SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 187 

 and was elevated to the nobility,' displaying during the next decades inde- 

 fatigable energy as an official, member of the House of Nobles, and scientific 

 writer. Then during the years 1744-5 ^^ underwent a severe spiritual crisis; 

 after repeated phases of alternate depression and exaltation he beheld in a 

 vision the Saviour Himself and learnt from Him that he was henceforth to 

 devote himself entirely to spiritual matters. He at once resigned his post of 

 assessor and devoted his whole life to spreading the new doctrine that he 

 believed he had received direct from heaven through repeated spiritual 

 revelations. Pestered by the priesthood in his native country, he lived his 

 last years mostly abroad, and died in deep poverty in London in the year 

 1772., misunderstood by his own age, but honoured as a religious founder by 

 a small group of believers. 



Swedenborg's natural-scientific works are extraordinarily extensive; he 

 published books on mathematics, physics and chemistry, geology and cos- 

 mology, anatomy and physiology, and, besides this, much of what he wrote 

 remained unprinted and has not been published until our own time, as, for in- 

 stance, his anatomical work De Cerebro, which, contains his most important in- 

 vestigations regarding the brain. All these works are full of ideas and genius, 

 the true value of which was not appreciated until our own day, but which, 

 on the other hand, contain very little in the way of original observations. 

 He himself considered that he possessed more talent for thinking about 

 already existing facts and their interrelation than for making observations 

 of his own; but for the very reason that he did not support his speculations 

 upon facts which he himself had observed, he ran the risk of letting his 

 thinking be influenced by that attraction for the mystical which he had 

 always felt and which had been encouraged by the religious environment of 

 his childhood. Among the students of nature who thus impressed him must 

 especially be mentioned Olof Rudbeck, who in Swedenborg's youth was the 

 predominant figure in the University of Upsala and from whom he learnt 

 not only his love of nature, but also a tendency to many-sided activities and 

 fantastic conclusions. As we have already seen, Rudbeck was an upholder of 

 the seventeenth century's mechanical conception of natural phenomena, 

 both inanimate and animate, and this conception was also adopted by 

 Swedenborg. It was developed in the course of his foreign tour by studying 

 both the philosophy of Descartes and the writings of contemporary physicists 

 and anatomists. 



Swedenborg s vieivs of the life-problem 

 His views of life are at first much the same as those we found in Hoffmann; 

 the body is a mechanism, to which is added a vegetative life-force, animus, 

 which consists of a fine material substance, and finally a higher soul, tnens. 



^ After being ennobled he called himself Swedenborg, having previously borne the family 

 name of Swedberg. 



