hypothesis has been finally discarded by the advance guard of modern Science, are likely to find a sympathetic echo in scientific as well as philosophic circles. Inasmuch [he says] as the soul is the model, the idea, the first form, the substance, the force, and the principle of her organic body, and of all its forces and powers, or what amounts to the same thing, as the organic body is the image and type of its soul conformed and principled to the whole nature of the soul’s efficiency, it follows that the one is represented in the other.... Thus by the body we are instructed respecting the soul, by the soul respecting the body, and by both respecting the truth of the whole. Emerson describes the _Animal Kingdom_ as “an anatomist’s account of the human body in the highest style of poetry,” and its object as to “put science and the soul, long estranged from each other, at one again.” It was while continuing his pursuit of this apparently visionary aim that Swedenborg quite unexpectedly found himself, as he believed, in touch with another than the physical world. In writing of this extraordinary development in his life history in the Introduction to the _Arcana Cœlestia_, the first volume of which appeared in 1749, he gives his own account of his relationship with the spiritual realm in justification of the remarkably dogmatic statements contained in the book in question. “It is,” he says, “expedient here to premise that of the Lord’s divine mercy it has been granted me now for several years to be constantly and uninterruptedly in company with spirits and angels, hearing them converse with each other and conversing with them. Hence it has been permitted me to hear and see things in another life which are astonishing, and which have never before come to the knowledge of any man nor entered into his imagination. I have thus been instructed concerning different kinds of spirits and the state of souls after death—concerning Hell, or the lamentable state of the unfaithful—concerning Heaven, or the most happy state of the faithful—and particularly concerning the doctrine of Faith, which is acknowledged throughout all Heaven, on which subjects, by the divine mercy of the Lord, more will be said in the following pages.” With regard to the extraordinary transformation which these experiences brought about in his life’s work, he explains to a friend that the Lord has elected him for this work, and “for revealing the spiritual meaning of the Sacred Scriptures which he had promised to the Prophets and in the Book of Revelation.” “My purpose previously,” he adds, “had been to explore Nature, chemistry, and the sciences of mining and anatomy.”