heard there, for a long continuance, their lamentations; he saw their
tormentors, who increase and strain pangs to infinity; he saw the hell
of the jugglers, the hell of the assassins, the hell of the lascivious;
the hell of robbers, who kill and boil men; the infernal tun of the
deceitful; the excrementitious hells; the hell of the revengeful, whose
faces resembled a round, broad-cake, and their arms rotate like a
wheel. Except Rabelais and Dean Swift, nobody ever had such science
of filth and corruption.

These books should be used with caution. It is dangerous to sculpture
these evanescing images of thought. True in transition, they become
false if fixed. It requires, for his just apprehension, almost a genius
equal to his own. But when his visions become the stereotyped language
of multitudes of persons, of all degrees of age and capacity, they are
perverted. The wise people of the Greek race were accustomed to lead
the most intelligent and virtuous young men, as part of their education,
through the Eleusinian mysteries, wherein, with much pomp and
graduation, the highest truths known to ancient wisdom were taught.
An ardent and contemplative young man, at eighteen or twenty years,
might read once these books of Swedenborg, these mysteries of love and
conscience, and then throw them aside forever. Genius is ever haunted
by similar dreams, when the hells and the heavens are opened to it.
But these pictures are to be held as mystical, that is, as a quite
arbitrary and accidental picture of the truth--not as the truth. Any
other symbol would be as good: then this is safely seen.

Swedenborg's system of the world wants central spontaneity; it is
dynamic, not vital, and lacks power to generate life. There is no
individual in it. The universe is a gigantic crystal, all those atoms
and laminae lie in uninterrupted order, and with unbroken unity, but