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THE DUKE OF BRUNSWICK . 615
belief should prevail that he would rise at the last judgment, when yet
he was living already, and that the body should rise, when yet he
felt himself to be in a body; besides several other things." On p. 67
we read, “Some of those who come into the other life from the
Christian world are strongly persuaded that whatever they say
and think is true, even if it is against faith and against heaven ***
such a one was Polhem , and he appeared like them , on account of
the confidence he had in his own knowledge and imagination .” In the
" Larger Diary," No. 4722, he says further respecting him : " As the
mechanician Polhem was in the life of the body continually intent upon
planning and constructing hoisting machines, as he had been more
successful in this department than any one else, and as his genius was
of this nature, he had in the life of the body confirmed himself in
the belief that there was no God, that every thing was from nature,
that the living principle in human beings and animals is something
mechanical, which is filled and thus formed by the air according to
their nature and the laws of order, and that they are hence able to
live. He was unwilling to know anything of the life after death,
of the internal man, of heaven and hell, of anything Divine besides
nature, and of Providence as being anything more than the blind chance
of nature; he had even confirmed himself against their existence.
As the imaginative power which he had in the body still continues
with him , he learns and gives instruction as to how various objects
may be created, such as birds, mice, cats, and even infants and
men; this he does by kneading and shaping a certain mass and by
means of the ideas of thought, and hence such objects appear:
for in the other world thought can represent such objects with any
It is, however, only something aërial and nothing real which
thus appears. It was shown him that all others could produce such
objects by their imagination and phantasy, and that what he did
was a mere matter of sport; yet he continues like some silly person
to form these and similar new objects out of his mass. He was also
in a camera obscura displaying his art, and he appeared himself in
it sitting upon some dead men’s bones, which were in a coffin,
because his nature was such that he did not acknowledge the living
but the dead." See also Nos. 4729, 5059, 5837, 6025, 6049, 6071.
one.
NOTE 15.
LUDWIG RUDOLPH, DUKE OF BRUNSWICK .
Ludwig Rudolph, who is mentioned in Document 4, p. 20, was
the second son of Anton Ulrich, Duke of Brunswick -Wolfenbüttel.
On the death of his father in 1714, the duchy was divided between
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