Abstract
In March 1744 a peculiar crisis put an end to what promised to be — and actually was — the brilliant scientific career of the Swedish citizen of the Age of Enlightenment, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). Ever since then, it has been granted that his contributions to science had come to a standstill, he started writing about spirits, angels, the afterlife, the Lord. ... A physical revelation? Wasn’t everything metaphysical? — or pretending to be?
As you know, every theory that is new is declared to be absurd; then it is recognized to be true but useless and trivial; finally, it is thought to be so relevant that its very opponents claim its discovery.
— William James
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Notes
Some parts of the JD, the indented paragraphs in WE, the totality of SD and some aspects of the Memorabilia (Memorable relations) are incorporated in his late production (AR, CL and TCR).
Strictly speaking, forerunners of the doctrine of correspondences are found in EAK and in Clavis hieroglyphica arcanorum naturalium et spiritualium, per viam repraesentationum et correspondentiarum, published posthumously ( London: R. Hindmarsh, 1784 ).
Yet, it has been consistently sustained by first rank scholars.
Quoted by A. Feldman and P. Ford in Grandes cientificos e inventores (Barcelona: Hymsa, 1979 ), Vol. II, p. 22.
M. Masson, La segunda ciencia de sueno, in the collective work Los extrasensoriales (Barcelona: Ediciones 29, 1977 ), pp. 205–206.
Cf. Fib., 393, 467 and 561, and AK I, 157, n. L.
In the eighteenth century, the term spirit signified humour: a fluid state of matter. As theory went, the expression animal spirit used in one of the next passages, refers to the subtlest and most vital of all these substances.
L. Pasteur, La Théorie des germes et ses applications à la chirurgie (1878). Swedenborg’s note (SD 3791) is dated November 1, 1748.
M. Ramström, Emanuel Swedenborg’s Investigation in National Science and the Basis for His Statements concerning the Functions of the Brain ( Upsala: University of Upsala, 1910 ), p. 23.
I. Jonsson, Swedenborgs korrespondenslära (Lund: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1969), p. 272. My translation.
Jonsson, Vetenskaparen och diktaren, in the collective book, Swedenborg: sökaren i naturens och andens världar (Stockhom: Proprius Vörlag, 1976), p. 24. My translation.
Letter to the author by Prof. Leon James, dated February 3, 1995.
Six lengthy chapters of my main work, La Tercera Fuente are dedicated to covering matters mentioned in Table 5. Obviously, there is no room for that material in this highly abridged report. La Tercera Fuente is programmed for publication in the nearest future by Grupo Libro, Madrid.
Letter from J. C. Cuno to Swedenborg dated March 8, 1769, in Letters and Memorials of Emanuel Swedenborg,collected and annotated by A. Acton (Bryn Athyn, Pa.: Swedenberg Scientific Association, 1949), pp. 650–51 and 653–54.
I have chosen to keep Swedenborg’s original Latin term and convey to the reader the peculiar and highly significant meaning he assigned to it. To wit: any kind of empirical or experimental information; i. e.: “[any data] procured from earthly and wordly things by means of sensuous impressions…. All things which are learnt and stored up in the memory, and which can be called forth from it for the use of the sight of the mind” (AC 1846 and 9394). Consequently, this expression neatly matches the theoretical requisites for positive science as stipulated by empiricists like David Hume, Auguste Comte, the Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle, etc. And indeed, it is to empirical science that Swedenborg’s physical revelations can be and have been collated.
It should be stressed that C. O. Sigstedt’s book, The Swedenborg Epic, marvellous and most accurate in all other respects, contains in this case a seriously mutilated version in which no less than the extremely important term, scientifica, has been omitted. This defective version reads as follows: “Another class are delighted with the new things as curiosities” (The Swedenborg Epic [London: The Swedenborg Society, 1981], p. 234). The original text reads quite clearly: Alterum genus, qui recipiunt ea ut scientifica, et ut scientificis, turn ut curiosis delectantur (see Emanuelis Swedenborgii Diarium Spirituale, ed. Tübingen and London: J. Fr. I. Tafel, 1843–46, SD 2955 ).
See series SD 2896–98.
A selection of twenty-two extensive monographic and fully documented cases is thoroughly discussed in my main manuscript, La Tercera Fuente. Evidently, this may be reckoned to amount to quite a substantial body of research evidence.
Letter to the author dated Princeton, December 4, 1991.
In this connection it ought to be mentioned that some laboratory experiments about consciousness-related phenomena and the paradoxes of quantum mechanics are at least as perplexing as my findings. Cf. for instance R. G. Jahn’s and Brenda J. Dunne’s excellent book, Margins of Reality: the Role of Consciousness in the Physical World (Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), and John Horgan’s “Filosofia cuântica” (Quantic philosophy) in Investigacion y Ciencia (Spanish ed. of Scientific American),September 1992, pp. 70ff.
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Blom-Dahl, C.A. (1998). Emanuel Swedenborg’s Physical and Metaphysical Revelation. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Phenomenology of Life and the Human Creative Condition. Analecta Husserliana, vol 52. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2604-7_9
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