Swedenborg, Emanuel(1688–1772)
Emanuel Swedenborg, the scientist, biblical scholar, and mystic, was a member of a famous Swedish family of clergymen and scholars; his father was a prominent bishop and a prolific writer. Swedenborg studied the classics and Cartesian philosophy at Uppsala and became interested in mathematics and natural science. In 1710 he went abroad, spending most of the next five years in England, where he learned the Newtonian theories and developed a modern scientific outlook. After his return to Sweden in 1715, Swedenborg was appointed an assessor in the College of Mines by Charles XII. He held this office until 1747, when he resigned in order to devote his time to the interpretation of the Scriptures.
Philosophy of Nature
Swedenborg's many writings are characterized by great scholarship and by a fervent search for a synthesis of ancient wisdom and modern experience, empirical science, rationalistic philosophy, and Christian revelation. After some minor treatises on geological and cosmological problems, he published his first important work in 1734, Opera Philosophica et Mineralia (3 vols., Dresden and Leipzig); the first part of this work, Principia Rerum Naturalium, contains his philosophy of nature. Here Swedenborg used the concept of the mathematical point, which he described as coming into existence by motion from the Infinite.
