Must the highest good drag
after it a quality which neutralizes and discredits it? --

"Indeed it takes
From our achievements, when performed at height,
The pith and marrow of our attribute. "

Shall we say, that the economical mother disburses so much earth and
so much fire, by weight and metre, to make a man, and will not add a
pennyweight, though a nation is perishing for a leader?
Therefore, the
men of God purchased their science by folly or pain. If you will have
pure carbon, carbuncle, or diamond, to make the brain transparent, the
trunk and organs shall be so much the grosser: instead of porcelain,
they are potter's earth, clay, or mud.

In modern times, no such remarkable example of this introverted mind
has occurred, as in Emanuel Swedenborg, born in Stockholm, in 1688.
This man, who appeared to his contemporaries a visionary, and elixir
of moonbeams, no doubt led the most real life of any man then in the
world: and now, when the royal and ducal Frederics, Cristierns, and
Brunswicks, of that day, have slid into oblivion, he begins to spread
himself into the minds of thousands. As happens in great men, he seemed,
by the variety and amount of his powers, to be a composition of several
persons,--like the giant fruits which are matured in gardens by the
union of four or five single blossoms. His frame is on a larger scale,
and possesses the advantage of size. As it is easier to see the
reflection of the great sphere in large globes, though defaced by some
crack or blemish, than in drops of water, so men of large calibre,
though with some eccentricity or madness, like Pascal or Newton, help
us more than balanced mediocre minds.

His youth and training could not fail to be extraordinary. Such a boy
could not whistle or dance, but goes grubbing into mines and mountains,
prying into chemistry and optics, physiology, mathematics, and
astronomy, to find images fit for the measure of his versatile and
capacious brain. He was a scholar from a child, and was educated at
Upsala. At the age of twenty-eight, he was made Assessor of the Board
of Mines, by Charles XII. In 1716, he left home for four years, and
visited the universities of England, Holland, France, and Germany. He
performed a notable feat of engineering in 1718, at the siege of
Fredericshall, by hauling two galleys, five boats, and a sloop, some
fourteen English miles overland, for the royal service. In 1721 he
journeyed over Europe, to examine mines and smelting works. He
published, in 1716, his Daedalus Hyperboreus, and, from this time, for
the next thirty years, was employed in the composition and publication
of his scientific works. With the like force, he threw himself into
theology. In 1743, when he was fifty-four years old, what is called
his illumination began. All his metallurgy, and transportation of ships
overland, was absorbed into this ecstasy. He ceased to publish any
more scientific books, withdrew from his practical labors, and devoted
himself to the writing and publication of his voluminous theological
works, which were printed at his own expense, or at that of the Duke
of Brunswick, or other prince, at Dresden, Liepsic, London, or
Amsterdam. Later, he resigned his office of Assessor: the salary
attached to this office continued to be paid to him during his life.
His duties had brought him into intimate acquaintance with King Charles
XII. , by whom he was much consulted and honored. The like favor was
continued to him by his successor. At the Diet of 1751, Count Hopken
says, the most solid memorials on finance were from his pen. In Sweden,
he appears to have attracted a marked regard. His rare science and
practical skill, and the added fame of second sight and extraordinary
religious knowledge and gifts, drew to him queens, nobles, clergy,
shipmasters, and people about the ports through which he was wont to
pass in his many voyages. The clergy interfered a little with the
importation and publication of his religious works; but he seems to
have kept the friendship of men in power. He was never married. He had
great modesty and gentleness of bearing. His habits were simple; he
lived on bread, milk, and vegetables; and he lived in a house situated
in a large garden; he went several times to England, where he does not
seem to have attracted any attention whatever from the learned or the
eminent; and died at London, March 29, 1772, of apoplexy, in his
eighty-fifth year. He is described, when in London, as a man of quiet,
clerical habit, not averse to tea and coffee, and kind to children.
He wore a sword when in full velvet dress, and, whenever he walked
out, carried a gold-headed cane. There is a common portrait of him in
antique coat and wig, but the face has a wandering or vacant air.

