Science Quote by Emanuel Swedenborg

Swedenborg opens with a preemptive flinch, then turns it into armor. Before he even delivers the supernatural goods, he inventories the predictable backlash: the sober materialist objection (you cannot talk to angels in a body), the psychological dismissal (it is all fancy), the cynical motive-mongering (he wants credence), and the catchall of “other objections.” It is an almost modern media move: he names the comments section before it appears, trying to deprive it of oxygen.

The intent is less “believe me” than “watch how disbelief operates.” By mapping the skeptics into types, he quietly claims the higher ground of method. That matters because Swedenborg is not presenting himself as a prophet in the wilderness; he is a scientist crossing a border. The subtext is: I know what counts as evidence in your world, and I also know your world is too small. He concedes the body as a problem (“so long as he lives in the body”) while insisting his testimony survives that problem. The result is a rhetorical compromise: he sounds reasonable while asking for an unreasonable expansion of reality.

Context sharpens the gambit. In the Enlightenment, credibility was being re-engineered around observation, reproducibility, and public verification. Swedenborg borrows that prestige and retools it for private revelation. The sentence is long, procedural, almost like a lab note, which is precisely the point: he wants his visions to read like empirical reporting. The irony is that his strongest evidence is his awareness of how unbelievable he sounds. That self-consciousness becomes the hook, and also the trap.