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Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg described the world of humans after death as a purely subjective experience, a projection of human thoughts and feelings into the sensations. A few of his followers read him as having an equally idealist view of the natural world. The first to do this, beginning in 1817, was Charles Augustus Tulk. According to historian Carl Theophilus Odhner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge introduced Tulk to subjective idealism, beginning in 1817, and by 1825 Coleridge was “much affected by Tulk’s form of Swedenborgianism.” Subsequently, from 1819 to his death in 1849, Tulk claimed to resolve inconsistencies in Swedenborg’s writings by finding in them a hidden, idealist meaning. As already noted, Swedenborg held that the world humans inhabit after death is a projection of individual and collective thinking and feeling. For Tulk, it became a simple matter of consistency that this present world must be equally subjective – whether or not every statement by Swedenborg literally supports this position. Tulk promoted his interpretation, in London and Boston. In addition to many articles, Tulk published The Record of Family Instruction in London in 1832, A Summary Explication of the Lord’s Prayer in London in 1842, and Aphorisms on the laws of creation in London and Boston in 1843. His major work Spiritual Christianity was published in London and Boston in 1846. By mid-century, prominent Americans were reading Tulk’s books and writing about his ideas. In 1846, Bangor Seminary professor Enoch Pond published a polemic against Swedenborg in which he used Tulk’s Spiritual Christianity as one of his sources and noted that Tulk’s idealism went beyond Swedenborg’s other interpreters in spiritualizing not only heaven and hell but also the natural world. At the same time, Andover Seminary professor Leonard Woods published a similar polemic and in Swedenborg’s defense linguist George Bush quoted from Tulk’s Record of Family Instruction. In 1848, Tulk’s Spiritual Christianity received a favorable mention in the Massachusetts Quarterly Review, edited by Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1849, editor David Nevins Lord argued that minister Horace Bushnell was a pantheist like Swedenborg and quoted Tulk on Swedenborg several times in the process. In addition, Henry James Senior, father of William and Henry, was an early reader of Tulk who corresponded with him and, for a time, shared an enthusiasm for Tulk’s ideas with a British friend, James John Garth Wilkinson. Immediately after Tulk’s death, his English follower, poet and medical reformer Mary Catherine Hume-Rothery, eloquently promoted his ideas in A Brief Sketch of the Life, Character, and Religious Opinions, of the Late Charles Augustus Tulk published in Boston in 1850. In connection with Evans and New Thought, it is significant that Hume-Rothery explained Jesus’s healing ability on the basis of Tulk’s idealist interpretation of Swedenborg -- much as Evans later understood Quimby’s cures on the basis of his own idealist interpretation. Adopting Tulk’s views, Hume-Rothery wrote, a man would bring his spirit into harmony with Divine Love and direct his healing efforts against spiritual causes. This, she argued, is how Jesus healed those who submitted mentally to his influence. Hume-Rothery’s Sketch was published by Boston Swedenborgian Otis Clapp and read by others like him. For example, the copy now in the Massachusetts Historical Society is inscribed to Joseph E. Worcester from Z. Hyde. Worcester was a well-known dictionary maker whose brother Henry A. was a Swedenborgian minister. Zina Hyde was a prominent Swedenborgian from Bath Maine. In 1845 Hyde became the founding president of the “Swedenborg Association for the Dissemination of a True Philosophy” that worked to finance the publication of Swedenborg’s works. Publisher Otis Clapp joined Hyde in this Association as its first Treasurer. Apparently, mid-century American Spiritualists also knew Tulk. The first American writer to defend an idealist interpretation of Swedenborg did so in a Spiritualist newspaper and was described there as one who “contends with Bishop Berkeley and Charles Augustus Falk [sic] that there are really no outstanding objects… even in the