"thinking natures."[1] These thoughts, to which by Kant "probability" is frankly attributed, are carried out at length in the "Dreams of a Spirit-seer, &c.," in the half serious, half ironical style which characterises this remarkable work. (Du Prel makes another application of this thought: The Planet-dwellers; 1880, pp. 114–175.) See Fortschr. d. Met. Ros. I., 497: "We could imagine an immediate representation of an object, not through the conditions of sense, but by the understanding. But we have no tangible idea of such knowledge. Still, it is necessary for us to think of such in order not to subject all beings capable in intelligence to only our way of seeing things. For it may be that some world-beings might behold the same objects under another form. It can also be that this form is, and of necessity must be, the same in all world-beings, although we do not understand this necessity." Kant refers to this last possibility also later in his Note II. to the second edition of the Æsthetic, but remarks that this extension of the Space-
- ↑ Compare Swedenborg's De Telluribus, &c.: "Earths in the Universe and their Inhabitants, &c.: also their Spirits and Angels: from what has been heard and seen …" This work appeared in sections inserted in successive volumes of the Arcana from the year 1749 to 1756, and was published in a volume in London in 1758. Kant's Theory of the Heavens appeared in 1755. Swedenborg also treats of the inhabitants of Jupiter and Saturn as described by the spirits from those planets in the spiritual world. He, too, treats of their character in relation to their planetary conditions, but describes them mainly as to their spiritual place or function in relation to the Maximus Homo or entire order and form of the heavenly society.
