At the time when _Inferno_ was written Strindberg was, however, more completely under the spell of Rome than he acknowledges in his later writings. He contemplated retreat in a Belgian monastery, and in _Inferno_ he tells us that, when he read Sar Peladan's _Comment on devient Mage_, "Catholicism held its solemn and triumphant entry into my life." He found many points of contact between Swedenborg's mystical philosophy and that of the Catholic Church. The profound influence on modern thought exercised by Swedenborg, and which is clearly discernible in the writings of Goethe, Emerson, Balzac, Tennyson, Mrs. Browning, Ruskin, Coventry Patmore, and Carlyle, is evidence of the spiritual catholicity of the great Swedish mystic. Superficial criticism is apt to dismiss Swedenborg as a deluded ghost-seer, whose psychical derangements are responsible for a farrago of communications on heaven and hell, prodigiously wearisome in details and lacking the saving grace of humour. Such criticism is made by those who know nothing of the intellectual versatility, and the scientific achievements of Swedenborg. His writings on anatomy, physiology, geology, and metallurgy alone would have entitled him to a distinguished place among the pioneers of science. Swedenborg studied mechanics, engineering, mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, and music, and took a keen interest in handicrafts. There is a striking resemblance between Swedenborg and Strindberg in this versatility of mood and thought. It is emphasised by many minor traits of character and taste, such as the great love for children and flowers which both evinced. Separated by more than a century and a half, Strindberg found himself the spiritual descendant of Swedenborg. To him he dedicates his first _Blue Book_ (1907) in the following words: "To Emanuel Swedenborg, Teacher and Leader, this book is dedicated by the Disciple." The _Blue Books_ deal with every thinkable subject--religious, philosophical, scientific--in an aphoristic and combative manner which is pervaded by a curious mixture of pride and humility. Here speaks the High Priest of Knowledge, here quivers the helpless embryo of the humanity which is to come. In these motley pages the Teacher and the Disciple talk of telepathy, chemistry, astronomy, meteorology, spectral analysis, atoms and crystals, the psychology of plants, the secrets of birds, the formation of clouds, Darwinism, radium, woman, the secrets of chess, the secrets and magic of numbers, the Mesopotamian language, hieroglyphics, Hebraic research, symbolism, clairvoyance, and a hundred other subjects. In the preface to _The Bondswoman's Son_ Strindberg speaks of his Blue Book as the synthesis of his life. The Disciple is worthy of the Master; to the Swedenborgian and eighteenth-century conception of the natural world and the spiritual world Strindberg has added the craving for a synthetic interpretation of facts, which was characteristic of the nineteenth