The philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg : God, Man and the cosmos

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and whom learned Europe has accepted as one of the most outstanding men of the age? Mitrinovi¢é described him as the first Anthropo-philosopher and, as such, marking a turning point in philosophic method. The significance of this characterisation will become clearer to-night, and the sense in which his is a highly critical method and no mere humanism in the usually accepted sense of that word.

His doctrine of uses, or function, understood in relation to organic forms, becomes a universal key of order and wisdom. Particularly would I draw attention to his doctrine of discrete degrees which is of great importance to our age, an age which tends to slur over all differences and reduce everything to mediocrity. With this and his doctrine of correspondences he was able to form a coherent system from the atom to the throne of God.

There was no sudden change in his work; it developed consistently from the natural to the spiritual world. It represents one of the few great consistent Western cosmologies and one in which Man has his true value. Science and Religion are not at conflict in him. He is one of the essential original thinkers in the philosophic line of monadologies, with Bruno, Leibniz, Bo§covié, Herbart and in our own day Petronijevié.

~—We are met, then, to honour one of the supreme geniuses of our Western World, a man who accepted the philosophic implications of the statement that Man is made in the image of God, and carried it through with the highest courage, discrimination and integrity. Is it not time that men of Science and Philosophy overcame their reflex fears when a great man starts to speak of God and Angels, and began to hear what he said? I am sure it will become clear to-night how important is Swedenborg’s view, exactly for those unsolved problems in the cultural life of the West, which are rending the world. These stem on the one hand from the inability of Science to-understand the nature of Man and rom its world picture in which Man has no place; and on the ~yother from the one-sided development of historic Christianity up \ro date, in which the Cosmological side has been neglected. ue 4