Emmanuel Swedenborg's philosophy of the human organism

means by which wisdom can be reached: Experience, Geometry and the power of Reasoning. Experience includes everything in the world of nature which forms the basis of all our sciences. But experience by itself is merely knowledge and not wisdom. We cannot be wise without knowledge, but knowledge alone is not enough.

The second means leading to wisdom is geometry. Everything, whether in motion or at rest, makes a geometrical figure in space. Nothing can move without obeying some law of mechanics. Thus the whole universe in its motions is a system of mechanism in which all things are dependent on one another. Geometry is the means to understanding it. But all things depend on a first source from which they derive their existence. Geometry deals only with finite things, but beyond the sphere of geometry is the Infinite, which must be recognised as the origin of the finite.

The third means by which we arrive at a true philosophy is the faculty of reasoning. By reason we arrange into order and connection the fragments of knowledge we receive from experience. We use analogy to see how each fragment fits into the scheme of things and by analogy discover further truths previously unknown to us. Our soul is the principle of wisdom.

A true philosopher is a man who, by all these three means, arrives at the real causes of things in the mechanical world, causes which are remote from the senses. Afterwards he reasons from first principles about the world and its phenomena and surveys them as if from a central point. Primordial Man was, according to Swedenborg, in a state of perfect wholeness and his organism was the path from his senses to his soul. Thus he knew immediately the causes of what he experienced with his senses. Today in Man’s imperfect state, the way which leads from his senses to his soul is almost entirely closed and can only be opened by continual exercise through experience and reasoning.

Swedenborg now gives us a philosophic account of the origin of the universe. It is not possible in the course of a short lecture to do justice to this account, but some outline of it must be given for the proper understanding of what follows.

We cannot, he says, find the first cause in Nature or through our senses. The world itself is a miracle and whatever exists in any of its kingdoms exists by a miracle. The Infinite is the immediate

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