Den matematiska punkten

THE POINT has its point of departure in the indivisible point of mathematics. In Swedenborg's Principia rerum naturalium (1734) the mathematical points are given an ontological significance. The world appears when God, like an artist drawing with his pencil, gives motion to the point. The world consists of circulating points. With spider metaphors Swedenborg postulated that the world is built on mathematics, and with labyrinth metaphors he formulated the philosophers' feeling of disorientation in the chaos of nature. The mind is often described as a journey in a labyrinth in darkness, striving to find the plan of the labyrinth and to see the light. Behind this is a conception of the creation of the world as an exercise in geometry. The world is geometry. The mathematical point is a dot conceptualized as something that has no substantiality. Around 1730 he began sketching a second version of a theory of matter, in the work commonly called the Minor Principia. It differs considerably from the published work of 1734. In 1730, however, he had still not come across the philosophical terminology of the German philosopher Christian von Wolff.