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Swedenborg, a Hermetic Philosopher

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Swedenborg, a Hermetic Philosopher SWEDENBORG, A HERMETIC PHILOSOPHER. BEINa A SEQUEL TO REMARKS ON ALCHEMY AND THE ALCHEMISTS. SHOWING THAT EMANUEL SWEDENBOEG WAS A HERMETIC PHILOSOPHER AND THAT HIS WRITINGS MAY BE INTERPRETED FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF HEEMETIC PHILOSOPHY. WITH A CHAPTER COMPAEING SWEDEXBOUG AND SPINOZA. BY THE ATJTHOfe OF REMARKS ON ALCHEMY AND THE ALCHEMISTS. " One truth openeth the way to another.'' NEW YORK: . D. APPLETON & COMPAlSIY, 846 & 348 BROADWAY. ; j Entkked Jiccordiiif,' to act of Congress, in tho year 1608, by I). APPLETON & CO., In tho Clerk's Oq^c&.of the District Court of the United States, for the ^<mtherh District of New York. ADVERTISEMENT. The writer of the following pages desires to say- that, in preparing the work, it has been no part of his design to express his individual opinions upon the topics discussed. His purpose has been to sug- gest the opinions of others, especially of a class of men scarcely recognized as existing in the world. The art they profess, called after the name of Hermes, Sermetic Philosophy, is so little known at the present day that the name of it by no means in- dicates it. The adepts profess to be, or to have been, in possession of a secret, which they call the gift of God, The art has been prosecuted under many names, among which are Alchemy, Astrology, and even Chiromancy, as well as Geomancy, Magic, &c., under all of which names it has had deluded follow- ers, who have been deceived, as those who claim to be true artists say, not by the art itself which never 4 ADVERTISEMENT. "tlid betray the heart tliat loved it," but by their own selfisli jjassions, wliich play the Asrnodeiis with BO many that the few who escape delusion arc mysti- cal, not to say mythical, beings who are supposed to have lived uj)on dreams. I propose now, without ])retending to solve the problem, to sugpjest the true difficulty in the study, which I take to be this, that the Aljj/ia in the art is also the Omega^ and the Omega the Alpha, and the two arc one. Hence the difficulty is something like that of finding the commencement of a circle. An- other mode of suggesting the difficulty is by saying that the object is analogous to an attempt to discover the place of that force in nature called gravity or gravitation. In mechanical calculations this force or power is referred to a certain centre, called the centre every one that the absolute of gravity ; yet knows centre is a mere i^oint and physically nothing at all, yet there is no particle of matter free from the influ- ence of this power, and every, the most infinitesimal particle, has its own centre. So is it with what the Hermetic philosophers call their Mercury^ which they say is everywhere seen in action, but nowhere in essence. I am aware of the fact that some speculative spiritualists of the present day have much to say of what they call imponderahUs^ but I am not as yet convinced that any actual thing in the universe can — ADVERTISEMENT. 5 be an imponderable, except possibly those invisible things called thoughts and affections; yet even these, in some sense, seem to be the most powerful and j)onderable of influences, moving the entire be- ing of man in spite of prejudices and of ignorance the most absolute and immovable in themselves. It is to little or no purpose to give a mere name to a subtle influence whose mode of action is im- known, and whose existence is only recognized through an observation of disconnected effects, our knowledge of which is chaotic and remains chaotic because no principle of action is discovered, and yet, how many of us know what life is, except precisely in this way ? We see it everywhere, " the birds of the air fly with it, the fishes of the sea swim with it, we carry it about with us everywhere," yet we know not what it is. Let it be merely supposed now, that a recluse proposes to himself the problem. What is Life? but, as this w^ord is common and is imagined to car- ry some meaning with it, while yet the student enters upon the study confessing his ignorance, it is thought convenient to assume another name. Let it then be called Mercury^ from some remote analogy of this sort ; that, if a small portion of this mineral be dashed upon a smooth extended surface, it will sepa- rate into an infinity of flttle globules, each one of which has the entire properties of the whole, and like 6 ADVERTISEMENT. SO many mirrors reflects so many universes^ all simi- lar to each other. Any other wonl in place of INIercury, as Salt for example, may be