Volume Iv Part 50 (1/2)

In the general views, then, which are presented in the writings of Swedenborg on the subject of Heaven and h.e.l.l, as the abodes, respectively, of happiness and of misery, while there certainly is not anything which is not in the highest degree agreeable both to reason and Scripture, there also seems nothing which could be deemed inconsistent with the usual conceptions of the Christian world.

What tends to render thinking readers a little sceptical, is the want of a distinct boundary between the deductions from reason, and the articles, the truth of which is to rest on the Baron's personal testimony, his 'visa et audita'. Nor is the Baron himself (as it appears to me) quite consistent on this point.

Ib. p. 434.

Witness, again, the poet Milton, who introduces active sports among the recreations which he deemed worthy of angels, and (strange indeed for a Puritan!) included even dancing among the number.

How could a man of n.o.ble's sense and sensibility bring himself thus to profane the awful name of Milton, by a.s.sociating it with the epithet ”Puritan?”

I have often thought of writing a work to be ent.i.tled 'Vindiciae Heterodoxae, sive celebrium virorum [Greek: paradogmatizonton] defensio'; that is, Vindication of Great Men unjustly branded; and at such times the names prominent to my mind's eye have been Giordano Bruno, Jacob Behmen, Benedict Spinoza, and Emanuel Swedenborg. Grant, that the origin of the Swedenborgian theology is a problem; yet on which ever of the three possible hypotheses--(possible I mean for gentlemen, scholars and Christians)--it may be solved---namely:

1. Swedenborg's own a.s.sertion and constant belief in the hypothesis of a supernatural illumination; or,

2. that the great and excellent man was led into this belief by becoming the subject of a very rare, but not (it is said) altogether unique, conjunction of the somniative faculty (by which the products of the understanding, that is to say, words, conceptions and the like, are rendered instantaneously into forms of sense) with the voluntary and other powers of the waking state; or,

3. the modest suggestion that the first and second may not be so incompatible as they appear--still it ought never to be forgotten that the merit and value of Swedenborg's system do only in a very secondary degree depend on any one of the three. For even though the first were adopted, the conviction and conversion of such a believer must, according to a fundamental principle of the New Church, have been wrought by an insight into the intrinsic truth and goodness of the doctrines, severally and collectively, and their entire consonance with the light of the written and of the eternal word, that is, with the Scriptures and with the sciential and the practical reason. Or say that the second hypothesis were preferred, and that by some hitherto unexplained affections of Swedenborg's brain and nervous system, he from the year 1743, thought and reasoned through the 'medium' and instrumentality of a series of appropriate and symbolic visual and auditual images, spontaneously rising before him, and these so clear and so distinct, as at length to overpower perhaps his first suspicions of their subjective nature, and to become objective for him, that is, in his own belief of their kind and origin,--still the thoughts, the reasonings, the grounds, the deductions, the facts ill.u.s.trative, or in proof, and the conclusions, remain the same; and the reader might derive the same benefit from them as from the sublime and impressive truths conveyed in the Vision of Mirza or the Tablet of Cebes. So much even from a very partial acquaintance with the works of Swedenborg, I can venture to a.s.sert; that as a moralist Swedenborg is above all praise; and that as a naturalist, psychologist, and theologian, he has strong and varied claims on the grat.i.tude and admiration of the professional and philosophical student.--April 1827.

P. S. Notwithstanding all that Mr. n.o.ble says in justification of his arrangement, it is greatly to be regretted that the contents of this work are so confusedly tossed together. It is, however, a work of great merit.

[Footnote 1: An Appeal in behalf of the views of the eternal world and state, and the doctrines of faith and life, held by the body of Christians who believe that a New Church is signified (in the Revelation, c. xxi.) by the New Jerusalem, including Answers to objections, particularly those of the Rev. G. Beaumont, in his work ent.i.tled ”The Anti-Swedenborg.” Addressed to the reflecting of all denominations. By Samuel n.o.ble, Minister of Hanover Street Chapel, London. London, 1826. Ed.]

ESSAY ON FAITH.

Faith may be defined, as fidelity to our own being--so far as such being is not and cannot become an object of the senses; and hence, by clear inference or implication, to being generally, as far as the same is not the object of the senses: and again to whatever is affirmed or understood as the condition, or concomitant, or consequence of the same.

This will be best explained by an instance or example. That I am conscious of something within me peremptorily commanding me to do unto others as I would they should do unto me;--in other words, a categorical (that is, primary and unconditional) imperative;--that the maxim ('regula maxima' or supreme rule) of my actions, both inward and outward, should be such as I could, without any contradiction arising therefrom, will to be the law of all moral and rational beings;--this, I say, is a fact of which I am no less conscious (though in a different way), nor less a.s.sured, than I am of any appearance presented by my outward senses. Nor is this all; but in the very act of being conscious of this in my own nature, I know that it is a fact of which all men either are or ought to be conscious;--a fact, the ignorance of which const.i.tutes either the non-personality of the ignorant, or the guilt, in which latter case the ignorance is equivalent to knowledge wilfully darkened. I know that I possess this consciousness as a man, and not as Samuel Taylor Coleridge; hence knowing that consciousness of this fact is the root of all other consciousness, and the only practical contradistinction of man from the brutes, we name it the conscience; by the natural absence or presumed presence of which, the law, both divine and human, determines whether X Y Z be a thing or a person:--the conscience being that which never to have had places the objects in the same order of things as the brutes, for example, idiots; and to have lost which implies either insanity or apostasy. Well--this we have affirmed is a fact of which every honest man is as fully a.s.sured as of his seeing, hearing or smelling. But though the former a.s.surance does not differ from the latter in the degree, it is altogether diverse in the kind; the senses being morally pa.s.sive, while the conscience is essentially connected with the will, though not always, nor indeed in any case, except after frequent attempts and aversions of will, dependent on the choice. Thence we call the presentations of the senses impressions, those of the conscience commands or dictates. In the senses we find our receptivity, and as far as our personal being is concerned, we are pa.s.sive;--but in the fact of the conscience we are not only agents, but it is by this alone, that we know ourselves to be such; nay, that our very pa.s.siveness in this latter is an act of pa.s.siveness, and that we are patient ('patientes')--not, as in the other case, 'simply'