natural world, but what are called so are simply appearances in the plane of man’s sensuous nature, caused by his own internal states.” Promotion of this idealist interpretation in a Spiritualist periodical is surprising because American Spiritualists favored a thoroughly materialist reading of Swedenborg. In this they followed the lead of trance writer Andrew Jackson Davis and his editor William Fishbough who used Swedenborg’s writings to explain phenomena they took to be communication from the dead. Like the majority of Swedenborg’s followers, Davis and Fishbough found that he affirmed a pre-death world of material substance, little affected by the thoughts and feelings of humans. Unlike Swedenborg’s other followers, however, and unlike Swedenborg himself, they took the world of humans after death to be equally objective and made it of either rarified matter or an unknown spiritual substance. In 1859, a writer who signed his articles “F” was busy promoting this thoroughly materialist view of Swedenborg in the Spiritual Telegraph newspaper. Before he finished, a writer identified only as “Psyche” began to contribute the idealist articles mentioned above. F may well have been Fishbough, a frequent contributor to this publication and his subsequent interchange with Psyche offers a rare glimpse of a largely hidden, 19th-century battle of competing readings of Swedenborg. In this battle, Spiritualists took a materialist position, well described by Catherine Albanese as nature religion, and followers of Tulk took an idealist position. Publications of the Swedenborg church in America opposed both and maintained correctly that Swedenborg himself was idealist about the afterlife but not about this present world. Clearly F was familiar with views of Swedenborg in opposition to his own because it was F who identified Psyche with idealist philosopher George Berkeley and “Falk.” F also described Psyche as one whose real name is well known and who “has recently excited much interest… in certain conversational circles in this city [New York].” Although well known to F, Psyche’s real name is now lost to history. In his articles, Psyche argued that “the worlds, natural, spiritual, and celestial, are, so far as man is concerned, psychical from first to last, and… his death in the one, and birth into the other, is simply a psychological change in the condition of his soul.” Thus, he explicitly rejected the Spiritualist assumption that “the spiritual world is but a rarified and etherealized natural world” since this would imply, absurdly, that the spiritual world has a location in our present universe. Furthermore, in this world as in the next, “the normal life of man and the race here is but one of lucid trance, and the visible universe a purely psychical creation,” the result of Swedenborg’s Law of Correspondences by which “our interior states of affection and thought… project into the senses their corresponding forms.” F replied to Psyche’s challenge that he found no support for the idealist position in either logic or Swedenborg. While some disciples of Swedenborg (most, actually) “seem to have understood that seer as affirming that in the spiritual world things appear only subjectively,” F claimed not to find this plainly stated by Swedenborg and, in his opinion, this was not his meaning. Although he cannot prove absolutely that natural objects “are anything more than illusory appearances,” F finds enough proof that they are substantial in the “action, as if from such external objects, which we are conscious is from without ourselves, upon our external senses.” To F’s less than resounding argument, Psyche countered that we might as well “affirm that the stick is crooked in the water [and] the street is narrower at the farther end [whereas] my philosophy and observation teach me, that the senses are fundamentally fallacious [and] their very office is to make things appear to be, instead of being. They are the revelators of internal states of affection and thought, instead of the messengers from an unknown and incognizable hypothetical world beyond me.” According to Psyche, F’s mistake is to consider the senses as “messengers or go-betweens betwixt the mind and external objects” when they are actually “but a degree of mind itself.” Furthermore, according to Psyche it is F that is misreading