SWEDENBORG
Emerson, in his Representative Men, chose Swedenborg as the representative mystic. He accepted Swedenborg's way of looking at the world as universally characteristic of the mystical temperament. The Higher Space Theory was unheard of in Swedenborg's day, nevertheless in his religious writings—thick clouds shot with lightning—the idea is implicit and sometimes even expressed, though in a terminology all his own.
To Swedenborg's vision, as to Plato's, this physical world is a world of ultimates, in all things correspondent to the casual world, which he names "heaven." "It is to be observed," he says, "that the natural world exists and subsists from the spiritual world, just as an effect exists from its efficient cause."
According to Swedenborg, conditions in "heaven" are different from those in the world: space is different: distance is different He says, "Space in heaven is not like space in the world, for space in the world is fixed, and therefore measurable: but in heaven it is not fixed and therefore cannot be measured."
Herein is suggested a fluidic condition, singularly in accord with certain modern conceptions in theoretical physics. Commenting upon the significance of Lobatchewsky's and Bolyai's work along the lines of non-Euclidian geometry, Hinton says, "By immersing the conception of distance in matter, to which it properly belongs, it promises to be of the greatest aid in analysis, for the effective distance of any two particles is the result of complex material conditions, and cannot be measured by hard and fast rules."
The higher correlative of physical distance is a difference of state or condition, according to the Norwegian seer. "*Those are far apart who differ