come his own master." It was all right, he explained, to do so while the son was in the father's house, but when the son ". . . becomes his own master, so as to be able to guide himself from his own mind and know what to do, then the Lord is his father." 2
This seems to have been the only instance in which the Bishop had no reply to make, but then it was only a dream.
It was inevitable that commentators in later times would try to explain Swedenborg's quest for religion as a sort of penitence for having "left" his father's orthodoxy. Like absolutely everything else in human experience, the story can of course be forced into a Freudian formula. As William James has pointed out, it is a question in the last resort of whether the need for religious experience is always due to a neurosis or not. Were all the great mystics "compensating"? Who can tell, except the mystics, and they cannot, because all love is inexplicable to those who have not felt it.
If it is true that the mystic strain in Swedenborg was evident in his childhood, it is also true that it went underground during the years when he studied science, but he, no more than Pascal or Newton, ever repudiated religion for science. Until about 1733, however, he seems to have published nothing that indicates more than a decent deistic rationalism. With the important exception of the first chapter of the Principia (which was written last), it is hard to find any Biblical God in that work. Not that He was left out. Nature, Swedenborg said, was only another name for the motive forces issuing from the Infinite Being, "to be venerated by every philosopher."
It must be remembered that in the eighteenth century, though God might often be dismissed privately as nonexistent, it was not yet safe to do it too publicly. Voltaire himself put up a little chapel at Ferney to Him, on which, to be sure, the name of Voltaire was put in larger letters than the Deity's. And even in the nineteenth century Renan said that people who were unacquainted with modern Biblical research had no intellectual right to leave the church. In Swedenborg's time that kind of research was still to come.
A kind of Engineer-God was acknowledged in the Principia, seen as identical with the "Infinite." How that Infinite was going to produce the finite; how that Eternity was going to produce time,
