A Natural History of Pragmatism
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Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city.
Of course, words aren't magic. Neither are sextants, compasses, maps, slide rules and all the other paraphernalia which have accreted around the basic biological brains of Homo sapiens. In the case of these other tools and props, however, it is transparently clear that they function so as either to carry out or to facilitate computational operations important to various human projects.
TO THINK IS TO ACT
As much as his brother William, Henry James understood this fundamental of Emerson's “Spiritual Laws,” itself an application of what Swedenborg had described as the nature and behavior of his necessary angels. These were not disembodied spirits, but divining insights, communicated “vibrations” embodied in “people” as well as in the other elements of the natural world, which, if attended to, disclose the scaling continuity between the visible and invisible. These insights themselves are angels, revelation unfolding through time, and constitute “heaven.” This “angelic wisdom” is experienced as “vision” and communicated in words. As Emerson and William James had realized, Swedenborg's angelology is a cosmology of the linguistic universe, where laws of attraction, polarity, and gravity, in their relation to the “light” contained in both the Book of God and the Book of Nature, operate analogously to those governing the growth and development of all elements in relation to the light of the sun: “The ray of light passes invisible through space, and only when it falls on an object is it seen.
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