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
Catalogue details

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.

    81/208 (page 45)
    Should the reader wish then to recognize nature as the author of the universe and of man, he will at all events agree with me, that all those things which afterwards existed in actuality, were [in potency] in the minimum itself; and this, both in order that contingencies might thus exist, and that all intermediate causes might conspire to the precise end in view. It is clear they could not conspire by accident. Accident recognizes causes, although causes apart from intelligence, whereby such combina- tion takes place ; whereby parts or causes conspire simultaneously and successively to one end; particularly where the conspiring causes are indefinite in number. To bring the matter home let us suppose that there are only a thousand causes. If chance or accident governed them all, and the whole thousand arrived at the end, and this end was of such a character, that all, in a way truly stupendous, stood related to the first and last cause, and to the Infinite,—the first and last relations of ends thereby in- volving somewhat of infinity ;—then, I say, there would be a thousand chances ; and for these thousand chances to eventuate thus, would be against all reason to suppose ; that is to say, if chance be chance, and if chances arise from causes. We will still assume the same argument, and suppose that there are chances, and also innumerable circumstances to pro- duce them; there being therefore an adequate number of circumstances to account for the existence of all the chances. Yet review the lineage and series of chances; review their direction to a single end. Are we not forced to acknowledge here an immensity over and above them? Are we not forced to admit a directing, an applying agent,—a power by which all the elements of the series proceed from the beginning and arrive at the end in a given order? Are we not bound to admit what amounts to infinity? A somewhat whose existence and nature alike we are at once unable to understand and bound to acknowledge. If therefore all things in nature be means to this end, and if there be mechanical and physical necessities conspiring to it, then the philosopher cannot do less than wonder at the central cause of such necessities and causes with their manifoldly suc- cessive degrees of efficiency: he cannot but see all things con- centrated in his philosophical mmimum ; whence he may natu-