Swedenborg. It was generally agreed by Swedenborg’s readers that he posited “three co-existing discrete degrees of [man’s] mind…. the affectional… the intellectual… and the sensational” and linked these three degrees so that the affectional gives rise to the intellectual and both to the sensational. Materialists like F, borrowing from Swedenborg, concede this description but “claim that the realms of life are not alone with the human mind, but, at the same time, without it, as planes or parallelisms.” According to Psyche, this addition to Swedenborg tries to combine the ideal and the material, two theories that are “utterly inconsistent with each other, and mutually destructive [so that] one or the other must be true… there [being] no ratio between that which is ideal and that which is material.” For Psyche, then, Swedenborg must be either an idealist or a materialist and F is mistaken to defend the second option, in whole or in part. According to Psyche, idealism “systematized and explained by [Swedenborg’s] discrete degrees of the human mind and law of correspondences…. is the only theory of creation and the life of man that claims a respectful consideration at the hands of the modern philosophic Spiritualist. It is the key which unlocks all the myths and mysteries in theology, philosophy and religion, and promises a logical and rational solution… of the future life as well as the present.” There is no evidence that Psyche convinced American Spiritualists to adopt his idealism but other admirers kept Tulk’s reading of Swedenborg alive. In Boston, in 1870, Henry James Senior published an idealist interpretation of Swedenborg that varied somewhat from that of Pysche and Tulk. The following year, in London, Abraham Jones Le Cras promoted Tulk’s ideas in A Compendium of the Doctrines of Spiritual Christianity. In 1878, Hume-Rothery and her husband published The Divine Unity, Trinity, and At-one-ment in which they restated Tulk’s idealist views. There followed a revival of interest in Tulk in England that finally resulted in a revised edition of Tulk’s Record of Family Instruction, the first English publication of Hume-Rothery’s Sketch, and a republication of Tulk’s Explication of the Lord’s Prayer. In 1881, in Philadelphia, Edmund A. Beaman published a book in which he promoted Tulk’s conclusion that if the present world is no more than a projection of human thoughts and feelings, Jesus was not God incarnate but only a limited human perception of God – the implication that soured Wilkinson on Tulk. In 1882 the Toronto Canada Swedenborgian Society reported that “N. W. Clark,” a ministerial candidate who was previously a member of the Boston Society, proved to be a promoter of Tulk’s ideas and thus unacceptable to the congregation. This candidate was probably William H. Clarke who was a member of the Boston Swedenborgian Society from 1879 until 1913 but was listed as residing in Toronto in later membership lists. Clarke’s rejection shows that there was at least one member of the Boston Society who was following Tulk in the 1880s. This, then, is where Warren Felt Evans and New Thought come into the story. Long an admirer of both Swedenborg and idealism, in his earliest books Evans professed the same dualism of matter and spirit that most of Swedenborg’s followers found in his writings. “We must learn to think of spirit and matter as discrete or distinct substances… having no properties in common.” In 1876, Evans modified this dualism, declared himself an idealist, and made matter subordinate to spirit as its “sensuous manifestation.” Five years later, he attributed his new idealism to Swedenborg and began to echo Tulk. “In the spiritual philosophy of Swedenborg it is taught that, in the other life, the scenery in the midst of which we live and move is a constant creation from ourselves, and corresponds to our inward states…. Its outness is only apparent…. this law of correspondence extends through the whole universe, and is seen here as well as in the life above…. The external universe is inclosed [sic] in the being of the world of mind.” Building on Swedenborg thus interpreted and on other idealist and mystic writers, Evans finally had an explanation of the mental healing he had experienced two decades earlier, at the hands of mesmerist Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. “Disease, like