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824 [Doc. 309.
SWEDENBORG’S WRITINGS.
I. .
THE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES CLAIMS THE SWEDENBORG MSS. FROM THE
SWEDENBORG SOCIETY.
(
a) Letter of the Royal Academy of Sciences to the London
Printing Society.*
"The Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences has been in
formed that your Society is at present in possession of some
MSS. belonging to the collection of original handwritings of
Emanuel Swedenborg, which the heirs of that illustrious author
had deposited in our Academy, that they might be conserved
there, as an everlasting monument to his memory. But some
of those MSS. have, for a considerable time, been abali
enated from the original collection, by being lent on trust and
confidence to two members of the Academy, personal and
intimate friends of Swedenborg in his lifetime ; and the
same persons having afterwards taken those papers with them
to foreign countries, where they remained to their death,
without having restored to the Academy the borrowed MSS .
"By these considerations, the Royal Academy feels itself
fully assured that your honourable Society, inspired equally
by its own sentiment of what is right in general, and parti
cularly by its esteem for the memory of Swedenborg, will
make no objection to restore the before-mentioned MSS. to
the collection of Swedenborg’s originals, after having made of
them all the use the Society may desire, by copying or publish
ing the contents thereof ; the Royal Academy being, on its
part, bound by double obligation to preserve in their complete
* See Report of the Swedenborg Society for 1843, p. 42.
† The members of the Academy signing this letter labour under a
mistake in thinking that Wadström and Nordensköld were personally
acquainted with Swedenborg. A. Nordensköld was born in 1754, and thus
was scarcely eighteen years old when Swedenborg died in 1772. Besides,
it kno that he became acquainted with Swedenborg’s writings in
1773 ; thus a whole year after Swedenborg’s decease. Wadström was eight
years older, having been born in 1746 ; yet during Swedenborg’s life-time
after he had graduated at Upsal in 1767, he was scarcely ever in Stock
holm or London, and thus it is extremely unlikely that he made his per
sonal acquaintance.
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