CHAPTER SEVEN
Physicist and Physiologist
IN Bishop Swedberg's house, a condensed Caprice called God was worshiped daily. In his son's Principia no deity called sinners to account by letting calves be born wearing French headdresses. As one of the first of his first principles Swedenborg laid down that "Nature operates in the world in a mechanical manner, and the phenomena which she presents to our senses are subject to their proper laws and rules." 1
For this book Swedenborg, the engineer, chemist, and astronomer, had made use of all the sciences he had not only studied but applied now for many years, as far as his epoch's limited powers of microscopy and measurements allowed. The occult doctrines of alchemy had no part in it; he criticized them sharply in his preface. He based his work, he asserted, on Experience, Geometry, and Reason. Translated into modern terms: on experiments, mathematics, and the resulting hypotheses.
His fundamental ideas were not all original. Descartes and Leibnitz had helped. Even before the eighteenth century nearly everything had been guessed at, but there had been at least as many bad guesses as good ones. Swedenborg chose mainly the good ones, showing what has been called his uncanny ability to put things together correctly, not only from his own but from other people's observations.
The Principia, however, belongs largely to the pure realm of mathematics. The nonphysicist is lost in this world of bloodless energies, this "geometrical" world of gyres and vortices and magnetic fields. Here it is for scientists to appraise Swedenborg's work.
Part of it at least has been dealt with by Svante Arrhenius,2 Swedish Nobel Prize winner. When the Royal Swedish Academy rediscovered that Swedenborg was one of its cofounders and began publishing his scientific works at the beginning of this century, eminent scientists wrote the introductions. Arrhenius wrote the
