Chapter XX: Part 20

171 Op. cit., London, 1901, p. 130.

172 CLAPARÈDE et GOTY: Deux Héroines de la Foi, Paris, 1880, p. 112.

173 Compare these three different statements of it: A. P. CALL: As a
Matter of Course, Boston, 1894; H. W. DRESSER: Living by the Spirit,
New York and London, 1900; H. W. SMITH: The Christian’s Secret of a
Happy Life, published by the Willard Tract Repository, and now in
thousands of hands.

174 T. C. UPHAM: Life of Madame Catharine Adorna, 3d ed., New York,
1864, pp. 158, 172‐174.

175 The History of THOMAS ELWOOD, written by Himself, London, 1885, pp.
32‐34.

176 Memoirs of W.E. Channing, Boston, 1840, i. 196.

177 L. TYERMAN: The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley, i. 274.

178 A. MOUNIN: Le Curé d’Ars, Vie de M. J. B. M. Vianney, 1864, p. 545,
abridged.

179 B. WENDELL: Cotton Mather, New York, no date, p. 198.

180 That of the earlier Jesuit, RODRIGUEZ, which has been translated
into all languages, is one of the best known. A convenient modern
manual, very well put together, is L’Ascétique Chrétienne, by M. J.
RIBET, Paris, Poussielgue, nouvelle édition, 1898.

181 SAINT JEAN DE LA CROIX, Vie et Œuvres, Paris, 1893, ii. 94, 99,
abridged.

182 “Insects,” i.e. lice, were an unfailing token of mediæval sainthood.
We read of Francis of Assisi’s sheepskin that “often a companion of
the saint would take it to the fire to clean and _dispediculate_ it,
doing so, as he said, because the seraphic father himself was no
enemy of _pedocchi_, but on the contrary kept them on him (le
portava adosso), and held it for an honor and a glory to wear these
celestial pearls in his habit.” Quoted by P. SABATIER: Speculum
Perfectionis, etc., Paris, 1898, p. 231, note.

183 The Life of the Blessed HENRY SUSO, by Himself, translated by T. F.
KNOX, London, 1865, pp. 56‐80, abridged.

184 BOUGAUD: Hist. de la bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, Paris, 1894, pp.
265, 171. Compare, also, pp. 386, 387.

185 LEJEUNE: Introduction à la Vie Mystique, 1899, p. 277. The holocaust
simile goes back at least as far as Ignatius Loyola.

186 ALFONSO RODRIGUEZ, S. J.: Pratique de la Perfection Chrétienne, Part
iii., Treatise v., ch. x.

187 Letters li. and cxx. of the collection translated into French by
BOUIX, Paris, 1870.

188 BARTOLI‐MICHEL, ii. 13.

189 RODRIGUEZ: Op. cit., Part iii., Treatise v., ch. vi.

190 SAINTE‐BEUVE: Histoire de Port Royal, i. 346.

191 RODRIGUEZ: Op. cit., Part iii., Treatise iii., chaps. vi., vii.

192 R. PHILIP: The Life and Times of George Whitefield, London, 1842, p.
366.

193 EDWARD CARPENTER: Towards Democracy, p. 362, abridged.

194 Speculum Perfectionis, ed. P. SABATIER, Paris, 1898, pp. 10, 13.

195 An Apology for M. Antonia Bourignon, London, 1699, pp. 269, 270,
abridged.

Another example from Starbuck’s MS. collection:—

“At a meeting held at six the next morning, I heard a man relate his
experience. He said: The Lord asked him if he would confess Christ
among the quarrymen with whom he worked, and he said he would. Then
he asked him if he would give up to be used of the Lord the four
hundred dollars he had laid up, and he said he would, and thus the
Lord saved him. The thought came to me at once that I had never made
a real consecration either of myself or of my property to the Lord,
but had always tried to serve the Lord in _my_ way. Now the Lord
asked me if I would serve him in _his_ way, and go out alone and
penniless if he so ordered. The question was pressed home, and I
must decide: To forsake all and have him, or have all and lose him!
I soon decided to take him; and the blessed assurance came, that he
had taken me for his own, and my joy was full. I returned home from
the meeting with feelings as simple as a child. I thought all would
be glad to hear of the joy of the Lord that possessed me, and so I
began to tell the simple story. But to my great surprise, the
pastors (for I attended meetings in three churches) opposed the
experience and said it was fanaticism, and one told the members of
his church to shun those that professed it, and I soon found that my
foes were those of my own household.”

