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action, while below the red are many waves increasing in length and
noticeable in thermal action or calorescence.
It should be noted that Newton also postulated an ether in which
his luminous corpuscles travelled, and in which they were capable of
exciting undulations.
»He also attempted to account for gravitation in an ether, but he
published little of this theory, because he was not able from experiment
and observation to give a satisfactory account of the medium and the
manner of its operation in producing the chief phenomena of nature.»1
Swedenborg’s theories of light and colors are radically different from
those of Newton. The whole scheme of his bullular hypothesis would
at once prevent the formation of any theory involving the shooting of
corpuscles from the sun to the earth and thus impinging on the retina,
for he considers all space to the filled with degrees of matter and
natural substances, differing in degree of density of composition and inertia.
From the very beginning he taught that light is produced by the
undu-latory motion of an elastic ether, and that colors are produced by the
modification of this motion in the material objects receiving it. He
developed and modified the theory from time to time, but that it was
originally derived from the older workers, from Descartes, Huyghens
or Hooke, is clear from Swedenborg’s earliest works.
Up to the present point we have seen that Swedenborg retained
the Cartesian theory of vortices and without accepting the Newtonian
vacuum nevertheless employed Newton’s disco very of the matliematical
relation of masses in space which is commonly called the law of
gravitation. With regard to the question of the constitution of matter, Gassendi
and Boyle had introduced the atomic theory of Democritus, who also
postulates a vacuum, into modern chemistry and physics, but
Swedenborg, who studied Boyle’s wrorks, and was in general much influenced
by the English experimental school of thought, nevertheless differs with
all those advocates of the subdivisibility of matter wliose reasoning ends
1 Preston, Op. Git., p. 26: — The student of Swkdbnborg’s cosmology may be
interested in the following note, quoted from the same work, pp. 25—26: »To
Descartes the bare existence of bodies apparently at a distance was proof of the existence
of a continuous medium between them, for he regarded extension as the sole
essen-tial property of matter, and matter a necessary condition of extension. ’Ethers were
invented for the planets to swim in, to constitute the electric atmospheres and
magnetic effluvia, to convey sensations from one part of our body to another, till all space
was filled several times over with ethers’ (J. C. Maxwell).»
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