everything else in the universe, being a creation of thought, and having no existence except in thought …it should be the aim of the physician to banish it from the thought of the patient.” In 1884 and 1886, Evans developed the metaphysics of what would be called New Thought by expanding on this idea of mental healing and continuing to read Swedenborg as a subjective idealist about both the afterlife and the natural world. Given the sources he cites and his own claims, it has generally been assumed that Evans developed his idealist view of Swedenborg independently. However, as noted here, Evans’s idealist reading of Swedenborg was preceded and surrounded by the tradition that Tulk began more than half a century earlier. Americans Pond, Bush, Lord and a Massachusetts Quarterly Review writer were already well aware of Tulk’s publications by mid-century and Evans may have encountered some of the same British or American publications. Particularly suggestive is the idealist explanation of Jesus’ healing offered by Hume-Rothery in her 1850 Sketch which anticipates Evans’ explanation of Quimby’s success and which Zina Hyde was clearly circulating. F and Psyche were well aware of Tulk’s ideas in 1859 and Evans may have learned of the idealist interpretation the same way they did, through reading or conversation. Additionally, Evans may have read later books such as that by Hume-Rothery, husband and wife. Evans might also have learned of Tulk’s views through the Boston Swedenborgian Society. He joined the Society in 1867, and maintained his membership and an office in Boston from 1870 until his death in 1889. Through the Society he might have met Tulk’s Boston publisher Otis Clapp who was at one time a member and lived until 1886. He also might have met Tulk’s follower William H. Clarke who, as noted above, joined the Boston Society in 1879 and lived until 1913. News of the revival of English interest in Tulk might also have reached Evans when he was writing his 1881 book. Given their similarities, historian Hugo Lj. Odhner did not hesitate to place Evans squarely in the tradition begun by Tulk. To this it can be added that Evans might have easily gotten his interpretation directly from Tulk or one of his followers. Thus, a number of popular 20th-century religious movements such as positive thinking, law of attraction and creative visualization may be rooted not only in the New Thought metaphysics developed by Evans in the 1880s but even earlier in the American response to Tulk. Notes The author is grateful to Rev. Dr. James F. Lawrence, Dean of the Swedenborgian House of Studies at Pacific School of Religion, for supportive discussion and extremely helpful notes on an early draft of this paper. Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of Metaphysical Religion in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). On Evans and New Thought see James F. Lawrence, “An Extraordinary Season in Prayer: Warren Felt Evans’s Journey into ‘Scientific Spiritual Practice,” Studia Swedenborgiana 12:3 (2002); Arlene M. Sanchez Walsh, “Warren F. Evans, Emanuel Swedenborg, and the Creation of New Thought,” Studia Swedenborgiana 10:3 (1997); C. Alan Anderson, Healing Hypotheses; (Garland Publishing Inc., New York & London, 1993), 41-64; John F. Teahan, “Warren Felt Evans and Mental Healing: Romantic Idealism and Practical Mysticism in Nineteenth-Century America,” Church History 48:1 (1979): 63-80; Horatio W. Dresser, A History of the New Thought Movement (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1919), 71-96; William J. Leonard, “The Pioneer Apostle of Mental Science,” Practical Ideals 6 (1903): 30-37. On the commonly accepted 19th-century reading of Swedenborg see William M. White, Emanuel Swedenborg: his life and writings, in two volumes (London: Simpkin, Marshall, & Co., 1867), 1:257-259, 261-262, 290, 297, 371-372, 407, 489, 2:4, 23, 108, 112, 211-212, 216-224. The best summary of Tulk’s ideas is still Mary Catherine Hume-Rothery, A Brief sketch of the Life, Character, and Religious Opinions, of the Late Charles Augustus Tulk; Addressed to Members of the New Church (Boston: Otis Clapp, 1850). For positive reviews of Tulk’s views in a recent Swedenborgian publication, see Richard Lines, “Charles Augustus Tulk – Swedenborgian Extraordinary,” Arcana: Inner Dimensions of