196 J. J. CHAPMAN, in the Political Nursery, vol. iv. p. 4, April, 1900,
abridged.

197 GEORGE FOX: Journal, Philadelphia, 1800, pp. 59‐61, abridged.

198 Christian saints have had their specialties of devotion, Saint
Francis to Christ’s wounds; Saint Anthony of Padua to Christ’s
childhood; Saint Bernard to his humanity; Saint Teresa to Saint
Joseph, etc. The Shi‐ite Mohammedans venerate Ali, the Prophet’s
son‐in‐law, instead of Abu‐bekr, his brother‐in‐law. Vambéry
describes a dervish whom he met in Persia, “who had solemnly vowed,
thirty years before, that he would never employ his organs of speech
otherwise but in uttering, everlastingly, the name of his favorite,
_Ali, Ali_. He thus wished to signify to the world that he was the
most devoted partisan of that Ali who had been dead a thousand
years. In his own home, speaking with his wife, children, and
friends, no other word but ‘Ali!’ ever passed his lips. If he wanted
food or drink or anything else, he expressed his wants still by
repeating ‘Ali!’ Begging or buying at the bazaar, it was always
‘Ali!’ Treated ill or generously, he would still harp on his
monotonous ‘Ali!’ Latterly his zeal assumed such tremendous
proportions that, like a madman, he would race, the whole day, up
and down the streets of the town, throwing his stick high up into
the air, and shriek out, all the while, at the top of his voice,
‘Ali!’ This dervish was venerated by everybody as a saint, and
received everywhere with the greatest distinction.” ARMINIUS
VAMBÉRY, his Life and Adventures, written by Himself, London, 1889,
p. 69. On the anniversary of the death of Hussein, Ali’s son, the
Shi‐ite Moslems still make the air resound with cries of his name
and Ali’s.

199 Compare H. C. WARREN: Buddhism in Translation, Cambridge, U. S.,
1898, passim.

200 Compare J. L. MERRICK: The Life and Religion of Mohammed, as
contained in the Sheeah traditions of the Hyat‐ul‐Kuloob, Boston,
1850, passim.

201 BOUGAUD: Hist. de la bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, Paris, 1894, p.
145.

202 BOUGAUD: Hist. de la bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, Paris, 1894, pp.
365, 241.

203 BOUGAUD: Op. cit., p. 267.

204 Examples: “Suffering from a headache, she sought, for the glory of
God, to relieve herself by holding certain odoriferous substances in
her mouth, when the Lord appeared to her to lean over towards her
lovingly, and to find comfort Himself in these odors. After having
gently breathed them in, He arose, and said with a gratified air to
the Saints, as if contented with what He had done: ‘See the new
present which my betrothed has given Me!’

“One day, at chapel, she heard supernaturally sung the words,
‘_Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus_.’ The Son of God leaning towards her
like a sweet lover, and giving to her soul the softest kiss, said to
her at the second Sanctus: ‘In this _Sanctus_ addressed to my
person, receive with this kiss all the sanctity of my divinity and
of my humanity, and let it be to thee a sufficient preparation for
approaching the communion table.’ And the next following Sunday,
while she was thanking God for this favor, behold the Son of God,
more beauteous than thousands of angels, takes her in His arms as if
He were proud of her, and presents her to God the Father, in that
perfection of sanctity with which He had dowered her. And the Father
took such delight in this soul thus presented by His only Son, that,
as if unable longer to restrain Himself, He gave her, and the Holy
Ghost gave her also, the Sanctity attributed to each by His own
_Sanctus_—and thus she remained endowed with the plenary fullness of
the blessing of _Sanctity_, bestowed on her by Omnipotence, by
Wisdom, and by Love.” Révélations de Sainte Gertrude, Paris, 1898,
i. 44, 186.

205 FURNEAUX JORDAN: Character in Birth and Parentage, first edition.
Later editions change the nomenclature.

206 As to this distinction, see the admirably practical account in J. M.
BALDWIN’S little book, The Story of the Mind, 1898.

