Outlines of a philosophical argument on the infinite, and the final cause of creation; and on the intercourse between the soul and the body / by Emanuel Swedenborg. Translated from the Latin by James John Garth Wilkinson.

  • Emmanuel Swedenborg
Date:
1847
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Outlines of a philosophical argument on the infinite, and the final cause of creation; and on the intercourse between the soul and the body / by Emanuel Swedenborg. Translated from the Latin by James John Garth Wilkinson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ated successively from the natural primitive ; and the more again we are led to wonder at the state of this natural primitive ; and how all things that we see, and can possibly imagine, nay, how not only mechanical but even physical causes themselves, can have lain involved in it. I am anxious therefore that the reasoner should centre all his admiration in that first or least principle with which he supplies me; for by this means will it not all end in the cause of that principle? that is, in the infi- nite, as having produced the principle? Therefore in proportion as we worship nature, and believe in her as the origin of natural things, in the same proportion we may become worshipers of the Deity; because, out of the entirely perfect succession of things, modes, causes, contingents, we may experience deeper wonder over primitives, than others can do in contemplating the whole field of derivatives. From the perfec. Moreover in the philosophical primitive or tion of the primitive. least, or in the simple principle of nature, we may in a measure contemplate infinity in another way; we mean, by regarding the perfection of the primitive. For if it be so perfect as to result in the production, by multitudinous causes, necessities, motive powers, and all-pervading series, of the entire universe,—of a universe, in which there is no part but conspires most perfectly from one end to the other, through an unbroken chain of means,—can we not contemplate infinity in this; or at any rate an attribution that we are unable to conceive analogically or finitely, and yet which must have been present in a manner in the primitive; m short, a superlative perfection of nature which can come from the infinite alone. In this way then again we must acknowledge the infinite. oy Before the world could have attained its pre- Were there con- ] tingencies in thepri- sent completeness and desirable beauty, before crus all series could have arrived so harmonically at the actual end; innumerable contingencies, and contin- gencies of contingencles must have been present, and innu- merable modes and modifications also. Granting that all things proceeded with the greatest unanimity, by mechanical and phy-