In the essays which follow, White offers synopses and analyses of three of Swedenborg's greatest scientific-philosohicial works. He also describes the contents of three of Swedenborg's most important works of theology.

In the first essay below, Jonsson examines the historical period in which Swedenborg lived and wrote before presenting an introductory biographical sketch of and presenting an overview of his most important works. In the second, she offers an analysis of Swedenborg's importance in the history of ideas, noting particularly his influence on writers such as William Blake, Henry James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, W. B. Yeats, Honoré Balzac, Victor Hugo, and George Sand.

In the following essay, Lang argues that Swedenborg was largely responsible for the shift in the eighteenth century from the “theocratic” scholastic model, in which Christians focused on the divine, to an “anthropocentric” model that emphasizes the human element, and that he gave the new model its most intellectually satisfying and emotionally relevant form.

In the following excerpt, James compares Swedenborg favorably with other philosophers, particularly the idealist thinker Friederich Hegel. James shows Swendenborg to be a different kind of thinker, one who is interested in humanity's intimate fellowship with God and who affirms an absolute but empirical element in consciousness.

In this essay, Taylor discusses Swedenborg's ideas about psychology and his influence on American psychiatry, philosophical psychology, Jungian psychology, personality-social psychology, and humanistic psychology, arguing that Swedenborg's thought contains the germ of the idea that psychiatry and psychology can be central to the transformation of the social and medical sciences.

In the following essay, Goodenough examines Swedenborg's political ideas—including his vision of an organically unified humanity—which the critic says are not simply those of a spiritual dreamer but are thoughtful, practical, detailed, and concern actual problems needing attention.

In the essay below, Jonsson examines Swedenborg's influence on scientific and societal thinking, maintaining that Swedenborg's ideas were an expression of a yearning to create order out of a chaos of information that could not be confined within the limits of scientific rationality.

In the following essay, Johnson offers a sketch of Swedenborg's philosophical and religious ideas before discussing his influence on nineteenth-century American thought, in areas including Deism, neo-Platonism, Unitarianism, and the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In the following essay originally delivered as a lecture in 1971, Jonsson offers a brief overview of Swedenborg's literary production as a scientist, poet, and religious thinker.

In the following essay, Dole and Kirven elucidate key ideas in Swedenborg's religious thinking concerning God, humanity, love, and his theory of correspondence which they explain have as their foundation the concepts of “distinguishable oneness” and the reality of spirit.

In this essay, originally delivered as a lecture in 1991, Rose analyzes the complex or Homeric similes used by Swedenborg in his poetical-informative narrative account of his spiritual experience, Vera Christiana Religio. This use of imagery, according to Rose, sets the work apart from Swedenborg's other religious writings.

In the following essay, McLemee discusses the work of Gregory Johnson, who claims that Swedenborg was a seminal influence on the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and that Swedenborg's ideas actually informed Kant's thinking, even though the German thinker once lampooned the Swede in his pamphlet Dreams of the Spirit Seer and called him a “deliberate fraud.”

In this essay, Toksvig notes that Swedenborg was a thinker of incredible range, with interests in science, mysticism, psychology, ethics, philosophy, and religion but admits that Swedenborg is difficult to comprehend fully and that he has been misunderstood by many who have read him.

In the following excerpt, Milosz explores two twentieth-century interpretations of Swedenborg—the psychological portraits by Karl Jaspers and Paul Valéry—and compares them with William Blake's approach, which characterized Swedenborg's writings as supreme works of the imagination.