Emanuel Swedenborg, the great Swedish scientist and theologian, was born in Stockholm in 1688 and died in London in 1772. His father was first of all Chaplain to the Horse Guards of Charles XI, then later professor of Theology at Upsala University, Dean of the Cathedral at Upsala, Bishop of Skara, and a member of the Swedish Diet or House of Nobles. Coming as he did from a wealthy and distinguished family which fairly consistently enjoyed a high degree of royal patronage, the young Emanuel was able to attend the Cartesian influenced University of Upsala until he was twenty years of age. He then, as befitted a young man with his social and academic background, undertook an extended tour during which he spent nearly two years in London, and then, after a short sojourn in Holland and a year in Paris, he returned home via Swedish Pomerania. During the whole of this period he continued the mathematical, scientific and metallurgical studies to which he had been introduced at Upsala.

On his return to Sweden in 1716, Charles XII offered him a Professorship in Mathematics at Upsala but Swedenborg preferred an appointment as Assessor (i.e. a member of the Administrative Council) of the Board of Mines. He also took his seat as a nobleman in the Diet and began to contribute many memorials to its proceedings. Thus for the next twenty-five years he was busily engaged in his official as well as in his political duties. During the whole of this period he engaged in those profound scientific studies which enabled him to produce a series of remarkable books. These established his European reputation as a scientist of the first order and even today astonish those who read them with their remarkable anticipations of later scientific developments. The total list of his works - scientific, mineralogical, political, philosophical and psychological - comprises seventy-seven publications, some of which are of considerable length. Even Hegel would pale at such an output! No wonder Emerson says of Swedenborg that "he is one of the missourians and mastodons of literature who is not to be measured by whole colleges of ordinary scholars".

In order to give some little indication of the brilliance of Swedenborg's scientific thinking and of the extent that he was ahead of his age, here are a few of his scientific anticipations:

1. Years before Buffon published the first outline of the nebular hypothesis which was later developed by Herschel, Kant and Laplace, Swedenborg outlined the theory in great detail in Chapter 4 of his Principia.
2. The dominance of the cerebral cortex in neurology (Section D, No. 61 in The Brian).
3. Cerebral localization. This is the basic theses of The Brain.
4. Dr. Talbot, the editor of JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, writing in the October 1968 number, points out that in the work cited, he also discussed the somatotropic arrangement of the motor cortex, the importance of the pituitary gland, the formation of cerebro-spinal fluid, and (shades of Sherrington), the integrative action of the nervous system with a pronouncement on the neuron theory for good measure.
5. John Eastman points out that he introduced to Sweden the differential and integral calculus. He predicted an atomic theory. He was one of the creators of the modern sciences of crystallography and metallurgy. He identified electrical phenomena nineteen years before Franklin's experiments. He anticipated the theories of the solar origin of the earth and the undulatory principle of light. He developed the bases of the modern theory of molecular magnetics.

• The Divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ as described in The Word in many places as John X, 30; John XIV, 6-11; Col. II, 9.
• The holiness and the Divine inspiration of The Word: The Word as a Divine medium of conjunction with the human race.
• The life of charity. This involves the examination of a person's thoughts, intentions, and actions, using as criteria the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, as well as all the various injunctions set out in the Word, e.g. Luke XII, 15; Matthew V, 28.

Swedenborg has had an especial appeal to men and women of genius, those people who shape the culture patterns of nations. A very curtailed list is given elsewhere in this leaflet and all these, plus many more are known to have studied and drawn upon the writings of Swedenborg.
Swedenborg has occasionally been attacked on account of his so-called supernatural powers. The best refutation of any charlatanism has been provided by one of his most severe detractors, Immanuel Kant. In a well-known letter to Charlotte von Knobloch (extant in any University library in Borowsky's Darstellung des Lebens und Charakters Immanuels Kant, Konigsberg, p.211-255) Kant gives an account of several otherwise inexplicable demonstrations of Swedenborg's powers. He says, inter alia, that these occurrences "appear to me to have the greatest weight of proof and to place the assertion respecting Swedenborg's extraordinary gift beyond all possibility of doubt". Since the original work by Archbishop L.E. Borowsky was revised and corrected by Kant himself, there should be little doubt that, if any charlatanism existed, Kant's careful and meticulous scrutiny would have exposed it.
Although Swedenborg wrote in Latin, his works have been translated into thirty-three spoken European and Asiatic languages. Since 1820, over five million copies of his theological works have been sold. His prose style is Ciceronian in its clarity. Although he is dealing with the most profound subjects, there is not the least trace of any ambiguity or confusion of thought. Measured by the most severe tests of internal consistency, such as the criterion of coherence so dear to the heart of Rationalism, Swedenborg's consistency of statement, both over the whole time span of the twenty-seven years or by the more severe test of using deductions to test the degree of agreement or disagreement with other deductions is inerrable. His works are a completely unified system of thought, cohering not only internally but also agreeing both with Scripture and also with modern science. His whole system is expressed in unimpassioned, cool, logical prose, since he repeatedly insisted that to evaluate and then to accept the truth of any proposition, an individual must exercise his God-given faculties of reason and of judgement. All he asks of any reader is unbiased rational appraisal.