Atoms Within Atoms
Dr. Michael Stanley

A talk on Swedenborg the Scientist

We are familiar with the phenomenon of great thinkers and artists whose prophetic insights and visions are not recognized or understood by the age they lived in. They form the vanguard of civilization, but at the time it is difficult to know whose vision is true. One such outstanding figure is Emanuel Swedenborg, the great 18th century Swede, who mastered all the sciences and philosophy of his day, and went on to draw science, philosophy and theology into a unified theme, such as religious scientists and scientific theologians are still struggling today to discover. And in the process his powerful intellect threw off a large number of scientific insights, many of which have been confirmed by science over a century later, many being confirmed in our present decade, and it would seem to follow, many that might well be confirmed in days to come. That he could 'spin off' so many prophetic scientific concepts and ideas is a confirmation of the value of the principles that he developed to guide his efforts to understand the many varied phenomena of our world, and the hidden processes that give rise to them.

The most central of the new principles enunciated by Swedenborg is the principle of discrete degrees and influx by correspondences. By this he is declaring that life manifests itself on discretely different levels of existence, the major levels being the Divine origin, the Spiritual level, the natural level and the physical level. And life on a higher level or plane flows into corresponding forms of life on the next lower plane so that, for instance, life manifests itself in mental forms and then flows into corresponding physical forms in the human body. This principle of influx from an infinite Divine origin through corresponding forms on lower levels guided Swedenborg into a substantially correct view of the origin and history of matter - an insight denied to his older contemporary, Isaac Newton, and those who followed him an insight only now being confirmed in our nuclear age and by recent developments in high energy physics.

This same principle also guided Swedenborg into an understanding of the workings of the human body, and the discovery of many new physiological facts, particularly with respect to the brain, many of which lay buried for 140 years in a long unpublished manuscript. This principle, used so successfully to understand the workings of the natural world, Swedenborg then used to guide him in understanding the mental world and even further the world of man's spirit as revealed in the Bible.

Such a progression from matter to the human body, to the human mind and to the spirit was inherent in his principle of discrete degrees, and we can stand amazed at how well it guided Swedenborg into the secrets of nature and the spirit.

I want this evening to relate briefly how Swedenborg foresaw the inner nature of matter 200 years before atomic and high energy particle physics provided the observable confirmations.

Unlike his contemporary Newton, who thought of matter as composed of hard, massy, impenetrable atoms endowed from without with motion Swedenborg felt compelled to posit atoms within atoms, or discrete orders of particles, each order built from a higher, more energetic order, and each particle being endowed from within with motion of a closed vortical nature. Each discretely smaller and higher or more fundamental order of particles had discretely higher energies than the lower, the smallest particles having virtually no dimensions, but with infinite internal motion; and the appearance of solidity of a lower order was provided by the speed at which the constituent particles of a higher order circulated or spiraled around a centre. The resemblance to the modern atom with its rapidly circulating electrons giving a sense of solidity is clear. And now the physicists have identified a higher order particle from which the proton of the atomic nucleus is constituted - the so-called quark, which moves around inside the proton at incredibly high velocities.

Swedenborg's particles exhibited auxiliary motion or 'spin' just as do most of the elementary particles discovered in recent years. Swedenborg’s ultimate particle was of a nature that could only seem ridiculous in his day - a singular or natural point endowed with infinite energy to move in an infinitely spiral path. By the infinitely rapid motion of many of these 'points', the first or highest form of particle came into existence. So on this basis matter, according to Swedenborg, is resolvable into pure energy - and this 200 years before Einstein! Today the theory is seriously being maintained in some quarters that the mysterious black holes revealed by modern radio telescopes are the end product of a collapsed star, where all the star's matter has been crushed under the enormous force of gravity into a point-like singularity containing an enormous quantity of energy. It is thought that 'black holes' which normally suck in all surrounding matter, may suddenly explode spewing out all their infinitely condensed energy, back into space, and that the original creation of the universe might have been from a series of such 'big bangs' by exploding black holes.

Swedenborg was also the first to explain the origin of the planets as being spin off from the solar matter after it had condensed into the form of the sun. This theory, temporarily out of favour, now seems more likely than its rival theory of the planets origin from the break up of one of a pair of suns or binary star. Swedenborg was also the first to believe that the milky way is a galaxy of suns of which ours is one, and that there are probably countless other galaxies in the universe as well. Finally, I might mention the strange notion Swedenborg had that some stars might give off their energy by pulsating - like the human heart. Again, after 200 years, such stars now known as 'pulsars' have been discovered.

How relatively dead and lifeless Newton's picture of the Universe seems by comparison - a few planets set into swinging motion around the sun, held in their precarious orbits rather mysteriously by God, every atom of matter being inwardly solid and dead and moving tamely under the action of some impressed force.

Yet it was Newton's simpler, more naturalistic view, which carried the day, and enabled physical science to develop gradually on a simplistic basis. The greater, deeper, vision of Swedenborg was too far ahead of its time for experimental physics to cope with. The earth and the stars were not the limits of Swedenborg's vision - for there was the vegetable and the animal kingdom and above all, man, that highest and most mysterious of creatures who not only possesses in the human body the most complex of all machinery, or organism, the world has ever known, but can also think and judge - actually be aware of the processes going on in his own consciousness. This inevitably became the target for Swedenborg's great intellect. His hypothesis, that matter is graded in a fundamental way, became the hypothesis that the life force operates in the body in a graded way, in discrete degrees, each lower degree representing something of the form of the higher degree from which it was formed, and since the very highest degree is the Infinite Divine Itself, something of the Divine Form is revealed in every human being, in every living form, and even in matter itself. In the second talk in this series we shall see how Swedenborg was led not only to great physiological anticipations, but also to a recognition of the great importance of psychosomatic effects, the effect the spirit has on the body and vice versa, and a realm of the mind that is above and deeper than our conscious ability to see and judge our thoughts and feelings. He is being led upwards towards that domain from which all life proceeds. Swedenborg believed in God: but would he be able to discover God by the sheer force of his great intellect striving ever upwards and ever more deeply into the forms of life?