207 On this subject I refer to the work of M. MURISIER (Les Maladies du
Sentiment Religieux, Paris, 1901), who makes inner unification the
mainspring of the whole religious life. But _all_ strongly ideal
interests, religious or irreligious, unify the mind and tend to
subordinate everything to themselves. One would infer from M.
Murisier’s pages that this formal condition was peculiarly
characteristic of religion, and that one might in comparison almost
neglect material content, in studying the latter. I trust that the
present work will convince the reader that religion has plenty of
material content which is characteristic, and which is more
important by far than any general psychological form. In spite of
this criticism, I find M. Murisier’s book highly instructive.

208 Example: “At the first beginning of the Servitor’s [Suso’s] interior
life, after he had purified his soul properly by confession, he
marked out for himself, in thought, three circles, within which he
shut himself up, as in a spiritual intrenchment. The first circle
was his cell, his chapel, and the choir. When he was within this
circle, he seemed to himself in complete security. The second circle
was the whole monastery as far as the outer gate. The third and
outermost circle was the gate itself, and here it was necessary for
him to stand well upon his guard. When he went outside these
circles, it seemed to him that he was in the plight of some wild
animal which is outside its hole, and surrounded by the hunt, and
therefore in need of all its cunning and watchfulness.” The Life of
the Blessed Henry Suso, by Himself, translated by KNOX, London,
1865, p. 168.

209 Vie des premières Religieuses Dominicaines de la Congrégation de St.
Dominique, à Nancy; Nancy, 1896, p. 129.

210 MESCHLER’S Life of Saint Louis of Gonzaga, French translation by
LEBRÉQUIER, 1891; p. 40.

211 In his boyish note‐book he praises the monastic life for its freedom
from sin, and for the imperishable treasures, which it enables us to
store up, “of merit in God’s eyes which makes of Him our debtor for
all Eternity.” Loc. cit., p. 62.

212 Mademoiselle Mori, a novel quoted in HARE’S Walks in Rome, 1900, i.
55.

I cannot resist the temptation to quote from Starbuck’s book, p.
388, another case of purification by elimination. It runs as
follows:—

“The signs of abnormality which sanctified persons show are of
frequent occurrence. They get out of tune with other people; often
they will have nothing to do with churches, which they regard as
worldly; they become hypercritical towards others; they grow
careless of their social, political, and financial obligations. As
an instance of this type may be mentioned a woman of sixty‐eight of
whom the writer made a special study. She had been a member of one
of the most active and progressive churches in a busy part of a
large city. Her pastor described her as having reached the
censorious stage. She had grown more and more out of sympathy with
the church; her connection with it finally consisted simply in
attendance at prayer‐meeting, at which her only message was that of
reproof and condemnation of the others for living on a low plane. At
last she withdrew from fellowship with any church. The writer found
her living alone in a little room on the top story of a cheap
boarding‐house, quite out of touch with all human relations, but
apparently happy in the enjoyment of her own spiritual blessings.
Her time was occupied in writing booklets on sanctification—page
after page of dreamy rhapsody. She proved to be one of a small group
of persons who claim that entire salvation involves three steps
instead of two; not only must there be conversion and
sanctification, but a third, which they call ‘crucifixion’ or
‘perfect redemption,’ and which seems to bear the same relation to
sanctification that this bears to conversion. She related how the
Spirit had said to her, ‘Stop going to church. Stop going to
holiness meetings. Go to your own room and I will teach you.’ She
professes to care nothing for colleges, or preachers, or churches,
but only cares to listen to what God says to her. Her description of
her experience seemed entirely consistent; she is happy and
contented, and her life is entirely satisfactory to herself. While
listening to her own story, one was tempted to forget that it was
from the life of a person who could not live by it in conjunction
with her fellows.”

213 The best missionary lives abound in the victorious combination of
non‐resistance with personal authority. John G. Paton, for example,
in the New Hebrides, among brutish Melanesian cannibals, preserves a
charmed life by dint of it. When it comes to the point, no one ever
dares actually to strike him. Native converts, inspired by him,
showed analogous virtue. “One of our chiefs, full of the Christ‐
kindled desire to seek and to save, sent a message to an inland
chief, that he and four attendants would come on Sabbath and tell
them the gospel of Jehovah God. The reply came back sternly
forbidding their visit, and threatening with death any Christian
that approached their village. Our chief sent in response a loving
message, telling them that Jehovah had taught the Christians to
return good for evil, and that they would come unarmed to tell them
the story of how the Son of God came into the world and died in
order to bless and save his enemies. The heathen chief sent back a
stern and prompt reply once more: ‘If you come, you will be killed.’
On Sabbath morn the Christian chief and his four companions were met
outside the village by the heathen chief, who implored and
threatened them once more. But the former said:—

“ ‘We come to you without weapons of war! We come only to tell you
about Jesus. We believe that He will protect us to‐day.’

