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204 DOCUMENTS CONCERNING SWEDENBORG.
by Swedenborg be once understood, the anatomist and physiologist will acquire
more information, and obtain a more comprehensive view of the human body,
iand its relation to a higher sphere, than from any suigle book ever published
;
nay, we may add, than from all the books which have been written (especially
in modem times) on physiology, or, as it has been lately named, transcendental
anatomy.
*’
Swedenborg reasons not on any hypothesis, not on any theory, not on any
favorite doctrine of a fashionable school, but on the solid principles of geome-
try, based on the immutable rock of truth : and he must and will be considered
at no distant period the Zoroaster of Europe, and the Prometheus of a new era
of reason, however at present the clouds of prejudice may intervene, or the
storms of passion obscure the coruscations of his intellect."
In this connection we extract from the London " Forceps" for Nov. 1844, the fol-
lowing summary view of " Animal Kingdom.’*
" This, is the most remarkable theory of the human body that has ever fal-
len into our hands ; and by Emanuel Swedenborg, too ! a man whom we had
always been taught to regard as either a fool, a madman, or an impostor, or
perhaps an undefinable compound of all the three. Wonders, it seems, never
will cease, and therefore it were better henceforth to look out for them, and ac-
cept them whenever they present themselves, and make them into ordinary
things in that way. For thereby we may be saved from making wonderful
asses of ourselves and our craft, for enlightened posterity to laugh at.
" To return to our book, we can honestly assure our readers (which is more
than it would be safe to do in all cases), that we have carefully read through
both volumes of it, bulky though they be, and have gained much philosophical
insight from it into the chains of ends and causes that govern in the human or-
ganism. What has the world been doing for the past century, to let this great
system slumber on the shelf, and to run after a host of little bluebottles of hypo-
theses which were never framed to live for more than a short part of a single
season ? It is clear that it yet * knows nothing of its greatest men.’ The fact is,
it has been making money, or trying to make it, and grubbing after worthless
reputation, until it has lost its eyesight for the stars of heaven and the sun that
is shining above it.
" Emanuel Swedenborg’s doctrine is altogether the widest thing of the kind
which medical literature affords, and cast into an artistical shape of consummate
beauty. Under the rich drapery of ornament which diversifies his pages, there
runs a framework of the truest reasoning. The book is a perfect mine of prin-
ciples, far exceeding in intellectual wealth, and surpassing in elevation, the
finest efforts of Lord Bacon’s genius. It treats of the loftiest subjects without
abstruseness, being all ultimately referable to the common sense of mankind.
Unlike the German transcendentalists, this gifted Swede fulfils both the requi-
sites of the true philosopher ; he is one *
to whom the lowest things ascend,
and the highest descend, who is the equal and kindly brother of all’ There is
no trifling about him, but he sets forth his opinions, irrespective of controversy,
with a plaimiess of affirmation which cannot be mistaken ,- and in such close
and direct terms, that to give a full idea of his system in other words would re-
quire that we lesser men should write larger volumes than his ov^ni.
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