On the Relative Advantage of Tubs with Bottoms and Tubs Without: Being a Rambling Letter from a Cooper's Apprentice to a Swedenborgian Clergyman (Classic Reprint)

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

An understanding of these subjects is essential to any un derstanding of Swedenborg. A fair understanding of some of them comes by intuition to all practical persons and comes to these without any active thought - comes indeed m the absence of thought; these concepts being tacit concepts. And a much better understanding, upon the whole, comes to those persons who do not know how to talk about them, than to those who know how. In general, it can be said, that il literate people understand most of these things pretty well; and the reason is, that in their daily life they are familiar with truths that are the same with these concepts, though expressed upon a lower and more obvious plane. Illiterate people do not lose their thought in words; they think by things, i. E., by visible mental pictures. But men of letters, if they are not at the same time men of a practical and (ipictures, but mostly by words, and they lose their thought in words, and are unable to think with coherence upon any of these subjects, because these subjects are deep - deeper than Thought for the most part - deep as Fact itself.

I ought perhaps to add, as a further excuse for the un satisfactory nature of the treatment I give these subjects, that in truth I know next to nothing at all about them. In this respect Ishall be thought to differ from the majority of Swedenborg's readers, the most of whom I am told are well informed in regard to these topics, however little of such information may thus far have been betrayed by them in writing or in conversation. My confession of my own ignorance may serve a use, via, to warn the reader against accepting any theory or statement which he shall find in this letter, unless he finds it applied - in detail and in every detail, and accurately in each detail - to Facts, to facts in nature apprehensible by some one of the five bodily senses, and familiar to himself by daily observation. For whatever efi'ect this statement of my views may produce upon the mind of any reader - and I have small belief that it will produce much effect - I wish that such effect at least may not be that of causing him to stand still farther abstracwd from the world of common sense and common experience than at present he may chance to stand The principles of Swedenborg are principles which are all-sublime; but many of the principles which have been retailed to the public as his, are, in my opinion and in that of some other persons, entirely opposed to common rationality in respects quite independent of religious belief. The misapprehension of Swedenborg's doctrines by many of his followers is-due, I think, to several causes. One is the total ignorance of science joined with some ignorance of Latin, which mostly has obtained with his translators. The other is the tinge of pantheism, got from Berkeley, with which the earlier trans lators appear to have entered upon the study of Swedenborg.

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