V EMANUEL SWEDENBORG Of all the men and women whom the world has classed under the general title of “mystic,” not one certainly occupies so singular a position as Emanuel Swedenborg. If we decide to accept the world’s verdict—and it seems difficult to do otherwise—and agree to call Swedenborg a mystic, we are confronted by the fact that we can find no parallel either to his personality or to his career, though we search the roll of the mystics of all the ages. Pascal indeed was, like Swedenborg, a master mathematician, and a man of wide general learning, but he was a mystic first and foremost, and his life from an early date was given up to his calling as a leading light of the Catholic Church. Swedenborg, on the other hand, was, until the age of fifty, a man of science and a man of affairs; that is, he was a scientist of the most eminently practical kind, one whose encyclopædic knowledge was turned always into utilitarian channels, and for whom knowledge of any kind appeared to have no meaning outside its practical application. It would be difficult to instance a single one of the world’s great men whose interests were so wide, or whose mental activity was so all-absorbing. Outside art there seemed literally nothing that did not appeal to him as a field for his indefatigable investigation, and, as regards art, it was presumably its lack of utilitarian value which led to its neglect by his essentially practical mentality. [Illustration: Emanuel Swedenborg.]