Willoughby. And none of them, I think, distress themselves, as did Fénélon, about purely disinterested love.
Atherton. They are too close followers of Plato to do that. They do not disguise their impatience of the bodily prison-house. Neither have they any love for the divine ignorance and holy darkness of Dionysius. They are eager to catch every ray of knowledge—to know and to rejoice, to the utmost that our mortality may, upon its heavenward pilgrimage.[[387]]
BOOK THE TWELFTH
EMANUEL SWEDENBORG
CHAPTER I.
What if earth
Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein
Each to other like, more than on earth is thought.
Milton.
Here follow extracts from a section in Atherton’s Note-book, entitled ‘Remarks on Swedenborg.’
The doctrine of Correspondence is the central idea of Swedenborg’s system. Everything visible has belonging to it an appropriate spiritual reality. The history of man is an acted parable; the universe, a temple covered with hieroglyphics. Behmen, from the light which flashes on certain exalted moments, imagines that he receives the key to these hidden significances,—that he can interpret the Signatura Rerum. But he does not see spirits, or talk with angels. According to him, such communications would be less reliable than the intuition he enjoyed. Swedenborg takes opposite ground. ‘What I relate,’ he would say, ‘comes from no such mere inward persuasion. I recount the things I have seen. I do not labour to recall and to express the manifestation made me in some moment of ecstatic exaltation. I write you down a plain statement of journeys and conversations in the spiritual world, which have made the greater part of my daily history for many years together. I take my stand upon experience. I have proceeded by observation and induction as strict as that of any man of science among you. Only it has been given me to enjoy an experience reaching into two worlds—that of spirit, as well as that of matter.’