Swedenborg was born into an atmosphere of great ideas. 'Tis hard to
say what was his own: yet his life was dignified by noblest pictures
of the universe. The robust Aristotelian method, with its breadth and
adequateness, shaming our sterile and linear logic by its genial
radiation, conversant with series and degree, with effects and ends,
skilful to discriminate power from form, essence from accident, and
opening by its terminology and definition, high roads into nature, had
trained a race of athletic philosophers. Harvey had shown the
circulation of the blood; Gilbert had shown that the earth was a magnet;
Descartes, taught by Gilbert's magnet, with its vortex, spiral, and
polarity, had filled Europe with the leading thought of vortical motion,
as the secret of nature. Newton, in the year in which Swedenborg was
born, published the "Principia," and established the universal gravity.
Malpighi, following the high doctrines of Hippocrates, Leucippus, and
Lucretius, had given emphasis to the dogma that nature works in
leasts,--"_tota in minimis existit natura_." Unrivalled dissectors,
Swammerdam, Leeuwenhoek, Winslow, Eustachius, Heister, Vesalius,
Boerhaave, had left nothing for scalpel or microscope to reveal in
human or comparative anatomy; Linnaeus, his contemporary, was affirming,
in his beautiful science, that "Nature is always like herself;" and,
lastly, the nobility of method, the largest application of principles,
had been exhibited by Leibnitz and Christian Wolff, in cosmology;
whilst Locke and Grotius had drawn the moral argument.
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