The genius which was to penetrate the science of the age with a far
more subtle science; to pass the bounds of space and time; venture
into the dim spirit-realm, and attempt to establish a new religion in
the world,--began its lessons in quarries and forges, in the
smelting-pot and crucible, in ship-yards and dissecting-rooms. No one
man is perhaps able to judge of the merits of his works on so many
subjects. One is glad to learn that his books on mines and metals are
held in the highest esteem by those who understand these matters. It
seems that he anticipated much science of the nineteenth century;
anticipated, in astronomy, the discovery of the seventh planet,--but,
unhappily, not also of the eighth; anticipated the views of modern
astronomy in regard to the generation of earth by the sun; in magnetism,
some important experiments and conclusions of later students; in
chemistry, the atomic theory; in anatomy, the discoveries of
Schlichting, Monro, and Wilson; and first demonstrated the office of
the lungs. His excellent English editor magnanimously lays no stress
on his discoveries, since he was too great to care to be original; and
we are to judge, by what he can spare, of what remains.

A colossal soul, he lies vast abroad on his times, uncomprehended by
them, and requires a long local distance to be seen; suggest, as
Aristotle, Bacon, Selden, Humboldt, that a certain vastness of learning,
or _quasi_ omnipresence of the human soul in nature, is possible.
His superb speculations, as from a tower, over nature and arts, without
ever losing sight of the texture and sequence of things, almost realizes
his own picture, in the "Principia," of the original integrity of man.
Over and above the merit of his particular discoveries, is the capital
merit of his self-equality. A drop of water has the properties of the
sea, but cannot exhibit a storm. There is beauty of a concert, as well
as of a flute; strength of a host, as well as of a hero; and, in
Swedenborg, those who are best acquainted with modern books, will most
admire the merit of mass. One of the missouriums and mastodons of
literature, he is not to be measured by whole colleges of ordinary
scholars. His stalwart presence would flutter the gowns of an
university. Our books are false by being fragmentary; their sentences
are _bon mots_, and not parts of natural discourse; childish expressions
of surprise or pleasure in nature; or, worse, owing a brief notoriety to
their petulance, or aversion from the order of nature,--being some
curiosity or oddity, designedly not in harmony with nature, and
purposely framed to excite a surprise, as jugglers do by concealing
their means. But Swedenborg is systematic, and respective of the world
in every sentence; all the means are orderly given; his faculties work
with astronomic punctuality, and this admirable writing is pure from all
pertness or egotism.

Swedenborg was born into an atmosphere of great ideas. 'Tis hard to
say what was his own: yet his life was dignified by noblest pictures
of the universe. The robust Aristotelian method, with its breadth and
adequateness, shaming our sterile and linear logic by its genial
radiation, conversant with series and degree, with effects and ends,
skilful to discriminate power from form, essence from accident, and
opening by its terminology and definition, high roads into nature, had
trained a race of athletic philosophers. Harvey had shown the
circulation of the blood; Gilbert had shown that the earth was a magnet;
Descartes, taught by Gilbert's magnet, with its vortex, spiral, and
polarity, had filled Europe with the leading thought of vortical motion,
as the secret of nature. Newton, in the year in which Swedenborg was
born, published the "Principia," and established the universal gravity.
Malpighi, following the high doctrines of Hippocrates, Leucippus, and
Lucretius, had given emphasis to the dogma that nature works in
leasts,--"_tota in minimis existit natura_. " Unrivalled dissectors,
Swammerdam, Leeuwenhoek, Winslow, Eustachius, Heister, Vesalius,
Boerhaave, had left nothing for scalpel or microscope to reveal in
human or comparative anatomy; Linnaeus, his contemporary, was affirming,
in his beautiful science, that "Nature is always like herself;" and,
lastly, the nobility of method, the largest application of principles,
had been exhibited by Leibnitz and Christian Wolff, in cosmology;
whilst Locke and Grotius had drawn the moral argument. What was left
for a genius of the largest calibre, but to go over their ground, and
verify and unite? It is easy to see, in these minds, the original of
Swedenborg's studies, and the suggestion of his problems. He had a
capacity to entertain and vivify these volumes of thought. Yet the
proximity of these geniuses, one or other of whom had introduced all
his leading ideas, makes Swedenborg another example of the difficulty,
even in a highly fertile genius, of proving originality, the first
birth and annunciation of one of the laws of nature.

He named his favorite views, the doctrine of Forms, the doctrine of
Series and Degrees, the doctrine of Influx, the doctrine of
Correspondence. His statement of these doctrines deserves to be studied
in his books. Not every man can read them, but they will reward him
who can. His theologic works are valuable to illustrate these. His
writings would be a sufficient library to a lonely and athletic student;
and the "Economy of the Animal Kingdom" is one of those books which,
by the sustained dignity of thinking, is an honor to the human race.
He had studied spars and metals to some purpose. His varied and solid
knowledge makes his style lustrous with points and shooting spicula
of thought, and resembling one of those winter mornings when the air
sparkles with crystals. The grandeur of the topics makes the grandeur
of the style. He was apt for cosmology, because of that native
perception of identity which made mere size of no account to him. In
the atom of magnetic iron, he saw the quality which would generate the
spiral motion of sun and planet.

