Representative Men: Seven Lectures
circular, which is also called the perpetual-angular, because the
circumference of a circle is a perpetual angle. The form above this
is the spiral, parent and measure of circular forms; its diameters are
not rectilinear, but variously circular, and have a spherical surface
for center; therefore it is called the perpetual-circular. The form
above this is the vortical, or perpetual-spiral; next, the
perpetual-vortical, or celestial; last, the perpetual-celestial, or
spiritual."
Was it strange that a genius so bold should take the last step,
also,--conceive that he might attain the science of all sciences, to
unlock the meaning of the world? In the first volume of the "Animal
Kingdom," he broaches the subject, in a remarkable note.--
"In our doctrine of Representations and Correspondences, we shall treat
of both these symbolical and typical resemblances, and of the
astonishing things which occur, I will not say, in the living body
only, but throughout nature, and which correspond so entirely to supreme
and spiritual things, that one would swear that the physical world was
purely symbolical of the spiritual world; insomuch, that if we choose
to express any natural truth in physical and definite vocalterms, and
to convert these terms only into the corresponding and spiritual terms,
we shall by this means elicit a spiritual truth, or theological dogma,
in place of the physical truth or precept; although no mortal would
have predicted that anything of the kind could possibly arise by bare
literal transposition; inasmuch as the one precept, considered
separately from the other, appears to have absolutely no relation to
it. I intend, hereafter, to communicate a number of examples of such
correspondences, together with a vocabulary containing the terms of
spiritual things, as well as of the physical things for which they are
to be substituted. This symbolism pervades the living body."
The fact, thus explicitly stated, is implied in all poetry, in allegory,
in fable, in the use of emblems, and in the structure of language.
Plato knew of it, as is evident from his twice bisected line, in the
sixth book of the Republic. Lord Bacon had found that truth and nature
differed only as seal and print; and he instanced some physical
proportions, with their translation into a moral and political sense.
Behmen, and all mystics, imply this law in their dark riddle-writing.
The poets, in as far as they are poets, use it; but it is known to
them only, as the magnet was known for ages, as a toy. Swedenborg first
put the fact into a detached and scientific statement, because it was
habitually present to him, and never not seen. It was involved, as we
explained already, in the doctrine of identity and iteration, because
the mental series exactly tallies with the material series. It required
an insight that could rank things in order and series; or, rather, it
required such rightness of position, that the poles of the eye should
coincide with the axis of the world. The earth has fed its mankind
through five or six millenniums, and they had sciences, religions,
philosophies; and yet had failed to see the correspondence of meaning
between every part and every other part. And, down to this hour,
literature has no book in which the symbolism of things is
scientifically opened. One would say, that, as soon as men had the
first hint that every sensible object,--animal, rock, river, air,--nay,
space and time, subsists not for itself, nor finally to a material
end, but as a picture-language, to tell another story of beings and
duties, other science would be put by, and a science of such grand
presage would absorb all faculties; that each man would ask of all
objects, what they mean: Why does the horizon hold me fast, with my
joy and grief, in this center? Why hear I the same sense from countless
differing voices, and read one never quite expressed fact in endless
picture-language? Yet, whether it be that these things will not be
intellectually learned, or, that many centuries must elaborate and
compose so rare and opulent a soul,--there is no comet, rock-stratum,
fossil, fish, quadruped, spider, or fungus, that, for itself, does not
interest more scholars and classifiers than the meaning and upshot of
the frame of things.
But Swedenborg was not content with the culinary use of the world. In
his fifty-fourth year, these thoughts held him fast, and his profound
mind admitted the perilous opinion, too frequent in religious history,
that he was an abnormal person, to whom was granted the privilege of
conversing with angels and spirits; and this ecstasy connected itself
with just this office of explaining the moral import of the sensible
world. To a right perception, at once broad and minute, of the order
of nature, he added the comprehension of the moral laws in their widest
social aspects; but whatever he saw, through some excessive
determination to form, in his constitution, he saw not abstractly, but
in pictures, heard it in dialogues, constructed it in events. When he
attempted to announce the law most sanely, he was forced to couch it
in parable.
Modern psychology offers no similar example of a deranged balance. The
principal powers continued to maintain a healthy action; and, to a
reader who can make due allowance in the report for the reporter's
peculiarities, the results are still instructive, and a more striking
testimony to the sublime laws he announced, than any that balanced
dulness could afford. He attempts to give some account of the modus
of the new state, affirming that "his presence in the spiritual world
is attended with a certain separation, but only as to the intellectual
part of his mind, not as to the will part;" and he affirms that "he
sees, with the internal sight, the things that are in another life,
more clearly than he sees the things which are here in the world."
