But, after all, suppose that the every-day experience of men is that only he who lives in the world as not of the world lives a true life, and this is the Bible teaching,—whose then is the true doctrine? Swedenborg errs if he claims this as his _exclusive personal_ experience. Paul claimed it as belonging to all men. Surely men of science should of all men claim this likewise. Now, when a man unquestionably honest makes an assertion such as Swedenborg made, there are only two possible conclusions to which we can come, unless we choose to remain in a state of mental suspense. We must either believe that he really saw what he professes to have seen, or that he was the victim of some strange hallucination, in virtue of which his subjective impressions became transferred into the realms of objective realities. We know very well that the human mind is extremely prone to such delusions, and that the nature of the case is frequently betrayed by some indiscreet admission which we have external grounds for believing to be incorrect. Had Swedenborg confined himself to the invisible world it would have been very difficult to prove him the subject of a delusion, but when he converses with angels from the planets, and thus comes to describe their inhabitants, he enters at once upon dangerous ground. Concerning his description of the various planets it has been remarked that his information relates only to those, the existence of which was known when he wrote, Uranus and Neptune being passed over. This of itself is a suspicious circumstance. Again, he peoples the planets Jupiter and Saturn with inhabitants as well as our own Moon; now, scientific analogy is strongly against either of these two planets being inhabited, while it is next to certain that our moon is entirely without inhabitants. In fine, there is no reason to suppose that the speculations of Swedenborg were anything else than the product of his own mind, in the same sense as that in which the speculations of this volume may be regarded as the product of the minds of its authors.