ics and psychology. A man remarkable for
his practical activities, an ardent scholar of the exact sciences, versed
in all the arcana of physics, a skilful and inventive mechanician, he has
evolved from the hard and gross materialism of his studies a system of
transcendent spiritualism. From his aggregation of cold and apparently
lifeless practical facts beautiful and wonderful abstractions start forth
like blossoms on the rod of the Levite. A politician and a courtier, a
man of the world, a mathematician engaged in the soberest details of the
science, he has given to the world, in the simplest and most natural
language, a series of speculations upon the great mystery of being:
detailed, matter-of-fact narratives of revelations from the spiritual
world, which at once appall us by their boldness, and excite our wonder
at their extraordinary method, logical accuracy, and perfect consistency.
These remarkable speculations--the workings of a mind in which a powerful
imagination allied itself with superior reasoning faculties, the
marvellous current of whose thought ran only in the diked and guarded
channels of mathematical demonstration--he uniformly speaks of as
"facts." His perceptions of abstractions were so intense that they seem
to have reached that point where thought became sensible to sight as well
as feeling. What he thought, that he saw.

He relates his visions of the spiritual world as he would the incidents
of a walk round his own city of Stockholm. One can almost see him in his
"brown coat and velvet breeches," lifting his "cocked hat" to an angel,
or keeping an unsavory spirit at arm's length with that "gold-headed
cane" which his London host describes as his inseparable companion in
walking. His graphic descriptions have always an air of naturalness and
probability; yet there is a minuteness of detail at times almost
bordering on the ludicrous. In his Memorable Relations he manifests
nothing of the imagination of Milton, overlooking the closed gates of
paradise, or following the "pained fiend" in his flight through chaos;
nothing of Dante's terrible imagery appalls us; we are led on from heaven
to heaven very much as Defoe leads us after his shipwrecked Crusoe. We
can scarcely credit the fact that we are not traversing our lower planet;
and the angels seem vastly like our common acquaintances. We seem to
recognize the "John Smiths," and "Mr. Browns," and "the old familiar
faces" of our mundane habitat