Between 1758 and 1766 a small piece of intellectual history plays out in four European cities – Stockholm, Potsdam, Königsberg and Berlin – within a single family with four main figures: Frederick II of Prussia, architect of the modern school system; his elder sister Louisa Ulrika, Queen of Sweden, who twice received Emanuel Swedenborg in audience; Emanuel Swedenborg himself, the best-documented medium of the 18th century; and Immanuel Kant, who from 1762 onwards was thinking about it all in Königsberg. This configuration has been remarkably little noted in 18th-century intellectual history – although in it all the tensions become visible that have shaped the European understanding of consciousness up to today. This article reconstructs the configuration source-critically and asks what it actually says about today's school system – and what not.
The family
The Prussian royal house of the Hohenzollerns had, around 1740, brought forth fourteen siblings – the children of King Frederick William I and Sophie Dorothea of Hanover. Two of them play the main role for our story:
- Frederick II ("the Great"), born on 24 January 1712 in Berlin, from 1740 to 1786 King in Prussia and later King of Prussia. A pupil of Voltaire, flautist, enlightenment thinker with a pronounced rationalist self-image ("I am the first servant of my state").
- Louisa Ulrika, born on 24 July 1720 in Berlin, eight years younger than Frederick. In 1744 she married the Swedish crown prince Adolf Frederick; from 1751 she was Queen of Sweden. She was considered one of the most educated princesses in Europe, was a patron of the arts and sciences, founded the Kungliga Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien (Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities) and corresponded intensively with her brother in Potsdam.
The two siblings were linked by a mixture of deep intellectual familiarity and political competition. Frederick treated Louisa Ulrika in his letters over four decades as an intellectual equal – a rarity in the patriarchal court culture of the 18th century. At the same time they sometimes disagreed politically (Sweden's alliance capability, the Nordic wars). This double bond makes the Swedenborg episode so interesting – Frederick could not simply dismiss his sister as a victim of superstition, because he knew her too well and respected her too much.
1758 and 1761: the Swedenborg audiences
In June 1758 Louisa Ulrika's second brother, August William of Prussia, died prematurely in Berlin at the age of 36 – after a political rupture with Frederick, who had accused him of incompetence in the Seven Years' War. August William died broken and deeply embittered. Louisa Ulrika had at this time already been Queen of Sweden for seven years and could only experience the final years of her brother's life from afar. Three years after his death, in October 1761, she invited Emanuel Swedenborg to the Swedish court.
At this audience, attested several times by contemporary witnesses at court (especially by Count Anders Johan von Höpken, one of the queen's closest confidants and longtime Secretary of State), she asked Swedenborg to convey a message to her deceased brother. Swedenborg returned a few days later and told her, in private, something which according to all reports could only have been known by August William and her. The queen is said to have turned pale. She never made the content public during her lifetime.
The historical details are laid out in the main Swedenborg article. What matters here is the family dimension: this audience was not about generic "spirit voices" but about Louisa Ulrika's third brother. Frederick and she had together experienced August William's dying – Frederick close up, Louisa Ulrika from afar. The sister wanted to reach the last brother via Swedenborg. Frederick was not involved.
Frederick II in Potsdam: the mockingly rationalist reaction
Frederick was informed about the audience. In several letters to Louisa Ulrika – edited in the Politische Correspondenz Friedrichs des Großen (critical Berlin Academy edition, 47 volumes 1879–1939) – he reacted to the Swedenborg matter with mocking distance. He called Swedenborg an "enthusiast", played with the usual enlightenment topoi (superstition, fantasy, bad digestion), but was remarkably not angry. He held his sister in too high intellectual regard to take her for a simple esoteric adherent.
Frederick's philosophical background at this point was clearly defined: Voltaire. The French enlightener had been Frederick's house guest at Sanssouci from 1750 to 1753, and the Voltaire–Frederick correspondence remained for over forty years one of the most important letter exchanges of the 18th century. Voltaire's Dictionnaire philosophique (1764) ridicules all forms of "enthousiasme" – including the mystical-mediumistic – and Frederick took on this stance as his self-image.
Important: Frederick was not a Kant pupil. In 1761/63 Kant was a thirty-nine-year-old private lecturer in Königsberg, far below the intellectual references by which Frederick oriented himself. He did not know him personally. The popular notion that Frederick "followed the Kant line" confuses two chronologically different layers: Kant's public effect begins only after 1781 with the Critique of Pure Reason, five years before Frederick's death, and even afterwards Frederick did not actively receive Kant.
