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J. J. GARTH WILKINSON. 1195
than any other man in England, supplies us with some valuable and
beautifully written criticism of them. If all Mr. Wilkinson’s writings
.
were as good as the following passage, we should not be disposed
to dissent from Emerson’s estimate of him as holding a place in the
front rank of English authors :-
’In the works that we are con
sidering, as indeed in all that Swedenborg wrote, there is an
unconcealed belief, from the first, in God and in His providence ; and
such a belief as results, not from meditation only, or from sceptical
second thought, but from the religious atmosphere of Christendom.
On this head our author was a child to the end of his days, and
never questioned the earliest instructions which he had received from
his father and mother, whom he honoured to the extent of believing
that thought can never begin ab origine, as though it had no
human parentage. He knew that every truth and mental possession
has its genealogy, which it can no more deny or question with pro
priety than we ourselves can dispense with our natural ancestry, by
proceeding from whom we start from the vantage ground of previous
manhood, and may be originators in our line, instead of fruitlessly
repeating the past creation for every fresh individual. Especially
did he know that no Christian man can, without sheer impuissance,
begin out of Christianity. Accordingly, Swedenborg took full
advantage of the religion of his time, and the belief in a personal
God was with him the foundation of all sciences. Nothing is more
plain than that only in so far as man is in the image of God, and
can think like God, can he give the reason of anything God has
made .... Swedenborg’s observations of facts are as superior to the
ordinary foundations, as his method is better than the procedures
which are still in vogue. His power of remark is more physiog
nomical than that of any previous writer with whom we are acquainted.
Other collectors of facts rushed at once into dissection and violence,
and broke through the speaking face of things in their impatience.
He, on the other hand, proceeded cautiously and tenderly, and only
cut the skin when he had exhausted its looks and expressions. He
was the most grandly superficial writer who had then arisen—a rare
qualification in its good sense, and one which gives the benefit of
travel to the sciences, enabling them to take liberal views of their
materials’" (Emanuel Swedenborg : a Biography, pp. 44, 53).
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