The thoughts in which he lived were, the universality of each law in
nature; the Platonic doctrine of the scale or degrees; the version or
conversion of each into other, and so the correspondence of all the
parts; the fine secret that little explains large, and large, little;
the centrality of man in nature, and the connection that subsists
throughout all things: he saw that the human body was strictly
universal, or an instrument through which the soul feeds and is fed
by the whole of matter: so that he held, in exact antagonism to the
skeptics, that, "the wiser a man is, the more will he be a worshipper
of the Deity. " In short, he was a believer in the Identity-philosophy,
which he held not idly, as the dreamers of Berlin or Boston, but which
he experimented with and established through years of labor, with the
heart and strength of the rudest Viking that his rough Sweden ever
sent to battle.

This theory dates from the oldest philosophers, and derives perhaps
its best illustration from the newest. It is this: that nature iterates
her means perpetually on successive planes. In the old aphorism, nature
is always self-similar. In the plant, the eye or germinative point
opens to a leaf, then to another leaf, with a power of transforming
the leaf into radicle, stamen, pistil, petal, bract, sepal, or seed.
The whole art of the plant is still to repeat leaf on leaf without
end, the more or less of heat, light, moisture, and food, determining
the form it shall assume. In the animal, nature makes a vertebra, or
a spine of vertebrae, and helps herself still by a new spine, with a
limited power of modifying its form,--spine on spine, to the end of
the world. A poetic anatomist, in our own day, teaches that a snake,
being a horizontal line, and man, being an erect line, constitute a
right angle; and, between the lines of this mystical quadrant, all
animate beings find their place; and he assumes the hair-worm, the
span-worm, or the snake, as the type of prediction of the spine.
Manifestly, at the end of the spine, nature puts out smaller spines,
as arms; at the end of the arms, new spines, as hands; at the other
end, she repeats the process, as legs and feet. At the top of the
column, she puts out another spine, which doubles or loops itself over,
as a span-worm, into a ball, and forms the skull, with extremities
again; the hands being now the upper jaw, the feet the lower jaw, the
fingers and toes being represented this time by upper and lower teeth.
This new spine is destined to high uses. It is a new man on the
shoulders of the last. It can almost shed its trunk, and manage to
live alone, according to the Platonic idea in the Timaeus. Within it,
on a higher plane, all that was done in the trunk repeats itself.
Nature recites her lesson once more in a higher mood. The mind is a
finer body, and resumes its functions of feeding, digesting, absorbing,
excluding, and generating, in a new and ethereal element. Here, in the
brain, is all the process of alimentation repeated, in the acquiring,
comparing, digesting, and assimilating of experience. Here again is
the mystery of generation repeated. In the brain are male and female
faculties; here is marriage, here is fruit. And there is no limit to
this ascending scale, but series on series. Everything, at the end of
one use, is taken up into the next, each series punctually repeating
every organ and process of the last. We are adapted to infinity. We
are hard to please, and love nothing which ends; and in nature is no
end; but everything, at the end of one use, is lifted into a superior,
and the ascent of these things climbs into daemonic and celestial
natures. Creative force, like a musical composer, goes on unweariedly
repeating a simple air or theme now high, now low, in solo, in chorus,
ten thousand times reverberated, till it fills earth and heaven with
the chant.

Gravitation, as explained by Newton, is good, but grandeur, when we
find chemistry only an extension of the law of masses into particles,
and that the atomic theory shows the action of chemistry to be
mechanical also. Metaphysics shows us a sort of gravitation, operative
also in the mental phenomena; and the terrible tabulation of the French
statists brings every piece of whim and humor to be reducible also to
exact numerical rations. If one man in twenty thousand, or in thirty
thousand, eats shoes, or marries his grandmother, then, in every twenty
thousand, or thirty thousand, is found one man who eats shoes, or
marries his grandmother. What we call gravitation, and fancy ultimate,
is one fork of a mightier stream, for which we have yet no name.
Astronomy is excellent; but it must come up into life to have its full
value, and not remain there in globes and spaces. The globule of blood
gyrates around its own axis in the human veins, as the planet in the
sky; and the circles of intellect relate to those of the heavens. Each
law of nature has the like universality; eating, sleep or hybernation,
rotation, generation, metamorphosis, vortical motion, which is seen
in eggs as in planets. These grand rhymes or returns in nature,--the
dear, best-known face startling us at every turn, under a mask so
unexpected that we think it the face of a stranger, and, carrying up
the semblance into divine forms,--delighted the prophetic eye of
Swedenborg; and he must be reckoned a leader in that revolution, which,
by giving to science an idea, has given to an aimless accumulation of
experiments, guidance and form, and a beating heart.

