The harmonial philosophy
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| Andrew Jackson Davis |
a compendium and digest of the works of Andrew Jackson Davis
The seership of Andrew Jackson Davis was attracting wide attention in America, and in a more restricted sense was known also in England, some few years before the Rochester Knockings inaugurated the epoch of modern Spiritualism.
By the hypothesis, it gave forth — like the latter — a revelation from the world beyond, and was to all intents and purposes an early example of trance mediumship, though Davis never claimed to speak under the influence of specific personal controls, like the long line of psychic orators who came after him and were, for the better part, his contemporaries. As he was, on the one hand, so much the most important of all that there is no person who could be placed in the second rank beneath him, so he has been of all the most popular.
The Principles of Nature, his first book of revelations, and the only one which claims to have been dictated by him in the " magnetic " state, has passed through at the least forty-four American editions, and as there is no question that it is still in demand, it is likely to be reprinted again — perhaps many times over. It is the most comprehensive of all his writings. He wrote and published continuously during a long period of years, and his readers seem to have been no less eager than he was himself untiring, the demand for his successive volumes is always large.
His collected works have been issued on several occasions, available sometimes Philosophy in single volumes separately, sometimes in complete sets only. The reason for this popularity is not far to seek. In The Principles of Nature philosophy of modern Spiritualism preceded Spiritualism itself, and so also a doctrine concerning the world beyond in that sphere which was held to be in immediate contiguity with the life of earth was put forward as the result of personal knowledge in seership, while later on a thousand voices coming from that sphere and, according to the claim of Spiritualism, speaking through a thousand mediums, testified to its general truth. There is no seer of the past — and there is no prophet — who had such a cloud of witnesses.
The effect was greater and stronger because they did not set out to testify in favour of Davis; he was not for them the precursor of all those voices, but that which he affirmed was by them verified without reference to him.
The doctrine, in a word, was that the world beyond is as natural as this world of ours; that it is neither the heaven nor hell of official Christianity; that it is simply this world spiritualism, and that men and women in their psychic bodies are as men and women here in the bodies of flesh, but with better opportunities of progress and a far better environment.
They are encompassed by helpers innumerable, so that those even who pass from the life of earth in a state of hardened criminality have every encouragement to amend and ultimately never fail to do so. In a word, the gospel of Davis, in common with that of Spiritualism, cast out all fear concerning the life to come. The prototype of Davis is a still greater seer in the person of Emanuel Swedenborg; but whatever its claims and merits — about which much yet remains to be said after a new manner — the doctrine of the New Jerusalem, according to the Swedish prophet, will bear no comparison on the ground of popular appeal with the " Divine Revelations " of him who was the Poughkeepsie seer and the exponent of Harmonial Philosophy. It is obvious that this is put forward in the only reasonable and therefore possible sense, not as a test of truth or even a title of excellence, but as a purely explanatory statement concerning a great vogue.
Some contents:
BOOK I
Revelations of Divine Being
I. What and Where is God?
II. God Revealed to Intellect
III. The Central Sun
II. God Revealed to Intellect
III. The Central Sun
BOOK III
Revelations of Mind and Soul
I. The Outward and Inward.
II. Seven Mental States ....
III. Mind as a Motive and Moral Power.
IV. Liberty and Necessity
V. What is Truth?...
VI. A Spiritual Consideration of Physical Man
VII. The Soul in Man...
VIII. The Spiritual Body...
IX. The Spirit of Man...
The Harmonial Philosophy
BOOK IV
Death and the After-Life
I. Immortality and the Life to Come
II. Evidence of Immortality...
III. The Philosophy of Death...
IV. The Seven Spheres of the Spirit
V. Demonstration of the Summer Land.
VI. Celestial Rivers in Space...
VII. Constitution and Location of the Summer Land
VIII. Centres in the Summer Land
IX. Winter Land and Summer Land
X. Language in the Summer Land.
XL Travelling and Society in the Summer Land
XII. The Diakka and their Earthly Victims
XIII. Scenes in the Summer Land
XIV. Ultimates in the Summer Land.
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