On the Relative Advantage of Tubs With Bottoms and Tubs Without: Being a Rambling Letter From a Cooper's Apprentice to a Swedenborgian Clergyman

Excerpt from On the Relative Advantage of Tubs With Bottoms and Tubs Without: Being a Rambling Letter From a Cooper's Apprentice to a Swedenborgian Clergyman

The following letter was begun as a private communication, and was not intended for other than private circulation. This is my only excuse, if an excuse at all, for the mangled and most unsatisfactory manner in which I have treated of the subjects which it considers. Those subjects are:

1. Degrees, discrete and continuous, and the differences between the two kinds of degrees.

2. Order, successive and simultaneous, and the difference between the two kinds of order.

3. The origin of all made substance, as having come about once for all, and at the beginning; and as having consisted merely in an off-throw, from God, of substance which was living substance in His Body before it was thrown off, but became dead as soon as thrown off, and thenceforth remained dead and spiritually inert, and wholly unneeding any Divine upholding for the preservation of its reality.

4. The presence of God in all made substance, as being a presence of His Uses only, and not in the least a presence of His substance; no portion of made substance being any longer such substance as is He, yet it all being not less real than is His substance.

5. The nature of the Life-current as being the vibrator beat or swing which is constantly maintained by God in such organized forms of dead substance as possess spiritual substance capable of vibrating to that swing; that swing being a swing which goes on only in spiritual substance; and that Life-current being merely a stream of motion, and not being in the least a stream of substance.

6. The nature of Action and Re-action.

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