IN OTHER WORLDS
EMANUEL SWEDENBORG, SCIENTIST AND MYSTIC, by Signe Toksvig; Faber and Faber. English price, 30/-. ORN in 1688, the son of a Swedish bishop, Emanuel Swedenborg, was a man of astonishingly varied. parts. He served his native country for a long period, and with great distinction, as an engineer and physicist; took time off abroad to study medicine, and anticipated some modern neurological theories by sheer shrewdness of reasoning from the data then available; in middle life, puzzled his friends by displaying rather remarkable powers of clairvoyance; then worried as well as puzzled them by claiming to move freely in supernatural realms, and to be the appointed founder of a new religion; but remained a capable man of affairs, and a valued counsellor at the Swedish Court, until his retirement to England towards the end of his days. Miss Toksvig’s biography of him is a fine piece of research-very detailed, remarkably objective, and yet not a bit dull. She takes his feats of lateinvihes seriously (and they are indeed well at-tested-among those of his contemporaries who was interested in investigating them was Immanuel Kant), but his revelations about what goes on in other.
worlds, with a pinch of salt (though not | perhaps a big enough one for most of us). At the same time she makes it clear that even if much "that Swedenborg regarded as coming from heaven is to be put down as his own subconscious musing, it is the subconscious musing of a most remarkable man. Swedenborg’s descriptions of the spirit-world show an originality of imagination, a moral insight, and even touches of humour, that are not to be found in the standardised trivialities on the subject given forth by the average spiritualistic medium. His. religion, moreover, has had some remarkable offshoots. Miss ‘Toksvig makes use here and there of William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, but does. not mention that James’s father was a Swedenborgian; nor that Swedenborgianism provided the backsround to the writings of William Blake. |
A.N.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 548, 23 December 1949, Page 12
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335IN OTHER WORLDS New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 548, 23 December 1949, Page 12
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