Swedenborg was an eighteenth-century Swedish dignitary of considerable learning who believed that he had the power to communicate with spirits and angels and that these beings would help him fulfil the task allotted to him by God, namely to reveal the hidden meaning of Scripture and to usher in the new Church. His thought attracted the critical attention of no less a figure than Immanuel Kant.

Swedenborg was born in Stockholm to a prominent Lutheran cleric. At the age of eleven, he entered the University of Upsala, where he developed a keen interest in mathematics and natural philosophy. He was to pursue scholarly interests for the rest of his life. In 1716, Charles XII made him an honorary appointment to the Swedish Board of Mines. Swedenborg rose to the salaried position of Assessor Ordinary. Under this title, Swedenborg served the King with distinction in many different capacities, including that of statesman, engineer and geologist.

Swedenborg retired from the Board in 1747 to devote himself to biblical exegesis. He believed that God had given him the power to communicate with angels and spirits so that he could reveal the hidden meaning of Scripture. In 1756, he published anonymously the Arcana coelestia, a massive line-by-line commentary on Genesis and Exodus.

Stories about Swedenborg's prophetic gift began to spread throughout Europe at this time. In 1756, during a dinner party in Gotenborg, Swedenborg claimed to see a fire spreading in Stockholm fifty miles away. He described the catastrophe in such minute detail that his vision could be checked against reports from the stricken capital which arrived in Gotenborg shortly thereafter. These reports apparently confirmed Swedenborg's vision on every point. Swedenborg had now made his name as a visionary. More stories added to his fame and excited interest in the Arcana coelestia, which was now known to be his work.

The problem is what to make of Swedenborg. Was he a prophet, a lunatic, or a man with questions too difficult to answer by the usual methods of scientific enquiry? Whatever else we might think, it is important to understand that Swedenborg saw himself as a Church reformer. He believed that the Church had lost sight of a fundamental truth, namely that God is one and operates through all of creation. The Nicene Council was the first indication of spiritual myopia, because it ruled that there have been three distinct divine persons from eternity. According to Swedenborg, this was to make three different gods out of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (see Trinity). Worse, it encouraged us to represent the Trinity as a council of human dignitaries, or even as a gang of thugs such as the Triumvirate at Rome. The polytheism of the Nicene Council and its attendant heresies were transmitted to the Roman Catholic Church, and from that Church to all the reformed Churches of Swedenborg's day. Swedenborg's mission was to right such wrong thinking and to prepare us for salvation in the new Church. His strategy was simple: he had only to describe his encounters with angels and spirits. Thus he reported how angels set him on the right path and how the spirits of churchmen revealed themselves in an otherworldly burlesque show as the buffoons they had been all along. Swedenborg found followers, not least the young William Blake. The Swedenborgian church is alive to this day.

Swedenborg thought that philosophers had as little spiritual insight as churchmen. Since they could not see spiritual things, as Swedenborg did, they could never formulate a true metaphysics of immaterial substances. So Swedenborg complained that metaphysics is all conjecture. He illustrated his complaint with reports of his discussions with the spirits of metaphysicians. Once, he said, they discussed the mind-body union. Swedenborg watched as the spirits divided into three camps representing the three hypotheses of the day: occasionalism, pre-established harmony and real interaction. When the discussion became acrimonious, a neutral spirit arrived to settle things. He invited a representative from each camp to write his favourite hypothesis on a slip of paper. The three slips of paper were put in a hat, and the spirits drew lots. Not surprisingly, Swedenborg's way of understanding things won the day. The lot chosen from the hat was 'spiritual influx', which Swedenborg interpreted as his own view that all life and wisdom flows from God into the human soul and from the human soul into the body.

Swedenborg was right at least about rational psychology. Champions of the different systems of mind-body union claimed to offer nothing more than hypotheses. The only way to make progress in the debate was to discredit the rival systems, and one might have concluded that too many opposing metaphysicians had done too good a job of that. Swedenborg was frustrated by the apparent futility of the debate. He assumed that metaphysicians themselves would lose patience, if they had not done so already, and succumb to temptation - namely to simplify things by denying the existence of anything immaterial (including the rational soul) and to think that material nature operates under its own steam. They would come to think that God and nature are one. Swedenborg apparently believed that Spinozism results when human reason applies itself to metaphysics (see Spinoza, B. de). In this, he was to anticipate Jacobi.

Swedenborg himself believed that everything in material nature flows out of the thoughts of angels and spirits and that the power of thought in angels and spirits flows ultimately from God. This is the basis of his 'correspondence' theory. Accordingly, every material thing 'corresponds' to the spiritual thing of which it is an effect. Thus cows correspond to angels thinking about the affections of nature-bound minds; sheep correspond to angels thinking about spiritually uplifted minds, and so on. The correspondence theory is in turn the basis of Swedenborg's biblical exegesis. Swedenborg believed that every word in Scripture expresses a correspondence.

Swedenborg had a wide influence. His ideas were of interest to Emerson, Jaspers and Kant (§2). Kant became convinced in the mid-1760s that Swedenborg's visions were somehow emblematic of fundamental errors in Kant's own metaphysics. In 1766 he published a devastating self-critique in the guise of a satirical review of Swedenborg's Arcana coelestia. The title of Kant's review was Dreams of a Spirit-Seer. The writing of this review was to move Kant by 1770 to treat our representations of space and time as subjective forms of sensibility - an important step in the direction of his considered views in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781).