936 A. For Kant's evidence in regard to the supernormal powers of Swedenborg, see Dreams of a Spirit Seer, by Immanuel Kant, translated by E. F. Goerwitz; edited by Frank Sewall (London: Swan Sonnen-schein & Co.; New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900).

The three most famous cases are: (1) Swedenborg's communication to the Queen of Sweden of some secret information, which she had asked him for, and believed that no living human being could have told him. (2) The widow of the Dutch Ambassador at Stockholm was called upon by a goldsmith to pay for a silver service which her husband had purchased. She believed that it had been paid for, but could not find the receipt; so she begged Swedenborg to ask her husband where it was. Three days later he came to her house and informed her in the presence of some visitors that he had conversed with her husband, and had learnt from him that the debt had been paid, and the receipt was in a bureau in an upstairs room. The spirit had said that after pulling out the left-hand drawer a board would appear, and on drawing out this a secret compartment would be disclosed, containing his private Dutch correspondence and the receipt. The whole company went upstairs and the papers were found, as described, in the secret compartment, of which no one had known before.

(3) In September, 1759, at four o'clock on a Saturday afternoon, Swedenborg arrived at Gottenburg from England, and was invited by a friend to his house. Two hours after he went out and then came back and informed the company that a dangerous fire had just broken out in Stockholm (which is about fifty German miles from Gottenburg), and that it was spreading fast. He was restless and went out often. He said that the house of one of his friends, whom he named, was already in ashes, and that his own was in danger. At eight o'clock, after he had been out again, he declared that the fire was extinguished at the third door from his house. This news occasioned great commotion throughout the whole city, and was announced to the Governor the same evening.

On Sunday morning Swedenborg was summoned to the Governor, who questioned him about the disaster. He described the fire precisely, how it had begun and in what manner it had ceased, and how long it had continued. On Monday evening a messenger arrived at Gottenburg, who had been despatched by the Board of Trade during the time of the fire. In the letters brought by him, the fire was described precisely as stated by Swedenborg, and next morning the news was further confirmed by information brought to the Governor by the Royal Courier. As Swedenborg had said, the fire had been extinguished at eight o'clock.

These cases are given in Kant's letter to Fraulein Charlotte von Knobloch, which is quoted in Appendix II. of Dreams of a Spirit Seer, the original letter being contained in Borowsky's Darstellung des Lebens unci Charakters Immanuels Kant, Konigsberg, 1804, pp. 211 to 225.

See also Documents concerning Swedenborg, by R. L. Tafel.

936 B. Frau Frederica Hauffe, better known as the "Seeress of Prevorst," was one of the most noted of the group of somnambules who flourished in Germany in the early part of the nineteenth century. A history of her trances was published soon after her death by Justinus Kerner, - a well-known poet and physician to whom she had come for "magnetic" treatment, - under the title of Die Seherin von Prevorst: Eroff-nungen fiber das innere Leben des Menschen und uber das Hereinragen einer Geisterwelt in die Unsere (Stuttgart und Tubingen, 1829).1 It was claimed that the Seeress possessed supernormal powers of vision, both of distant scenes and of the future; she was supposed to see and converse with discarnate spirits, who gave her information on their affairs and family history, and physical phenomena were observed in her presence. The evidence, however, for her supernormal powers was what would now be considered quite inadequate. She excited even greater interest by her supposed revelations of things spiritual. These revelations formed the study of Gorres, Eschenmayer, and other members of a circle of mystics, and were expounded by them in the Blatter aus Prevorst, of which several volumes appeared from 1831 onwards.

Besides the doctrine - more or less common to all the mystics of the time - of the threefold nature of man, the revelations of the Seeress included descriptions of certain intricate systems of circles - designated respectively Sun-Circles and Life-Circles - which represented symbolically spiritual conditions and the passage of time. Diagrams of these are given in Kerner's work. Their interpretation was furnished partly by cyphers, partly by words of the supposed primitive universal language written in the primitive ideographs. These have some resemblance to Hebrew characters, and the Seeress herself compared the language to Hebrew, and maintained that it resembled the language actually spoken in the time of Jacob, and that it was the common language of the inner life. She frequently spoke it in her trances, and it is asserted that she was quite consistent in her use of the words. It was supposed to be the primitive Nature-speech, which was lost and forgotten with the coming of sin, but something of which can be recovered in rare states of exaltation.

There are, of course, many other instances of this type of supposed languages, - e.g. the unknown tongues spoken in Edward living's church,1 and the Martian and other languages of Mlle Helene Smith (see 837).

1 A second edition was published in 1832, and later ones in 1838 and 1846. An English translation, greatly abridged, by Mrs. Crowe, was published in London in 1845. See also The Pioneers of the Spiritual Reformation: Life and Works of Dr. Justinus Kerner: William Howitt and his work for Spiritualism, by Anna Mary Howitt Watts (London: The Psychological Press Association and E. W. Allen, 1883).