"A short step in any direction from Western science's reductionist approach to knowledge is a meditative world that includes ghosts, demons, angels, saints, divinely inspired dreams, remote viewing, electromagnetic fields, distant healing, and a host of psychic phenomena and occult activities that defy the epistemological tools of 'normal' science." With this engaging panoply of the preternatural, John S. Haller Jr. invites the reader to investigate Swedenborg, Mesmer, and the Mind/Body Connection . From Emanuel Swedenborg to the New Age movement, Haller's thorough scholarship and incisive analysis ranges across a diverse historical landscape populated by visionaries, mystics, and idealist reformers who influenced some of greatest minds of the past two centuries. Although this book has much to say about the intellectual influences impacting a lively heterodox medical marketplace of homeopaths, botanics, osteopaths, chiropractics, and Christian Scientists, readers will also find communitarian groups such as the Owenites and Fourierists, Emerson's transcendentalism, spiritualism, Theosophy, and many others well represented. Thus, Haller provides an important window into American philosophical, theological, and scientific life. Much more than a history of Swedenborgianism and mesmerism, this book elucidates significant aspects of America's cultural past and present.

  All too often historians have approached these fascinating intellectual movements dismissively, as aberrations providing little more than comic relief in the march of social and scientific progress. Haller refuses to succumb to these Whiggish simplifications too easily embraced by presentist conventions hidebound to materialism and positivism. Approaching his subject with an honest objectivity and fairness that runs throughout, he has provided scholars and interested lay readers alike with a clear and engaging study of crucial intellectual currents that have navigated generations then and now toward new horizons and new worlds. This is an important book.   Michael A. Flannery Professor and Associate Director for Historical Collections University of Alabama at Birmingham.