Kant in Königsberg: the parallel investigation
While Frederick, from Potsdam, looked at the Stockholm audiences with mocking distance, in Königsberg Immanuel Kant was working on a different approach to the same question. Kant did not personally know Louisa Ulrika's court, but the reports about Swedenborg were widely circulated in the Prussian–German enlightenment networks. In August 1763 Kant wrote a detailed letter to a young East Prussian noblewoman, Charlotte von Knobloch, in which he reports in detail on the Stockholm fire incident of 1759 (an earlier Swedenborg case) and informs her that he had sent an English merchant to Stockholm to verify the facts on site.
This unusual investigative activity – a university private lecturer dispatching a merchant to do field research in a foreign capital – is described in detail in the main Kant and Swedenborg article. Three years later, in 1766, Kant published the book Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics, in which he raises the epistemological question of what reason can do with such reports.
Here lies a remarkable intellectual asymmetry: Frederick, the king and enlightener, blocks with Voltairian wit; Kant, the later top philosopher, investigates and writes a book. Both live in the same state, both are informed about the reports from Stockholm, both arrive at different reactions. Frederick chooses rhetorical closure, Kant epistemological opening.
The General-Land-Schul-Reglement of 12 August 1763
Two days after Kant's Knobloch letter of 10 August 1763, Frederick II promulgated the General-Land-Schul-Reglement – the founding document of modern compulsory schooling in Prussia, which over the following decades and centuries became the worldwide model for mass schooling. This chronological proximity is at first glance striking. It invites the suspicion that the reglement was in some way a reaction to the Swedenborg question.
This suspicion is not tenable. The reglement had been in preparation for years. The main author of the substantive draft was Johann Julius Hecker (1707–1768), a Lutheran theologian, founder of the Berlin Realschule and long-time school reformer in the Prussia of Frederick William I and Frederick II. Hecker's draft regulated:
- Compulsory schooling for children aged 5 to 13 in all Prussian rural communities
- Choice of material: reading, writing, arithmetic, singing, catechism, biblical stories, Christianity
- Form: class group, fixed lesson hours, attendance obligation, penalties for absences (school-fee penalties for the parents), school penny
- Supervision by local clergy, inspection by the consistories
The reglement does not regulate whether one may talk about clairvoyance, mediumship or Swedenborg. It does not regulate how Kepler or Newton are to be taught (that happens, in any case, only at a higher school level). It creates the form of school – class group, lesson clock, canonised choice of material, compulsory character – but not today's content filter against the spiritual sides of the great scientists. We have reconstructed this point in detail in our article on Prussian schooling.
Where today's filtering actually comes from
The systematic deletion of the mediumistic-theological-esoteric sides of Kepler, Newton, Boyle, Faraday, Maxwell, Kelvin and William James from the school textbooks takes place a good 140 years after Frederick II – namely in the course of the academic materialist turn of the early 20th century. This turn has a remarkably narrow historical date window (1906–1910), which we have reconstructed in detail in our 1906-pattern synthesis:
- April 1906: Death of Pierre Curie, shortly before the planned publication of his Palladino findings
- December 1907: Death of Lord Kelvin
- 1909: Hugo Münsterberg's Palladino "exposure" in New York and Boston as a distancing ritual of American psychology
- August 1910: Death of William James
Within this four-year window the most important bridging figures between top natural science and consciousness research leave the stage, and the next generation can no longer institutionally take up the old connection. The textbooks follow this turn over the following decades: Kepler becomes a pure astronomer, Newton a pure mathematician, Faraday a pure electrical engineer. Their theological-alchemical-mediumistic side is editorially struck out.
Two acts of one story
What the family configuration Frederick–Louisa Ulrika–Swedenborg–Kant historically shows is therefore a story in two acts, lying a good century apart:
Act 1: Form (1763)
Frederick II creates with the reglement the form of the modern school. Content and choice of material are at this stage still open. Kepler can be taught with astrology, Newton with alchemy. In the 18th and even in the 19th century this was customary in many school presentations. Frederick himself did not impose a content-side filter against mediumship – his Voltairian scepticism remained personal, not institutional.
