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I own, with some regret, that his printed works amount to about fifty stout octaves, his scientific works being about half of the whole number; and it appears that a mass of manuscript still unedited remains in the royal library at Stockholm. The scientific works have just now been translated into English, in an excellent edition.

Swedenborg printed these scientific books in the ten years from 1734 to 1744, and they remained from that time neglected; and now, after their century is complete, he has at last found a pupil in Mr. Wilkinson, in London, a philosophic critic, with a co-equal vigor of understanding and imagination comparable only to Lord Bacon’s, who has produced his master’s buried books to the day, and transferred them, with every advantage, from their forgotten Latin into English, to go round the world in our commercial and conquering tongue. This startling reappearance of Swedenborg, after a hundred years, in his pupil, is not the least remarkable fact in his history. Aided, it is said, by the munificence of Mr. Clissold, and also by his literary skill, this piece of poetic justice is done. The admirable preliminary discourses with which Mr. Wilkinson has enriched these volumes, throw all the contemporary philosophy of England into shade, and leave me nothing to say on their proper grounds.

The “Animal Kingdom” is a book of wonderful merits. It was written with the highest end,—to put science and the soul, long estranged from each other, at one again. It was an anatomist’s account of the human body, in the highest style of poetry. Nothing can exceed the bold and brilliant treatment of a subject usually so dry and repulsive. He saw nature “wreathing through an everlasting spiral, with wheels that never dry, on axles that never creak,” and sometimes sought “to uncover those secret recess is where nature is sitting at the fires in the depths of her laboratory;” whilst the picture comes recommended by the hard fidelity with which it is based on practical anatomy. It is remarkable that this sublime genius decides, peremptorily for the analytic, against the synthetic method; and, in a book whose genius is a daring poetic synthesis, claims to confine himself to a rigid experience.

He knows, if he only, the flowing of nature and how wise was that old answer of Amasis to him who bade him drink up the sea,—“Yes, willingly, if you will stop the rivers that flow in.” Few knew as much about nature and her subtle manners, or expressed more subtly her goings. He thought as large a demand is made on our faith by nature, as by miracles. “He noted that in her proceeding from first principles through her several subordinations, there was no state through which she did not pass, as if her path lay through all things.” “For as often as she betakes herself upward from visible phenomena, or, in other words, withdraws herself inward, she instantly, as it were, disappears, while no one knows what has become of her, or whither she is gone; so that it is necessary to take science as a guide in pursuing her steps.”

The pursuing the inquiry under the light of an end or final cause, gives wonderful animation, a sort of personality to the whole writing. This book announces his favorite dogmas. The ancient doctrines of Hippocrates, that the brain is a gland; and of Leucippus, that the atom may be known by the mass; or, in Plato, the macrocosm by the microcosm; and, in the verses of Lucretius,—

  Ossa videlicet e pauxillis atque minutis
  Ossibus sic et de pauxillis atque minutis
  Visceribus viscus gigni, sanguenque creari
  Sanguinis inter se multis coeuntibus guttis;
  Ex aurique putat micis consistere posse
  Aurum, et de terris terram concrescere parvis;
  Ignibus ex igneis, humorem humoribus esse.
                                          Lib. I. 835.

  “The principle of all things entrails made
  Of smallest entrails; bone, of smallest bone,
  Blood, of small sanguine drops reduced to one;
  Gold, of small grains; earth, of small sands compacted
  Small drops to water, sparks to fire contracted:”
 

and which Malpighi had summed in his maxim, that “nature exists entirely in leasts,”—is a favorite thought of Swedenborg. “It is a constant law of the organic body, that large, compound, or visible forms exist and subsist from smaller, simpler, and ultimately from invisible forms, which act similarly to the larger ones, but more perfectly and more universally, and the least forms so perfectly and universally, as to involve an idea representative of their entire universe.” The unities of each organ are so many little organs, homogeneous with their compound; the unities of the tongue are little tongues; those of the stomach, little stomachs; those of the heart are little hearts. This fruitful idea furnishes a key to every secret. What was too small for the eye to detect was read by the aggregates; what was too large, by the units. There is no end to his application of the thought. “Hunger is an aggregate of very many little hungers, or losses of blood by the little veins all over the body.” It is the key to his theology, also. “Man is a kind of very minute heaven, corresponding to the world of spirits and to heaven. Every particular idea of man, and every affection, yea, every smallest spark of his affection, is an image and effigy of him. A spirit may be known from only a single thought. God is the grand man.” The hardihood and thoroughness of his study of nature required a theory of forms, also. “Forms ascend in order from the lowest to the highest. The lowest form is angular, or the terrestrial and corporeal. The second and next higher form is the circular, which is also called the perpetual-angular, because the circumference of a circle is a perpetual angle. The form above this is the spiral, parent and measure of circular forms; its diameters are not rectilinear, but variously circular, and have a spherical surface for center; therefore it is called the perpetual-circular. The form above this is the vortical, or perpetual-spiral; next, the perpetual-vortical, or celestial; last, the perpetual-celestial, or spiritual.”

Was it strange that a genius so bold should take the last step, also,—conceive that he might attain the science of all sciences, to unlock the meaning of the world? In the first volume of the “Animal Kingdom,” he broaches the subject, in a remarkable note.—

“In our doctrine of Representations and Correspondences, we shall treat of both these symbolical and typical resemblances, and of the astonishing things which occur, I will not say, in the living body only, but throughout nature, and which correspond so entirely to supreme and spiritual things, that one would swear that the physical world was purely symbolical of the spiritual world; insomuch, that if we choose to express any natural truth in physical and definite vocalterms, and to convert these terms only into the corresponding and spiritual terms, we shall by this means elicit a spiritual truth, or theological dogma, in place of the physical truth or precept; although no mortal would have predicted that anything of the kind could possibly arise by bare literal transposition; inasmuch as the one precept, considered separately from the other, appears to have absolutely no relation to it. I intend, hereafter, to communicate a number of examples of such correspondences, together with a vocabulary containing the terms of spiritual things, as well as of the physical things for which they are to be substituted. This symbolism pervades the living body.”