Emanuel Swedenborg

Emanuel Swedenborg (born January 29, 1688, Stockholm, Sweden—died March 29, 1772, London, England) was a Swedish scientist, Christian mystic, philosopher, and theologian who wrote voluminously in interpreting the Scriptures as the immediate word of God. Soon after his death, devoted followers created Swedenborgian societies dedicated to the study of his thought. These societies formed the nucleus of the Church of the New Jerusalem, or New Church, also called the Swedenborgians.

Early life and works

Swedenborg was born at Stockholm. His father, Jesper Swedberg, was a prominent member of the Swedish clergy, court chaplain, professor of theology in the University of Uppsala, and later bishop of Skara. When the family was ennobled in 1719, it took the name Swedenborg. After graduating from the University of Uppsala in 1709, the young Swedenborg spent five years abroad. He had become fascinated by mathematics and the natural sciences, and to study them he visited England, Holland, France, and Germany, meeting some of the representatives of the new sciences there and learning practical mechanical skills. Swedenborg’s inventive and mechanical genius flowered at this time, and his speculations ranged from a method of finding terrestrial longitude by the Moon to new methods of constructing docks and even to tentative suggestions for the submarine and the airplane.

He returned to Sweden in 1715 and soon began to publish that country’s first scientific journal, called Daedalus Hyperboreus, in which he wrote numerous reports of his projects and discoveries and of the inventions of Sweden’s foremost mechanical talent of the time, Christopher Polhem. King Charles XII made the young scientist an assistant to Polhem by appointing him assessor extra ordinem (“extraordinary”) at the Royal Board of Mines. In this office, and later as assessor, he devoted himself for 30 years to the development and improvement of Sweden’s metal-mining industries. At this time he devoted several years to publishing reports and treatises on various scientific and philosophical problems—e.g., cosmology, corpuscular philosophy, mathematics, and human sensory perceptions. Now and then he also found time to write poems in Latin, some of which were published. In 1718 he published the first work on algebra in the Swedish language, and in 1721 he published a work on chemistry and physics.

Swedenborg’s philosophy of nature

Swedenborg was ennobled in 1719. After a second journey abroad in 1721–22, during which he published two Latin volumes on natural philosophy and chemistry, he wrote little or nothing for more than 10 years. But when he set out for a third European journey in 1733, it became obvious that these years had been filled with reading and reflection in addition to his ordinary work as a civil servant. In 1734 he published in Leipzig his Opera Philosophica et Mineralia (“Philosophical and Logical Works”) in three folio volumes, the first of which, the Principia Rerum Naturalium (“Principles of Natural Things”), contains Swedenborg’s mature philosophy of nature. In this work he reached by inductive argument several conclusions that resemble the theories of modern scientists. Swedenborg posited that matter consists of particles that are indefinitely divisible, and that these particles are in constant vortical (swirling) motion. Furthermore, these particles are themselves composed of smaller particles in motion. This idea strongly resembles the modern conception of the atom as described in terms of a nucleus and its electrons. Swedenborg’s suggestion concerning the formation of planets in the solar system was a precursor of the Kant–Laplace nebular theory (i.e., that the Sun and planets come from a common nebula).

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Philosophy 101

Investigation of “the Kingdom of the Soul.” After he published the Principia and a small work on the infinite in 1734, Swedenborg returned home. His father died in 1735, and in the next year he was granted a new leave of absence from his office as assessor. This time he went to France, Italy, and Holland. In Amsterdam he completed and published a new work in two great volumes, called Oeconomia Regni Animalis (1740–41; The Economy of the Animal Kingdom), and in November 1740 he was back in Stockholm.

Oeconomia Regni Animalis represents a new stage in Swedenborg’s scientific career. As he had sought to find the “soul” of creation in pure motion, he now sought to understand the soul of man and to find it in its own kingdom—i.e., the body. Here Swedenborg made a thorough study of human anatomy and physiology, with special attention to the blood and the brain. But he was not studying the human body as a subject per se. What he intended was to fulfill a program that he had formulated in 1734—i.e., to prove the immortality of the soul to the senses themselves. He believed the soul to be the inmost life of the blood and located in the brain, specifically in the cellular cortex. Swedenborg’s method as a researcher consisted mainly in collecting facts from microscopists and experimentalists and drawing his own conclusions from them. His energy and his erudition were overwhelming, and he has been given credit for some contributions to the localization of the mental processes. His anatomical works, however, remained almost unnoticed by contemporary science, and, when they were discovered by some 19th-century scholars, science had moved beyond them. Oeconomia Regni Animalis was followed by a whole series of sketches and small treatises in which Swedenborg attempted to round out his psychological investigations. Some of these became a part of the three volumes of the Regnum Animale (The Animal Kingdom, 2 vol.)—planned to be 17 volumes—that Swedenborg himself published in 1744–45.

Swedenborg’s religious crisis

These years of anatomical research were concluded by a painful religious crisis from which there survives a unique document. It is usually called the Journal of Dreams (1743–44) and was obviously meant to be a journal of his new travels beginning in July 1743, but the rather trivial notices were suddenly interrupted. There follows instead a list of various dreams recalled from earlier years and a detailed report on his spiritual experiences, mostly at night, from March to October 1744. Some of the dreams were of a grossly sexual character and caused many pious readers quite a shock when the journal was published in 1859. But the feelings of guilt Swedenborg evidently experienced at this time were not concentrated on his sexual impulses but rather on his intellectual pride, his burning ambition to be recognized as a great man of science. On April 7, 1744, he had his first vision of Christ, which gave him a temporary rest from the temptations of his own pride and the evil spirits he believed to be around him. A definite call to abandon worldly learning occurred in April 1745, Swedenborg told his friends in his later years. The call apparently came in the form of a waking vision of the Lord. Swedenborg thereafter left his remaining works in the natural sciences unfinished.