Science Quote by Emanuel Swedenborg

Swedenborg is doing something sly here: he slips a radical metaphysical claim into the calm, procedural voice of a man who once mapped mines and measured planets. “Man was so created” sounds like a design specification, not a mystical fever dream. That’s the rhetorical move. He’s not asking you to believe in ghosts; he’s asserting a blueprint for the human animal, drafted by “the Lord,” then validated by precedent: “as in fact was done in the most ancient times.” Antiquity functions as both alibi and aspiration. If the earliest humans could do it, modern skepticism starts to look less like sophistication and more like amnesia.

The subtext is a protest against the narrowing of reality in the early modern world. Swedenborg lived in the age when “scientist” meant an architect of rational systems, and those systems were steadily evicting angels from the furniture of the cosmos. His answer isn’t to reject reason but to annex it: the body isn’t a barrier to the spirit world; it’s a temporary casing for a being already “one with them.” That phrase collapses distance. Spirits and angels aren’t far-off entities; they’re the adjacent room of existence.

There’s also a moral psychology embedded in the claim. If humans are continuous with the spiritual realm, then inner life becomes participatory, not private. Thoughts, desires, and conscience stop being merely personal and start reading like signals in a larger network. Swedenborg’s intent is pastoral as much as visionary: to re-enchant daily life without surrendering the modern appetite for coherence.