The Secret of Swedenborg Author:Henry James Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: VI. It is easy to see that a reader unused to the line of thought here exposed may conceive it liable to a charge of pantheism. But it will be quite as easy t... more »o show that there is no real ground for such an imputation. What is the essence of pantheism ? It consists in making creation a direct, not a redemptive process of the divine power; in making the creature continuous, as it were, from the creator. That is to say, it denies him the very hoon of natural or subjective identity, upon which, according to Swedenborg, his spiritual or objective individuality is inevitably conditioned; and so leaves his creation, in any honest sense of the word, as completely indeterminate or unavouched, and indeed uuattempted, as the generation of a child would be, which claimed a paternal or causative action, but disallowed a maternal or constitutive reaction. Thus Hegel bases his ontology upon the identity of being and nothing, i. e. ho makes being (the creator) a logical evolution of not-being (the creature) : so that creation is no actual vivification of the created nature by the creator, whereby the creature's spiritual or individual conjunction with the creator becomes assured, but is on the contrary a grossly illusory appearance whereby the creator, under cover of a creaturely disguise, attains himself to subjective consciousness, and leaves his creature proportionably defrauded. He thus utterly falsifies, or degrades into childish make-believe, the great fact of a natural creation which is fundamental to Swedenborg's scheme of thought; for he interprets what appears to be creation into the so-called creator's essential incapacity to be himself, without a perpetual fillip from the so-called creature. lie concedes, of course, a quasi reality to the creature; but as, upon his theory, the crea...« less