Spirituality 3:4 (1997): 5-32; Ray Silverman, “A Portrait of Ourselves: The Spiritual Christianity of Charles Augustus Tulk,” Arcana: Inner Dimensions of Spirituality 1:4 (1995): 51-69. For an early rejection of Tulk’s views see Swedenborg versus Berkeley, Kant, & Coleridge in A retrospective review of the ‘Record of Family Instruction,” 18mo, 1832, with A Few Remarks on the “Tracts on Spiritual Christianity,” (London: William Smith, 1846). Carl Theophilus Odhner, Annals of The New Church, Vol. I, 1688-1850, (Academy of The New Church: Bryn Athyn, Pa., 1898, 1904), 261, 324. On Tulk and Coleridge see Richard Lines, “Coleridge and Charles Augustus Tulk,” Charles Lamb Bulletin 140, (2007): 167-179; H. J. Jackson, “’Swedenborg’s Meaning is the Truth’: Coleridge, Tulk, and Swedenborg,” in Essays on Swedenborg and Literature: In search of the absolute, ed. Stephen McNeilly (London: The Swedenborg Society, 2004), 1-13; Shirley Dent, "Iniquitous Symmetries: Aestheticism and Secularism in the Reception of William Blake's Works in Books and Periodicals during the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s" (Ph.D. diss., University of Warwick, 2000); and Raymond H. Deck, Jr., “New Light on C. A. Tulk, Blake’s Nineteenth-Century Patron,” Studies in Romanticism 16:2 (1977): 217-236. Odhner, Annals of The New Church, Vol. I, 275-76, 352, 386, 422, 446, 488, 499, 517, 532, 560-61 and Notes on The History of Doctrines in The New Church (Huntington Valley, Pa, 1897), 6-8. The Record of Family Instruction in the Spiritual doctrines of the Holy Scripture (London: Thomas Goyder, 1832); A Summary Explication of the Lord’s Prayer (London: Walton and Mitchell, 1842); Aphorisms on the Laws of Creation: as Displayed in the Correspondencies [sic] that Subsist between Mind and Matter (London: William Newberry; Boston: Otis Clapp, 1843). Spiritual Christianity: Collected from the Theological works of Emanuel Swedenborg, with an Illustrative Commentary (London: William Newberry; Boston: Otis Clapp, 1846). Enoch Pond, D.D., Swedenborgianism Reviewed (Portland [Maine]: Hyde, Lord and Duren, 1846), iv and footnote pp. 67-68. George Bush, Reply to Rev. Dr. Woods’ “Lectures on Swedenborgianism;” Delivered in the Theological Seminary, Andover, Mass. (New York: John Allen; Boston: Otis Clapp; London: William Newbery, 1847), 71-72; Leonard Woods, D.D., Lectures on Swedenborgianism, Delivered in the Theological Seminary, Andover, February, 1846 (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1846). “Swedenborg as a Theologian,” Massachusetts Quarterly Review 1 (3 June 1848): 299. David Nevins Lord, review of “God in Christ. Three Discourses delivered at New Haven, Cambridge, and Andover, with a Preliminary Dissertation on Language: By Horace Bushnell,” The Theological and Literary Journal 2, (October 1849): 177, 195. “Letter from Wilkerson to Mr. Henry James September 2 1845,” quoted in Clement John Wilkinson, James John Garth Wilkinson; a Memoir of his Life, with a Selection of His Letters (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.: London, 1911), 188-195. A Brief sketch of the Life, Character, and Religious Opinions, of the Late Charles Augustus Tulk; Addressed to Members of the New Church (Boston: Otis Clapp, 1850). Hume-Rothery, A Brief Sketch, 22-25. “Biography. Swanton family. Papers, 1759-1955: A Finding Aid,” Web, //oasis.lib. harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~sch00115, 31 May 2013. The Intellectual Repository, 6:71 (November 1845), 417. “The Spirit and the Spirit World. Eighth Article. Substance and Form – Space and Time,” The Telegraph and Preacher, 13 August 1859, pp. 186-7. Note that Tulk’s followers were careful to distinguish his system from that of Bishop Berkeley. See for example Hume-Rothery, A Brief Sketch, 17-18. Catherine L. Albanese, “On the Matter of Spirit: Andrew Jackson Davis and the Marriage of God and Nature,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 60:1 (Spring 1992): 1-17. Ibid. On the long effort of the Swedenborgian churches to counter Tulk’s interpretation see Odhner, Annals of The New Church, Vol. I, 307, 333-334, 344, 351-52, 359, 362, 484, 508, 517, 530, 560 and Carl Theophilus Odhner and William Whitehead, Annals of The New Church, Vol. II, 1851-1890, 68, 167, 173, 176, www.heavenlydoctrines.org, Web, 7 August 2013. “’F’s’ Reply to Psyche,’” The Telegraph and Preacher, 3 September 1859, pp. 236-237. “Psycho-cosmos,” The Telegraph and Preacher, 25 June 1859, pp. 98-99. Andrew Jackson Davies, The Principles of Nature, her divine revelations, and a voice to mankind, Edited, with an introduction and biographical sketch of the author, by William Fishbough (London: John Chapman, 1847).