I own, with some regret, that his printed works amount to about fifty
stout octaves, his scientific works being about half of the whole
number; and it appears that a mass of manuscript still unedited remains
in the royal library at Stockholm. The scientific works have just now
been translated into English, in an excellent edition.

Swedenborg printed these scientific books in the ten years from 1734
to 1744, and they remained from that time neglected; and now, after
their century is complete, he has at last found a pupil in Mr.
Wilkinson, in London, a philosophic critic, with a co-equal vigor of
understanding and imagination comparable only to Lord Bacon's, who has
produced his master's buried books to the day, and transferred them,
with every advantage, from their forgotten Latin into English, to go
round the world in our commercial and conquering tongue. This startling
reappearance of Swedenborg, after a hundred years, in his pupil, is
not the least remarkable fact in his history. Aided, it is said, by
the munificence of Mr. Clissold, and also by his literary skill, this
piece of poetic justice is done. The admirable preliminary discourses
with which Mr. Wilkinson has enriched these volumes, throw all the
contemporary philosophy of England into shade, and leave me nothing
to say on their proper grounds.

The "Animal Kingdom" is a book of wonderful merits. It was written
with the highest end,--to put science and the soul, long estranged
from each other, at one again. It was an anatomist's account of the
human body, in the highest style of poetry. Nothing can exceed the
bold and brilliant treatment of a subject usually so dry and repulsive.
He saw nature "wreathing through an everlasting spiral, with wheels
that never dry, on axles that never creak," and sometimes sought "to
uncover those secret recess is where nature is sitting at the fires
in the depths of her laboratory;" whilst the picture comes recommended
by the hard fidelity with which it is based on practical anatomy. It
is remarkable that this sublime genius decides, peremptorily for the
analytic, against the synthetic method; and, in a book whose genius
is a daring poetic synthesis, claims to confine himself to a rigid
experience.

He knows, if he only, the flowing of nature and how wise was that old
answer of Amasis to him who bade him drink up the sea,--"Yes, willingly,
if you will stop the rivers that flow in. " Few knew as much about
nature and her subtle manners, or expressed more subtly her goings.
He thought as large a demand is made on our faith by nature, as by
miracles. "He noted that in her proceeding from first principles through
her several subordinations, there was no state through which she did
not pass, as if her path lay through all things. " "For as often as she
betakes herself upward from visible phenomena, or, in other words,
withdraws herself inward, she instantly, as it were, disappears, while
no one knows what has become of her, or whither she is gone; so that
it is necessary to take science as a guide in pursuing her steps. "

The pursuing the inquiry under the light of an end or final cause,
gives wonderful animation, a sort of personality to the whole writing.
This book announces his favorite dogmas. The ancient doctrines of
Hippocrates, that the brain is a gland; and of Leucippus, that the
atom may be known by the mass; or, in Plato, the macrocosm by the
microcosm; and, in the verses of Lucretius,--

Ossa videlicet e pauxillis atque minutis
Ossibus sic et de pauxillis atque minutis
Visceribus viscus gigni, sanguenque creari
Sanguinis inter se multis coeuntibus guttis;
Ex aurique putat micis consistere posse
Aurum, et de terris terram concrescere parvis;
Ignibus ex igneis, humorem humoribus esse.
Lib. I. 835.

"The principle of all things entrails made
Of smallest entrails; bone, of smallest bone,
Blood, of small sanguine drops reduced to one;
Gold, of small grains; earth, of small sands compacted
Small drops to water, sparks to fire contracted:"

