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132 DOCUMENTS CONCERNING SWEDENBORG.
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divine commission as he affirms he had, follows of course.
To allow the reality of his extraordinary gift,’ and to
reject his account of the way and purpose in and for
which he received it, is to make a fact unintelligible, and
even incredible, though admitted to be indubitable. Nor
will the attempted solution of some of the German writers,
followed by some in England, at all meet the difficulty.
When they tell us, that his alleged spiritual experience
was nothing else than the vivid embodying of the con
ceptions of his own mind, they tell us what, so far as
concerns the relations in his writings, though not easy to
believe, it were also not easy to disprove. But how does
it explain the cases mentioned by Kant? Supposing
Swedenborg able to form so vivid a conception of the
deceased M. de Marteville as to fancy he heard him
speak ; yet that a piece of information respecting a fact
in the natural world, thus heard only in imagination,
should be verified by the event, were indeed an extra
ordinary coincidence. How lively soever the idea that
he might be able to conjure up in imagination of the
prince of Prussia ; yet that he should succeed in ex
tracting from this phantom, the mere creation ofhis own
mind, the knowledge of the secrets between the prince
and the queen, never told to any other person, were also
a miracle, such as only the credulity of sceptics could be
capacious enough to take in. And with whatever force of
colouring he might manage to picture to his fancy a fire
three hundred miles off
, till at last, believing it real, he
becomes alarmed for his own house ; yet that every thing
thus imagined should prove true in every particular, if
nothing but the activity of his own conceptions had
given it birth, were a phenomenon to puzzle much
wiser philosophers than either Germany, or any other
country, ever beheld. In declaring, then, that some of
the examples are such as " to set the assertion of Sweden
borg’s extraordinary gift out of all possibility of doubt,"
Kant has fixed the brand of folly on those of his own
disciples, who sagely resolve the whole into vividness of
conception. Nor is this testimony of Kant at all
weakened by his own defective consistency, in afterwards
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