“Psycho-cosmos II,” The Telegraph and Preacher, 2 July 1859, p. 110. “The Spirit and the Spirit World. Eighth Article. Substance and Form – Space and Time,” The Telegraph and Preacher, 13 August 1859, pp. 186-7. “The Spirit and the Spirit World. Eighth Article. Substance and Form – Space and Time,” The Telegraph and Preacher, 13 August 1859, pp. 186-7. “F’s Spirit and Spiritual World,” The Telegraph and Preacher, 27 August 1859, pp. 213-14. “’Psyche’s’ Rejoinder to ‘F.’,” The Telegraph and Preacher, 10 September 1859, pp. 224-225. “Psycho-cosmos—No. 4,” The Telegraph and Preacher, 20 August 1859, pp. 193-94. “Psycho-cosmos—No. 4,” The Telegraph and Preacher, 20 August 1859, pp. 193-94. According to Richard M’cully who cataloged alternative interpretations of Swedenborg, Henry James Senior read Swedenborg more like Thomas Lake Harris than like Tulk. Richard M’Cully, Swedenborg Studies (London: James Speirs, 1875), 143-153, 160-169. More recently, Giles Gunn finds James Senior to be entirely original in his interpretation. Giles Gunn, “Henry James, Senior: American Eccentric or American Original?” The Journal of Religion 54:3 (1974): 218-243. Emanuel Swedenborg, Abraham Jones Le Cras, A Compendium of the Doctrines of Spiritual Christianity (London: Pitman, 1871). William and Mary C. Hume-Rothery, The Divine Unity, Trinity, and At-one-ment: A Monograph (Manchester; London, 1878). “Tulkism Revived,“ New Church Life, 10:6 (June 1890): 90-92. The revised edition of Tulk’s Record of Family Instruction was published as Charles Augustus Tulk, The Science of Correspondency; and Other Spiritual Doctrines of Holy Scripture with Illustrative Spiritual Expositions, ed. Charles Pooley (London: James Speirs, 1889). The London edition of Hume-Rothery’s Sketch was published as Mary Catherine Hume-Rothery, A Brief Sketch of the Life, Character, and Religious Opinions of C. A. Tulk, 2nd edition, ed. Charles Pooley, With a Short Historical Outline of the Author's Life by Charles Pooley (London: G. Speirs, 1890). See also Explication of the Lord’s Prayer (London: James Speirs, ca. 1895). Edmund A. Beaman, Swedenborg and the New Age; or, The Holy City New Jerusalem. What it is, and when and how it comes down from God out of Heaven; and Swedenborg and His Mission in relation to it, With an Introduction on God and Man. (Philadelphia, J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1881), reviewed in Words for the New Church [Philadelphia] 2 (1883), 328-345. On Tulk’s view of Jesus see Hume-Rothery, A Brief Sketch, 18-22. “Toronto, Canada,“ New Church Life, 2:6 (May 1882): 80. Lists of Members of the Boston Society of the New Jerusalem (Boston: H. M. Hight, 1925), 11. Anderson, Healing Hypotheses, 41-64. W. F. Evans, The mental-cure, illustrating the influence of the mind on the body, both in health and disease, and the psychological method of treatment (Boston: T. H. Carter & Co., 1869, 1886), 28. W. F. Evans, Soul and Body (Boston: H. H. Carter and Company, 1876), 67-68. W. F. Evans, The Divine Law of Cure (Boston: H. H. Carter & Co., Publishers, 1881, 1884), 160-161. Teahan, “Warren Felt Evans and Mental Healing,” 71, 74, 78. Evans, The Divine Law of Cure, 294. W. F. Evans, The Primitive Mind-Cure (Boston: H. H. Carter & Co., Publishers, 1884), 5, 49-50, 57-58; W. F. Evans, Esoteric Christianity and Mental Therapeutics (Boston: H. H. Carter & Karrick, Publishers, 1886), 37-38. Anderson, Healing Hypotheses, 41-64. Lists of Members of the Boston Society of the New Jerusalem (Boston: Massachusetts New-Church Union Press, 1898), 14; Leonard, “The Pioneer Apostle,” 35. A Sketch of the History of the Boston Society of the New Jerusalem, with A List of its Members, (Boston: Wm. Carter and Brother, 1863), 47; A Sketch of the History of the Boston Society of the New Jerusalem, with A List of its Members, (Boston: John C. Regan, 1873), 47. See, Hugo Lj. Odhner, “Faith and Falsity, Class XI,” 1970, p. 12, www.heavenlydoctrines.org, Web, 7 May 2013.