Having adopted the belief that certain books of the Old and New
Testaments were exact allegories, or written in the angelic and ecstatic
mode, he employed his remaining years in extricating from the literal,
the universal sense. He had borrowed from Plato the fine fable of "a
most ancient people, men better than we, and dwelling nigher to the
gods;" and Swedenborg added, that they used the earth symbolically;
that these, when they saw terrestrial objects, did not think at all
about them, but only about those which they signified. The
correspondence between thoughts and things henceforward occupied him.
"The very organic form resembles the end inscribed on it." A man is
in general, and in particular, an organizd justice or injustice,
selfishness or gratitude. And the cause of this harmony he assigned
in the Arcana: "The reason why all and single things, in the heavens
and on earth, are representative, is because they exist from an influx
of the Lord, through heaven." This design of exhibiting such
correspondences, which, if adequately executed, would be the poem of
the world, in which all history and science would play an essential
part, was narrowed and defeated by the exclusively theologic direction
which his inquiries took. His perception of nature is not human and
universal, but is mystical and Hebraic. He fastens each natural object
to a theologic notion:--a horse signifies carnal understanding; a tree,
perception; the moon, faith; a cat means this; an ostrich, that; an
artichoke, this other; and poorly tethers every symbol to a several
ecclesiastic sense. The slippery Proteus is not so easily caught. In
nature, each individual symbol plays innumerable parts, as each particle
of matter circulates in turn through every system. The central identity
enables any one symbol to express successively all the qualities and
shades of the real being. In the transmission of the heavenly waters,
every hose fits every hydrant. Nature avenges herself speedily on the
hard pedantry that would chain her waves. She is no literalist.
Everything must be taken genially, and we must be at the top of our
condition to understand anything rightly.
His theological bias thus fatally narrowed his interpretation of nature,
and the dictionary of symbols is yet to be written. But the interpreter,
whom mankind must still expect, will find no predecessor who has
approached so near to the true problem.
Swedenborg styles himself, in the title-page of his books, "Servant
of the Lord Jesus Christ;" and by force of intellect, and in effect,
he is the last Father in the Church, and is not likely to have a
successor. No wonder that his depth of ethical wisdom should give him
influence as a teacher. To the withered traditional church yielding
dry catechisms, he let in nature again, and the worshiper, escaping
from the vestry of verbs and texts, is surprised to find himself a
party to the whole of his religion. His religion thinks for him, and
is of universal application. He turns it on every side; it fits every
part of life, interprets and dignifies every circumstance. Instead of
a religion which visited him diplomatically three or four times,--
when he was born, when he married, when he fell sick, and when he died,
and for the rest never interfered with him,--here was a teaching which
accompanied him all day, accompanied him even into sleep and dreams;
into his thinking, and showed him through what a long ancestry his
thoughts descend; into society, and showed by what affinities he was
girt to his equals and his counterparts; into natural objects, and
showed their origin and meaning, what are friendly, and what are
hurtful; and opened the future world, by indicating the continuity of
the same laws. His disciples allege that their intellect is invigorated
by the study of his books.
There is no such problem for criticism as his theological writings,
their merits are so commanding; yet such grave deductions must be made.
Their immense and sandy diffuseness is like the prairie, or the desert,
and their incongruities are like the last deliration. He is
superfluously explanatory, and his feelings of the ignorance of men,
strangely exaggerated. Men take truths of this nature very fast. Yet
he abounds in assertions; he is a rich discoverer, and of things which
most import us to know. His thought dwells in essential resemblances,
like the resemblance of a house to the man who built it. He saw things
in their law, in likeness of function, not of structure. There is an
invariable method and order in his delivery of his truth, the habitual
proceeding of the mind from inmost to outmost. What earnestness and
weightiness,--his eye never roving, without one swell of vanity, or
one look to self, in any common form of literary pride! a theoretic
or speculative man, but whom no practical man in the universe could
affect to scorn. Plato is a gownsman; his garment, though of purple,
and almost skywoven, is an academic robe, and hinders action with its
voluminous folds. But this mystic is awful to Caesar. Lycurgus himself
would bow.
The moral insight of Swedenborg, the correction of popular errors, the
announcement of ethical laws, take him out of comparison with any other
modern writer, and entitle him to a place, vacant for some ages, among
the lawgivers of mankind. That slow but commanding influence which he
has acquired, like that of other religious geniuses, must be excessive
also, and have its tides, before it subsides into a permanent amount.
Of course, what is real and universal cannot be confined to the circle
of those who sympathize strictly with his genius, but will pass forth
into the common stock of wise and just thinking. The world has a sure
chemistry, by which it attracts what is excellent in its children, and
lets fall the infirmities and limitations of the grandest mind.
That metempsychosis which is familiar in the old mythology of the