Far from declining to examine the portentous 'visions' of Swedenborg, Kant
interested himself deeply in the topic. As early as 1758 he wrote his
first remarks on the seer, containing some reports of stories or legends
about Swedenborg's 'clairvoyance.' In the true spirit of psychical
research, Kant wrote a letter to Swedenborg, asking for information at
first hand. The seer got the letter, but he never answered it. Kant,
however, prints one or two examples of Swedenborg's successes. Madame
Harteville, widow of the Dutch envoy in Stockholm, was dunned by a
silversmith for a debt of her late husband's. She believed that it had
been paid, but could not find the receipt. She therefore asked Swedenborg
to use his renowned gifts. He promised to see what he could do, and, three
days later, arrived at the lady's house while she was giving a tea, or
rather a coffee, party. To the assembled society Swedenborg remarked, 'in
a cold-blooded way, that he had seen her man, and spoken to him.' The late
M. Harteville declared to Swedenborg that he had paid the bill, seven
months before his decease: the receipt was in a cupboard upstairs. Madame
Harteville replied that the cupboard had been thoroughly searched to no
purpose. Swedenborg answered that, as he learned from the ghost, there was
a secret drawer behind the side-plank within the cupboard. The drawer
contained diplomatic correspondence, and the missing receipt. The whole
company then went upstairs, found the secret drawer, and the receipt among
the other papers. Kant adds Swedenborg's clairvoyant vision, from
Gothenburg, of a great fire at Stockholm (dated September 1756). Kant
pined to see Swedenborg himself, and waited eagerly for his book, 'Arcana
Coelestia.' At last he obtained this work, at the ransom, ruinous to Kant
at that time, of 7£. But he was disappointed with what he read, and in
'Träume eines Geistersehers,' made a somewhat sarcastic attempt at a
metaphysical theory of apparitions.

'Velut aegri somnia vanae