Science Quote by Emanuel Swedenborg

Swedenborg turns morality into physics: commit to “evil” and you don’t merely invite punishment, you enter it. The line refuses the courtroom model where wrongdoing is followed by an external sentence. Instead it suggests a closed system, almost thermodynamic, where the act carries its own heat. Coming from a scientist-turned-mystic, the phrasing matters: “is also in” reads like a condition, not a consequence. Punishment isn’t a lightning bolt from God; it’s an environment you inhabit.

The subtext is quietly radical for an era steeped in both Christian judgment and emerging rationalism. Swedenborg isn’t interested in moral bookkeeping. He’s describing a psyche and a society. “Evil” becomes a kind of spiritual orientation that distorts perception, narrows desire, and breeds its own miseries: suspicion, compulsion, isolation, the constant need to justify oneself. The punishment is embedded in the addiction to domination or deceit itself, not just in what the community does to you afterward.

Context helps explain the confidence of the formulation. Swedenborg wrote in the Enlightenment’s shadow, when mechanistic explanations of nature were ascendant and religious authority was being renegotiated. His theological project often reads like an attempt to reconcile spiritual life with causal law. This sentence is a neat bridge: it preserves moral seriousness while stripping away the melodrama of divine wrath. It’s also an implicit warning to the righteous: if punishment is internal to evil, then “justice” isn’t revenge; it’s diagnosis.