pa.s.sive. The result is, the consciousness of responsibility; and the proof is afforded by the inward experience of the diversity between regret and remorse.

If I have sound ears, and my companion speaks to me with a due proportion of voice, I may persuade him that I did not hear, but cannot deceive myself. But when my conscience speaks to me, I can, by repeated efforts, render myself finally insensible; to which add this other difference in the case of conscience, namely, that to make myself deaf is one and the same thing with making my conscience dumb, till at length I become unconscious of my conscience. Frequent are the instances in which it is suspended, and as it were drowned, in the inundation of the appet.i.tes, pa.s.sions and imaginations, to which I have resigned myself, making use of my will in order to abandon my free-will; and there are not, I fear, examples wanting of the conscience being utterly destroyed, or of the pa.s.sage of wickedness into madness;--that species of madness, namely, in which the reason is lost. For so long as the reason continues, so long must the conscience exist either as a good conscience, or as a bad conscience.

It appears then, that even the very first step, that the initiation of the process, the becoming conscious of a conscience, partakes of the nature of an act. It is an act, in and by which we take upon ourselves an allegiance, and consequently the obligation of fealty; and this fealty or fidelity implying the power of being unfaithful, it is the first and fundamental sense of Faith. It is likewise the commencement of experience, and the result of all other experience. In other words, conscience, in this its simplest form, must be supposed in order to consciousness, that is, to human consciousness. Brutes may be, and are scions, but those beings only, who have an I, 'scire possunt hoc vel illud una c.u.m seipsis'; that is, 'conscire vel scire aliquid mec.u.m', or to know a thing in relation to myself, and in the act of knowing myself as acted upon by that something.

Now the third person could never have been distinguished from the first but by means of the second. There can be no He without a previous Thou.

Much less could an I exist for us, except as it exists during the suspension of the will, as in dreams; and the nature of brutes may be best understood, by conceiving them as somnambulists. This is a deep meditation, though the position is capable of the strictest proof,--namely, that there can be no I without a Thou, and that a Thou is only possible by an equation in which I is taken as equal to Thou, and yet not the same. And this again is only possible by putting them in opposition as correspondent opposites, or correlatives. In order to this, a something must be affirmed in the one, which is rejected in the other, and this something is the will. I do not will to consider myself as equal to myself, for in the very act of const.i.tuting myself 'I', I take it as the same, and therefore as incapable of comparison, that is, of any application of the will. If then, I 'minus' the will be the 'thesis'; [2] Thou 'plus' will must be the 'ant.i.thesis', but the equation of Thou with I, by means of a free act, negativing the sameness in order to establish the equality, is the true definition of conscience. But as without a Thou there can be no You, so without a You no They, These or Those; and as all these conjointly form the materials and subjects of consciousness, and the conditions of experience, it is evident that the con-science is the root of all consciousness,--'a fortiori', the precondition of all experience,--and that the conscience cannot have been in its first revelation deduced from experience. Soon, however, experience comes into play. We learn that there are other impulses beside the dictates of conscience; that there are powers within us and without us ready to usurp the throne of conscience, and busy in tempting us to transfer our allegiance. We learn that there are many things contrary to conscience, and therefore to be rejected, and utterly excluded, and many that can coexist with its supremacy only by being subjugated, as beasts of burthen; and others again, as, for instance, the social tendernesses and affections, and the faculties and excitations of the intellect, which must be at least subordinated. The preservation of our loyalty and fealty under these trials and against these rivals const.i.tutes the second sense of Faith; and we shall need but one more point of view to complete its full import. This is the consideration of what is presupposed in the human conscience. The answer is ready. As in the equation of the correlative I and Thou, one of the twin const.i.tuents is to be taken as 'plus' will, the other as 'minus'

will, so is it here: and it is obvious that the reason or 'super'-individual of each man, whereby he is man, is the factor we are to take as 'minus' will; and that the individual will or personalizing principle of free agency (arbitrement is Milton's word) is the factor marked 'plus' will;--and again, that as the ident.i.ty or coinherence of the absolute will and the reason, is the peculiar character of G.o.d; so is the 'synthesis' of the individual will and the common reason, by the subordination of the former to the latter, the only possible likeness or image of the 'prothesis', or ident.i.ty, and therefore the required proper character of man. Conscience, then, is a witness respecting the ident.i.ty of the will and the reason effected by the self-subordination of the will, or self, to the reason, as equal to, or representing, the will of G.o.d. But the personal will is a factor in other moral 'syntheses'; for example, appet.i.te 'plus' personal will=sensuality; l.u.s.t of power, 'plus'