Emmanuel Swedenborg's philosophy of the human organism

exists for an end. Each new finite thing produced derives from its predecessor the same active power of producing further things and so is a means to a further end. Thus each thing is the instrumental cause of another for the sake of which it exists. Everything depends on something else for its existence and there is a continuous causal relationship right back to the first cause. Because of this relationship, the first cause can be said to be present in all the various things that are produced. Thus the world originates and exists as a connected series and at each stage of the series we have end or purpose leading to cause and effect.

Man with his faculties is placed in a special position in relation to the universe. With his senses, he stands midway between the greatest and the least things in creation. He can perceive with his senses all that is in the middle range, which is more or less equidistant from the two extremes of magnitude. Thus from what we see and feel we can, by reason, arrive at a knowledge of what we can neither see nor feel.

Our sensations give rise to intellectual ideas in our minds. In themselves, sensations are only instrumental causes or means, but as soon as they enter our minds they begin a new life. Intellectual ideas exist for the sake of serving the supreme life of wisdom. Thus Man is at that point where the infinite spiral returns upon itsel{—the mediator between the infinite and the finite universes. Where the Infinite with all its potentialities ends, there Man with his limited faculties begins. However, Man has lost his primordial knowledge of the relation between Infinity and the finite which once came to him through his senses. He has now to regain through reason a consciousness of his place as a connecting li In this way, Man completes the circle of things by which the universe is nothing else than a complex of means to a universal end, (Fig. IIL.)

Swedenborg saw Man’s physical body as the pathway from the senses to the soul. The body is the basis of Man’s reason and consciousness. Therefore after the publication of the Principia Swedenborg turned his attention to the study of human anatomy and physiology. He spent some time in Paris and Italy collecting material and during the period from 1734 to 1744 he worked on and published his two major treatises on these subjects: The Economy of the Animal Kingdom and The Animal Kingdom. It

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