SOURCE: McLemee, Scott. “Under the Influence: The Long Shadow of Emanuel Swedenborg.” Lingua Franca: The Review of Academic Life 8, no. 4 (May-June 1998): 58-61.

In the following essay, McLemee discusses the work of Gregory Johnson, who claims that Swedenborg was a seminal influence on the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and that Swedenborg's ideas actually informed Kant's thinking, even though the German thinker once lampooned the Swede in his pamphlet Dreams of the Spirit Seer and called him a “deliberate fraud.”

Right up until the dramatic events of his mid-fifties, Emanuel Swedenborg—nicknamed “the Swedish Aristotle”—led the busy life of a one-man think tank. In 1716, while still in his twenties, he launched his country's first scientific journal. Expert knowledge of mineralogy and economics made him a valuable consultant to the Swedish government. His notebooks contained plans for devices to travel through the air and beneath the sea, and to discharge...