the Arch-fanatic and enthusiast—and had remarked of his great work that it consists of "eight volumes full of nonsense."
That Kant here uses the word sublime in an ironic sense, as Lind tries to show in his work on " Kant's Mystic View of the World," no one can admit, since Kant's view, as here presented, bears at least a resemblance to the idea of Swedenborg. Nor is there anything contradictory in the fact that Kant finds something inconsistent in Swedenborg's doctrine of one's being able to see in a certain manner the society of departed spirits with which one's own soul, which is not yet departed, stands associated as a spirit. Naturally; since the soul in this world has only sensuous vision and cannot at the same time have spiritual vision, one cannot be wholly in this and in the other world at the same time. (Heinze, p. 557.)
This inclination of Kant to Swedenborg at the time of these lectures (1775–1780) is not so surprising, since in his "Inaugural Dissertation" Kant himself clearly distinguished between the two worlds, the mundus sensibilis and the mundus intelligibilis, and in this it is probable that he was influenced by Swedenborg.
Kant differs distinctly from Swedenborg in that he does not believe in the possibility of the association of any soul which is still bound to the body with absent souls; as he also rejects the idea that souls which spiritually are already in the other world appear in visible acts in this visible world. If we accept this, then there is no more use of reason in this world at all, for then the spirits can be made to account for many transactions.
It is of this kind of vision or representation that Kant speaks in his earlier[1] and his later works. His utterances in the "Critique" leave the impression that he has not entirely rid himself of these ideas of the Lectures.
In the "Paralogism of the Pure Reason" (p. 230, German edition), he says: "The idea that the thinking subject could have thought before connection with the body, would be thus expressed: 'Before the beginning of the kind of sensation wherein something appears to us in space, the same transcendent objects which in our present state appear as bodies may have been seen in an entirely different way!'
- ↑ "Dreams," &c., S. 27.
