NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 13762, 29 May 1908, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

A GREAT MASTER MIND. Tfik transportation of the body of Swedenborg from Wappiug to Sweden was made the subject of a leading article in the London Daily Telegraph. It speaks of him as one of the world's master minds. "Everyone,' says, the Telegraph, "of course, will sympathise with the natural desire of Sweden to possess the bones of Emanuel Swedenborg, • just as Fiance eagerly desired that Napoleon"*- body should be' brought to Park, or as Spain transferred the bones of Columbus from Havana to Seville, when Cuba passed out of her hands, or, as, just recently, the United States recovered from Paris the body of Paul Jones. Even when there has been a quarrel between a great man and his country, and the great man shakes off the dust of his native ground from his feet, exclaiming indignantly, as Camoens did, ' My country shall not have my bones,' Time makes up the quarrel, and posterity offers ample amends. During his lifetime Swedenborg was harshly treated by some of his contemporaries. He shared to some extent the usual fate of prophets — that of being stoned—when he proclaimed his new religion, and the hostility of the Swedish clergy■ drove him from his native land, though it must be admitted/ that he was not very averse from exile/ But that quarrel has long since been made up, and Sweden is anxious to pay all the reverence in her power to her mighty s#n. j Few careers are more extraordinary ian that of Swedenborg. He was born in 1688, and died in 1772, at the age of 84. During more than half his life he was famous all over Europe as a philosopher and/scientist, and held for many years an important official position in Sweden as assesor extraordinary to the Royal College of Mines, being appointed to this post by ; Charles XII. when he was only; 28. He , was master of all the sciences. Indeed, itmay be said without exaggeration that he had a brain capable of embracing all knowledge—a brain like iliat of " Aristotle, Bacon, or Spencer. He was-; mathematician, astronomer, chemist, geologist. He was also the Edison of his day in the matter of scientific inventions. He invented stoves and heating apparatus ; he constructed docks and machines for transporting ships overland; he wa* an expert musician; he originated the science of crystallography. He turned out book after book as fast as he could write them. He could write and think in nine languages. He exhausted all the old worlds of .knowledge and he discovered new. Encyclopaedist and specialist in one, he combined with a marvellous sagacity, for storing up theoretic knowledge an amazing genius for applying it to utilitarian purposes. It seems utterly impossible to exaggerate Swedenborg's mental powers, or to place him 100 high among the selectest company of men of intellect. In 1745, at the age of 57, Swedenborg, the man of science, became Swedanborjj, the *eer and the theosophist. He turned the whole of his gigantic powers upon the study of religion, and the Bible. He did not read the theology of otlwr men he made a new one. No one, it is said, ever saw him in later life reading any book but the Bible', and of this he poured forth a- new interpretation iu the long succession of volumes which contain his system, oi the New 1 Jerusalem.