and which Malpighi had summed in his maxim, that "nature exists entirely
in leasts,"--is a favorite thought of Swedenborg. "It is a constant
law of the organic body, that large, compound, or visible forms exist
and subsist from smaller, simpler, and ultimately from invisible forms,
which act similarly to the larger ones, but more perfectly and more
universally, and the least forms so perfectly and universally, as to
involve an idea representative of their entire universe. " The unities
of each organ are so many little organs, homogeneous with their
compound; the unities of the tongue are little tongues; those of the
stomach, little stomachs; those of the heart are little hearts. This
fruitful idea furnishes a key to every secret. What was too small for
the eye to detect was read by the aggregates; what was too large, by
the units. There is no end to his application of the thought. "Hunger
is an aggregate of very many little hungers, or losses of blood by the
little veins all over the body. " It is the key to his theology, also.
"Man is a kind of very minute heaven, corresponding to the world of
spirits and to heaven. Every particular idea of man, and every
affection, yea, every smallest spark of his affection, is an image and
effigy of him. A spirit may be known from only a single thought. God
is the grand man. " The hardihood and thoroughness of his study of
nature required a theory of forms, also. "Forms ascend in order from
the lowest to the highest. The lowest form is angular, or the
terrestrial and corporeal. The second and next higher form is the
circular, which is also called the perpetual-angular, because the
circumference of a circle is a perpetual angle. The form above this
is the spiral, parent and measure of circular forms; its diameters are
not rectilinear, but variously circular, and have a spherical surface
for center; therefore it is called the perpetual-circular. The form
above this is the vortical, or perpetual-spiral; next, the
perpetual-vortical, or celestial; last, the perpetual-celestial, or
spiritual. "

Was it strange that a genius so bold should take the last step,
also,--conceive that he might attain the science of all sciences, to
unlock the meaning of the world? In the first volume of the "Animal
Kingdom," he broaches the subject, in a remarkable note. --

"In our doctrine of Representations and Correspondences, we shall treat
of both these symbolical and typical resemblances, and of the
astonishing things which occur, I will not say, in the living body
only, but throughout nature, and which correspond so entirely to supreme
and spiritual things, that one would swear that the physical world was
purely symbolical of the spiritual world; insomuch, that if we choose
to express any natural truth in physical and definite vocalterms, and
to convert these terms only into the corresponding and spiritual terms,
we shall by this means elicit a spiritual truth, or theological dogma,
in place of the physical truth or precept; although no mortal would
have predicted that anything of the kind could possibly arise by bare
literal transposition; inasmuch as the one precept, considered
separately from the other, appears to have absolutely no relation to
it. I intend, hereafter, to communicate a number of examples of such
correspondences, together with a vocabulary containing the terms of
spiritual things, as well as of the physical things for which they are
to be substituted. This symbolism pervades the living body. "

The fact, thus explicitly stated, is implied in all poetry, in allegory,
in fable, in the use of emblems, and in the structure of language.
Plato knew of it, as is evident from his twice bisected line, in the
sixth book of the Republic. Lord Bacon had found that truth and nature
differed only as seal and print; and he instanced some physical
proportions, with their translation into a moral and political sense.
Behmen, and all mystics, imply this law in their dark riddle-writing.
The poets, in as far as they are poets, use it; but it is known to
them only, as the magnet was known for ages, as a toy. Swedenborg first
put the fact into a detached and scientific statement, because it was
habitually present to him, and never not seen. It was involved, as we
explained already, in the doctrine of identity and iteration, because
the mental series exactly tallies with the material series. It required
an insight that could rank things in order and series; or, rather, it
required such rightness of position, that the poles of the eye should
coincide with the axis of the world. The earth has fed its mankind
through five or six millenniums, and they had sciences, religions,
philosophies; and yet had failed to see the correspondence of meaning
between every part and every other part. And, down to this hour,
literature has no book in which the symbolism of things is
scientifically opened. One would say, that, as soon as men had the
first hint that every sensible object,--animal, rock, river, air,--nay,
space and time, subsists not for itself, nor finally to a material
end, but as a picture-language, to tell another story of beings and
duties, other science would be put by, and a science of such grand
presage would absorb all faculties; that each man would ask of all
objects, what they mean: Why does the horizon hold me fast, with my
joy and grief, in this center? Why hear I the same sense from countless
differing voices, and read one never quite expressed fact in endless
picture-language? Yet, whether it be that these things will not be
intellectually learned, or, that many centuries must elaborate and
compose so rare and opulent a soul,--there is no comet, rock-stratum,
fossil, fish, quadruped, spider, or fungus, that, for itself, does not
interest more scholars and classifiers than the meaning and upshot of
the frame of things.

