LETTER IX.

MY DEAR W.

Paris, Nov. 20th, 1856.

You know how continually Swedenborg protests against the popular habit of regarding space and time as real existences, and how he denies that any right understanding can be had of creation so long as that habit remains undisturbed. "Do not, he says, I beseech you, confound your ideas with time and space, for in proportion as you do so, you will really understand no Divine work. Creation cannot be explained in an intelligible manner, unless time and space be removed from the thought, but if these are removed it may be so explained. It is manifest from the ideas of the angels which are without space, that in the created universe nothing lives but God-man alone, or the Lord, and that nothing moves but by life from Him: thus that in Him we live, move, and are.”—Divine Love and Wisdom, 51, 155, 285-6, 300-1.

Now what does Swedenborg mean by thus everlastingly warning us against taking our sensible judgments of time and space as absolute, or con

hood images this creative peculiarity, this Diic perfection, putting the creature so far as he alizes it into exact correspondence with the eator, and making Him a full participant or fect of the Divine infinitude.

But how shall the creature realize this selfod in any degree, seeing that he is absolutely Jestitute of it? It is evident from the bare statement of his creatureship, that he is intrinsically void of life or selfhood, that his very nature is ot to be. How then shall he surmount this

trinsic or natural destitution, and so arrive at Sifhood, or conscious existence? This is the question. On the one hand, it is clear that he annot be a creature of God, save in so far as he ossesses selfhood: on the other, it is clear that is intrinsically, or by nature destitute of selfood. And the problem is to reconcile these two ropositions, or to shew this intrinsic natural detitution of life giving place to the amplest and eternal exuberance of it.

But now does it not irresistibly follow from These premises, that creation is nothing more and nothing less than a process of redemption? Does t not follow, in other words, that all true or Divine creation rigidly consists in giving the creature redemption from his own nature, that , in endowing him with selfhood? Bethink yourself. We have just seen that God's true creature is bound by the necessity of his creature

E

firming them from the reason? He means, in other words, to say that theologians and philosophers have an inveterate habit of representing life as a commerce or play between an internal subject and an external object, and so of degrading or brutifying life. For as in every logical copulation of object and subject, the object is the controlling member of the copula, and the subject the obedient one, so of course I cannot be subject to the external universe without being, in the exact ratio of the reach of my subjection, brutalized, or deprived of my human quality. The human essence lies in finding its object on a higher or interior plane to that of its own subjectivity, in short, in interiorating the object to the subject. Consequently when philosophy or theology reverses this process and shews me to myself as a legitimate subject of nature, it degrades me to the brute, or dehumanizes me. We may say then in strictly scientific speech, that the vice, according to Swedenborg, of all our orthodox modes of thought, lies in their sensuality, that is, in their systematic exterioration of the object to the subject, of the not-me to the me.

Take for example any fact of life, which philosophers call, a sensible perception. I see a horse. "Now" say the philosophers, "there are obviously two things involved in this experience, a subject and an object, a me and a not-me. I am the seeing subject, the horse is the seen-object. I con

sequently as subject am included in my body; the horse, as object, is excluded from that body, and hence is external to me. And so of all other facts of life. Thus the object, or not-me, is in every case spatially exterior to the subject, or me."

"Halt there!" cries Swedenborg, and I am now giving you the sheer pith of all his doctrine on this subject; "this is a most childish analysis of the experience in question, and will not bear the least scrutiny. I see a horse. There are two visible bodies enumerated in this proposition no doubt, my body and that of the horse, separated by more or less of space, and distinguishable from each other by almost every sense. But remember, we are talking, not of any logical proposition with its copula of object and subject, nor yet of any fact of sense, but wholly of a fact of life or consciousness, namely, sight: and the question is whether this fact of life or consciousness does not, within its own limits, completely annul the distance which to the eye separates all natural objects, and fuse them in living unity? We know perfectly well, already, that to the senses, or apparently, all things exist under the forms of space and time, that is, in spatial and temporal separation from each other. What alone we seek to know, accordingly, is whether they exist so really as well as apparently; that is to say, whether the consciousness does not lift them out of the isolation they exhibit to the sense, and fuse them in the unity or universality of the me?