used, or a word may be invented without any meaning at all, as Jlileg^ to represent the subject sought for, which is to be found not by the mere definition of a word, but by the properties or priiidples of the thing, which are to be admitted, not upon authority, but by obsei'\^ation and experience in life, always keeping in view " the possibility of na- ture," on the principle that tTiough the artist may err, '* nature when rightly handled cannot err." With these preliminary remarks I shall proceed to the object I have in view. E. A. H. New York, Angust, 1858. SWEDENBORG, A HERMETIC PHILOSOPHER. CHAPTER I. It is more than probable that, on reading the title-page of the following work, some may ask, what is meant by Hermetic philosophy ? I think proper, therefore, to premise a few words on that subject, not to explain it in detail, but to indicate some of its principal features. I published last year a small volume of Eemarhs upon Alchemy^ the object of which was to show that the so-called Philosopher's Stone, so much sought after by the Alchemists of the Middle Ages, was a mere symbol, the genuine Alchemists being in fact Hermetic philosophers—a class of men who have never * Remarks on Alchemy and the Alchemists^ &c. : Crosby, Nichols & Co. Boston, 1857. 8 8WEDENB0R0, [On. L been clearly (lelin('(l to tlio fi^oncral reader, owinp^, in p^rcat part, no (loul)t, to the nature of their studies and convictions. Many attempts, indeed, have been made to nnveil them, and to descril)e their philoBophy, but without results, BO far as I have seen ; the subject being so remote from tlie ordinary avocations of life, and because also of the common prepossessions of man in respect to what constitutes the true knowledge of God, and the beatitude of man. In my liemarTcs^ I *did not attempt to point out precisely the nature of this philosophy, as such an attempt would have been the height of presumption. Tliat which I chiefly intended, was simply to show from Alchemic books, some of the conditions set forth by the Alchemists themselves, though very mystically and obscure- ly, as indispensably requisite in him who would possess the philosopher's stone. A mere accident—a very casual circumstance —some three or four years ago, threw into my hands a small volume on Alchemy, the preface to which alone satisfied me that there must have been two classes of Alchemists : and the perusal of the book assured me that, while some ^'money- loving sots " employed themselves in experiments upon all sorts of metals and other materials in Ch. I.] A HERMETIC PHILOSOPHEK. 9 search of gold, there was another class of men in pursuit of the philosopher's stone by very different means : —by devout contemplation upon the nature of God and of man—upon the human soul and its capacity for knowledge, for happi- ness, and for immortality ; —and the object was a discovery of the means for attaining the true end of man ; not an ephemeral pleasure, but a permanent beatitude—not a good for a day, but for all time. The impression derived from read- ing this one work on alchemy induced me to look further, and without much effort I obtained a considerable number of volumes, over three hundred, of a strange character, on the philoso- pher's stone and hermetic philosophy ; some of which are of course worthless, but all of which show, beyond the possibility of doubt, that the philosopher's stone was a mere symbol for human perfection, or for something supposed to be essential to that perfection. There is not a single volume in my possession that could have been written by any one in pursuit of actual gold, though many of the works show that their authors had but very crude opinions as to the real object of the philosophers. It is not my purpose now to comment at length upon this subject. Keferring the reader 10 BWEDKNBOIWi, [(^ji. I. U) my Remarks, 1 ^vill niniply say, tliat after iinu'li study, I came to tlio ()]>iiiirni that, while Man was the suhject of alchemy, and his per- fection was the object of the art, that object required for its attainment certain nneans^ which were, however, as carefully wrai)ped up in sym- bolism as the end itself. At length, I became convinced that those means were as clearly stated in Scrij^ture as the use of human language will allow. In short, all of my studies drew my at- tention to the declaration of the Lord in the Sermon on the Mount ; —" Blessed are the pure " in heart, for they shall see God : —for it appeared very clear that the philosophers had in some way connected the perfection of man with a knowl- edge of God, the former leading to the latter, yet the latter being as a sign of the former.
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