Ralph Waldo Emerson：Essays, Excerpt 19

There is one man of genius who has done much for this philosophy of life, whose literary value has never yet been rightly estimated:--I mean Emanuel Swedenborg.[91] The most imaginative of men, yet writing with the precision of a mathematician, he endeavored to engraft a purely philosophical Ethics on the popular Christianity of his time. Such an attempt of course must have difficulty which no genius could surmount. But he saw and showed the connexion between nature and the affections of the soul. He pierced the emblematic or spiritual character of the visible, audible, tangible world. Especially did his shade-loving muse hover over and interpret the lower parts of nature; he showed the mysterious bond that allies moral evil to the foul material forms, and has given in epical parables a theory of insanity, of beasts, of unclean and fearful things.

Source： https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16643
Locator：Excerpt 19 · Verified：2026-10-19 · Verification：Short excerpt

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