Science Quote by Emanuel Swedenborg

Swedenborg turns charity from a public performance into a private discipline, and he does it with a scientist's instinct for stripping variables down to first principles. The line isn’t trying to make you feel generous; it’s trying to isolate what generosity is. “Desire” is the tell. Charity begins before the act, in the motive-force that precedes measurable outcomes. He’s not praising the occasional good deed so much as the internal orientation that makes usefulness a default setting, not a mood.

The phrasing also picks a fight with the hidden economy behind most altruism. “No thought of recompense” doesn’t just mean no money back; it indicts status, gratitude, social leverage, even the warm self-image we treat as moral cash. Swedenborg implies that the moment you start tallying returns, you’ve quietly relocated the center of gravity from the other person’s need to your own account book. Charity, in this view, is less a transaction than a refusal to transact.

Context matters. Swedenborg was a prominent Enlightenment-era scientist who later became a Christian mystic, obsessed with inner states and spiritual causality. That hybrid background shows here: the empirical clarity of “useful” meets the metaphysical demand for purity of intention. The subtext is almost clinical: if you want to know whether an action is charity, don’t look at the optics. Check the incentive structure. Modern readers can hear an uncomfortable echo in today’s philanthro-capitalist era, where giving is branded, tax-optimized, and reputationally lucrative. Swedenborg’s sentence functions like a moral lab test: remove recompense, and see what remains.