Emmanuel Swedenborg's philosophy of the human organism

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result of a profound inner crisis it became clear to him that a new task lay ahead of him.

The experience which thus altered the course of Swedenborg’s life was the realisation that the human organism is the source of Man’s knowledge of the divine. Everything which Man knows of divine qualities—of goodness, truth or wisdom—is incarnated in human physiological processes. Every part and organ of the body can be seen as a manifestation of divine qualities. These qualities are only divine insofar as, and by virtue of the fact that, they are applied to human social life. In religious terms, Heaven is the conception of the divine social organism in human thought. The Lord is a representation of the brain of the social organism. During the remainder of his life Swedenborg wrote of the Lord in the third person as the source of his ideas. The faculty by which Swedenborg experienced directly the connections and analogies between organic processes, human qualities and religious conceptions, he regarded as a special gift. He strongly warned others of the danger of insanity if they tried to imitate him,

Swedenborg now began to write two series of volumes, each of which took several years to complete. In 1747 he began his Spiritual Diary in which he recorded, as they occurred, his long series of inner experiences. In the following year he began the Arcana Celestia which was an interpretation of the Books of Genesis and Exodus. He later used these two collections of material as the basis for more systematic accounts of his ideas. These later books include Heaven and Hell, Divine Love and Wisdom, Divine Providence and many others which together constitute the third period in his philosophic thought. It is only possible here to summarise this very briefly.

According to Swedenborg, all things are connected with one another by correspondence. There is nothing in the created universe which does not correspond to something in Man, both to his affections and thoughts and also to the organs and viscera of his body. In the latter case the correspondence is with the functions of those organs and viscera. In the body, form and function are inseparable. The functions of the organs cannot be conceived without forms; one cannot think of sight without the eye or of respiration without the lungs. In the same way, when it is said mental processes correspond to the brain or to the heart, it i

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