But Swedenborg was not content with the culinary use of the world. In
his fifty-fourth year, these thoughts held him fast, and his profound
mind admitted the perilous opinion, too frequent in religious history,
that he was an abnormal person, to whom was granted the privilege of
conversing with angels and spirits; and this ecstasy connected itself
with just this office of explaining the moral import of the sensible
world. To a right perception, at once broad and minute, of the order
of nature, he added the comprehension of the moral laws in their widest
social aspects; but whatever he saw, through some excessive
determination to form, in his constitution, he saw not abstractly, but
in pictures, heard it in dialogues, constructed it in events. When he
attempted to announce the law most sanely, he was forced to couch it
in parable.

Modern psychology offers no similar example of a deranged balance. The
principal powers continued to maintain a healthy action; and, to a
reader who can make due allowance in the report for the reporter's
peculiarities, the results are still instructive, and a more striking
testimony to the sublime laws he announced, than any that balanced
dulness could afford. He attempts to give some account of the modus
of the new state, affirming that "his presence in the spiritual world
is attended with a certain separation, but only as to the intellectual
part of his mind, not as to the will part;" and he affirms that "he
sees, with the internal sight, the things that are in another life,
more clearly than he sees the things which are here in the world. "

Having adopted the belief that certain books of the Old and New
Testaments were exact allegories, or written in the angelic and ecstatic
mode, he employed his remaining years in extricating from the literal,
the universal sense. He had borrowed from Plato the fine fable of "a
most ancient people, men better than we, and dwelling nigher to the
gods;" and Swedenborg added, that they used the earth symbolically;
that these, when they saw terrestrial objects, did not think at all
about them, but only about those which they signified. The
correspondence between thoughts and things henceforward occupied him.
"The very organic form resembles the end inscribed on it. " A man is
in general, and in particular, an organizd justice or injustice,
selfishness or gratitude. And the cause of this harmony he assigned
in the Arcana: "The reason why all and single things, in the heavens
and on earth, are representative, is because they exist from an influx
of the Lord, through heaven. " This design of exhibiting such
correspondences, which, if adequately executed, would be the poem of
the world, in which all history and science would play an essential
part, was narrowed and defeated by the exclusively theologic direction
which his inquiries took. His perception of nature is not human and
universal, but is mystical and Hebraic. He fastens each natural object
to a theologic notion:--a horse signifies carnal understanding; a tree,
perception; the moon, faith; a cat means this; an ostrich, that; an
artichoke, this other; and poorly tethers every symbol to a several
ecclesiastic sense. The slippery Proteus is not so easily caught. In
nature, each individual symbol plays innumerable parts, as each particle
of matter circulates in turn through every system. The central identity
enables any one symbol to express successively all the qualities and
shades of the real being. In the transmission of the heavenly waters,
every hose fits every hydrant. Nature avenges herself speedily on the
hard pedantry that would chain her waves. She is no literalist.
Everything must be taken genially, and we must be at the top of our
condition to understand anything rightly.

His theological bias thus fatally narrowed his interpretation of nature,
and the dictionary of symbols is yet to be written. But the interpreter,
whom mankind must still expect, will find no predecessor who has
approached so near to the true problem.

Swedenborg styles himself, in the title-page of his books, "Servant
of the Lord Jesus Christ;" and by force of intellect, and in effect,
he is the last Father in the Church, and is not likely to have a
successor. No wonder that his depth of ethical wisdom should give him
influence as a teacher. To the withered traditional church yielding
dry catechisms, he let in nature again, and the worshiper, escaping
from the vestry of verbs and texts, is surprised to find himself a
party to the whole of his religion. His religion thinks for him, and
is of universal application. He turns it on every side; it fits every
part of life, interprets and dignifies every circumstance. Instead of
a religion which visited him diplomatically three or four times,--
when he was born, when he married, when he fell sick, and when he died,
and for the rest never interfered with him,--here was a teaching which
accompanied him all day, accompanied him even into sleep and dreams;
into his thinking, and showed him through what a long ancestry his
thoughts descend; into society, and showed by what affinities he was
girt to his equals and his counterparts; into natural objects, and
showed their origin and meaning, what are friendly, and what are
hurtful; and opened the future world, by indicating the continuity of
the same laws. His disciples allege that their intellect is invigorated
by the study of his books.

There is no such problem for criticism as his theological writings,
their merits are so commanding; yet such grave deductions must be made.
Their immense and sandy diffuseness is like the prairie, or the desert,
and their incongruities are like the last deliration. He is
superfluously explanatory, and his feelings of the ignorance of men,
strangely exaggerated. Men take truths of this nature very fast. Yet
he abounds in assertions; he is a rich discoverer, and of things which
most import us to know. His thought dwells in essential resemblances,
like the resemblance of a house to the man who built it.