the subject of a very rare, but not (it is said) altogether
unique, conjunction of the somniative faculty (by which the products of
the understanding, that is to say, words, conceptions and the like, are
rendered instantaneously into forms of sense) with the voluntary and
other powers of the waking state; or,

3. the modest suggestion that the first and second may not be so
incompatible as they appear--still it ought never to be forgotten that
the merit and value of Swedenborg's system do only in a very secondary
degree depend on any one of the three. For even though the first were
adopted, the conviction and conversion of such a believer must,
according to a fundamental principle of the New Church, have been
wrought by an insight into the intrinsic truth and goodness of the
doctrines, severally and collectively, and their entire consonance with
the light of the written and of the eternal word, that is, with the
Scriptures and with the sciential and the practical reason. Or say that
the second hypothesis were preferred, and that by some hitherto
unexplained affections of Swedenborg's brain and nervous system, he from
the year 1743, thought and reasoned through the 'medium' and
instrumentality of a series of appropriate and symbolic visual and
auditual images, spontaneously rising before him, and these so clear and
so distinct, as at length to overpower perhaps his first suspicions of
their subjective nature, and to become objective for him, that is, in
his own belief of their kind and origin,--still the thoughts, the
reasonings, the grounds, the deductions, the facts illustrative, or in
proof, and the conclusions, remain the same; and the reader might derive
the same benefit from them as from the sublime and impressive truths
conveyed in the Vision of Mirza or the Tablet of Cebes. So much even
from a very partial acquaintance with the works of Swedenborg, I can
venture to assert; that as a moralist Swedenborg is above all praise;
and that as a naturalist, psychologist, and theologian, he has strong
and varied claims on the gratitude and admiration of the professional
and philosophical student.--April 1827.

P. S. Notwithstanding all that Mr. Noble says in justification of his
arrangement, it is greatly to be regretted that the contents of this
work are so confusedly tossed together. It is, however, a work of great
merit.

[Footnote 1: An Appeal in behalf of the views of the eternal world and
state, and the doctr