Act 2: Content (from 1906)
The academic materialist turn of the early 20th century supplements the Prussian form with a systematic content filter. What no longer fits the mechanistic-materialist image of science is editorially struck out. The Prussian form from 1763 becomes here the carrier of this filter, but not its cause. Frederick II would presumably not have shared the mechanistic narrowing of the early 20th century – he was a Voltairian enlightener, not a positivist – but his invention of the class-group lesson-clock material-selection model made it possible for the filter to take systematic effect later.
This two-act reading is source-critically more honest than the direct causal claim "Frederick made the school against his sister's mediumship". But it shows precisely the same structural point: a particular form, born in the 18th century out of a rationalist mould, later serves as the carrier of an even more radical narrowing.
Steiner's Waldorf school as a counter-model
In 1919 Rudolf Steiner founded the first Waldorf school in Stuttgart. His pedagogical project is explicitly designed as a counter-model to the Prussian form and the materialist choice of material (see our Steiner portrait). Steiner criticises both:
- The form: the rigid class-group lesson-clock destroys the developmental rhythms of the child. Waldorf works instead with longer "epoch blocks", with artistic main lessons, with age-appropriate sequencing of material.
- The content: the purely materialist presentation of science mutilates the picture of the historical scientists. Steiner teaches Goethe as a natural researcher with his own methodological claim, treats the alchemical lines of the early modern period, lets astronomy and cosmological aspects intertwine.
Significantly, Steiner's pedagogy emerged exactly at the moment when the Prussian form reached its peak of filtering. The Waldorf school is not a counter-model to Frederick II's reglement of 1763, but to the materialist curriculum that had inserted itself into the Prussian form after 1906. This makes the contrast historically meaningful without simplifying it to a direct line Frederick II → materialism.
What the family configuration shows
What remains of this small intellectual story? It shows above all one thing: the tensions we experience today between scientific materialism and consciousness research are not the result of a distant abstract development. They were already fully present in a single Prussian family around 1760.
- Louisa Ulrika, the educated queen, who receives Swedenborg and turns pale at the result – not from superstition, but from genuine surprise at something she cannot explain.
- Frederick, the Voltairian enlightener, who mockingly blocks – not from a tested conviction, but from the rhetorical reflex of his school.
- Swedenborg, the mathematical mining counsellor and seer, who does not regard these as incompatible and proves it in his own person.
- Kant, the younger philosopher in the East Prussian province, who neither mockingly blocks nor naively goes along, but sends an English merchant to Stockholm and three years later writes his own book on the epistemological question.
Four reaction patterns to the same phenomenon, in the same family, in the same decade. Frederick's closure reaction has – through his institutional power – become over the next two and a half centuries the standard reaction of the academic world; Kant's methodological opening remained the rarer voice. Louisa Ulrika's direct experience and Swedenborg's practice have almost entirely disappeared from the academic-institutional discourse – and find their continuation outside the universities in the mediumistic tradition (Spiritism, Anthroposophy, modern mediumship research).
Anyone who takes seriously the family micro-scene of 1758–1766 sees: the question we face today is at its core an old question. It was already fully present in a single family of the Enlightenment age. The answers were already different then, and the range is still the same today.
Sources:Politische Correspondenz Friedrichs des Großen, critical Berlin Academy edition, 47 vols., 1879–1939 (Frederick II – Louisa Ulrika correspondence, available online). General-Land-Schul-Reglement of 12 August 1763: full text in several source collections, among them Lothar Wigger (ed.), Quellen zur Schulgeschichte Preußens, Weinheim 1993. James Van Horn Melton, Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria, Cambridge University Press 1988 (standard work). Immanuel Kant, letter to Charlotte von Knobloch, 10 August 1763, in: Akademie edition of Kant's works, vol. 10, pp. 43–48. Immanuel Kant, Träume eines Geistersehers, Königsberg 1766 (Akademie edition vol. 2, pp. 315–373). Friedemann Stengel, Aufklärung bis zum Himmel: Emanuel Swedenborg im Kontext der Theologie und Philosophie des 18. Jahrhunderts, Mohr Siebeck 2011. Lars Bergquist, Swedenborg's Secret, Swedenborg Society, London 2005 (on the 1758 and 1761 audiences). Robert Hindmarsh, Rise and Progress of the New Jerusalem Church in England, America, and Other Parts, London 1861 (main source for the queen incidents). Theodor Schieder, Friedrich der Große. Ein Königtum der Widersprüche, Propyläen 1983. Heiner Ullrich, Rudolf Steiner, Reclam 2018.