"place" them as outside of himself. In his brilliant book on the origin of Swedenborg's ideas7 Professor Lamm, in effect, says that Swedenborg was not insane; he was a poet with a vivid imagination.
Before Professor Lamm another champion of Swedenborg's sanity was Ethan Allen Hitchcock, the scholar (and incidentally soldier) who was called to be President Lincoln's and Secretary Stanton's adviser during the Civil War. Hitchcock wrote a clear and well—documented book,8 in which he noted the similarity of many of Swedenborg's ideas and expressions with those of the "hermeneutical" writers—the very ones whom Swedenborg once had stigmatized as "occult"—writers who in all ages out of the Kabbalah, nature mysticism, and various kinds of Neoplatonism had constructed "secret" systems, sometimes crudely "magical," sometimes of elevated religious philosophy, disguised from heresy-hunters by "occult" terms.
The General was right, but the similarity may have been due to the same sources having been tapped by Swedenborg and the hermeneutical writers. But Hitchcock concluded that Swedenborg had not meant what he said, except in the same symbolic sense that some of the hermeneutics meant their allegories. "It is also possible for me to talk with Luther," Hitchcock exclaimed in effect, "by reading his books!" And he thought that by saying he was "in the spirit" Swedenborg meant that he communicated with the living hermeneutical brethren, a secret and world-wide fraternity.
Hitchcock was well-intentioned but he was too rational. Swedenborg most assuredly meant it when he said he was in communication with the spirit world. His accounts of it, he asserted more than once, were based on "things heard, seen and felt."
But here also, it cannot be too often repeated, Swedenborg had spent many years in lessening the antecedent improbability of this, as far as he was concerned.
First, his extensive study of physics had, as we know, made him believe that matter was ultimately motion and hence essentially immaterial. He conceived of the universe as consisting of matter in diflerent states of energy (the Principia), and the "soul" as being of the same energy substance as that element or state which he called the "magnetic." Then his study of physiology, especially of