“As they pressed steadily forward towards the village, spears began
to be thrown at them. Some they evaded, being all except one
dexterous warriors; and others they literally received with their
bare hands, and turned them aside in an incredible manner. The
heathen, apparently thunderstruck at these men thus approaching them
without weapons of war, and not even flinging back their own spears
which they had caught, after having thrown what the old chief called
‘a shower of spears,’ desisted from mere surprise. Our Christian
chief called out, as he and his companions drew up in the midst of
them on the village public ground:—

“ ‘Jehovah thus protects us. He has given us all your spears! Once
we would have thrown them back at you and killed you. But now we
come, not to fight but to tell you about Jesus. He has changed our
dark hearts. He asks you now to lay down all these your other
weapons of war, and to hear what we can tell you about the love of
God, our great Father, the only living God.’

“The heathen were perfectly overawed. They manifestly looked on
these Christians as protected by some Invisible One. They listened
for the first time to the story of the Gospel and of the Cross. We
lived to see that chief and all his tribe sitting in the school of
Christ. And there is perhaps not an island in these southern seas,
amongst all those won for Christ, where similar acts of heroism on
the part of converts cannot be recited.” JOHN G. PATON, Missionary
to the New Hebrides, An Autobiography, second part, London, 1890, p.
243.

214 Saint Peter, Saint Teresa tells us in her autobiography (French
translation, p. 333), “had passed forty years without ever sleeping
more than an hour and a half a day. Of all his mortifications, this
was the one that had cost him the most. To compass it, he kept
always on his knees or on his feet. The little sleep he allowed
nature to take was snatched in a sitting posture, his head leaning
against a piece of wood fixed in the wall. Even had he wished to lie
down, it would have been impossible, because his cell was only four
feet and a half long. In the course of all these years he never
raised his hood, no matter what the ardor of the sun or the rain’s
strength. He never put on a shoe. He wore a garment of coarse
sackcloth, with nothing else upon his skin. This garment was as
scant as possible, and over it a little cloak of the same stuff.
When the cold was great he took off the cloak and opened for a while
the door and little window of his cell. Then he closed them and
resumed the mantle,—his way, as he told us, of warming himself, and
making his body feel a better temperature. It was a frequent thing
with him to eat once only in three days; and when I expressed my
surprise, he said that it was very easy if one once had acquired the
habit. One of his companions has assured me that he has gone
sometimes eight days without food.... His poverty was extreme; and
his mortification, even in his youth, was such that he told me he
had passed three years in a house of his order without knowing any
of the monks otherwise than by the sound of their voice, for he
never raised his eyes, and only found his way about by following the
others. He showed this same modesty on public highways. He spent
many years without ever laying eyes upon a woman; but he confessed
to me that at the age he had reached it was indifferent to him
whether he laid eyes on them or not. He was very old when I first
came to know him, and his body so attenuated that it seemed formed
of nothing so much as of so many roots of trees. With all this
sanctity he was very affable. He never spoke unless he was
questioned, but his intellectual right‐mindedness and grace gave to
all his words an irresistible charm.”

215 F. MAX MÜLLER: Ramakrishna, his Life and Sayings, 1899, p. 180.

216 OLDENBERG: Buddha; translated by W. HOEY, London, 1882, p. 127.

217 “The vanities of all others may die out, but the vanity of a saint
as regards his sainthood is hard indeed to wear away.” Ramakrishna,
his Life and Sayings, 1899, p. 172.

218 “When a church has to be run by oysters, ice‐cream, and fun,” I read
in an American religious paper, “you may be sure that it is running
away from Christ.” Such, if one may judge by appearances, is the
present plight of many of our churches.

219 C. V. B. K.: Friedens‐ und Kriegs‐moral der Heere. Quoted by HAMON:
Psychologie du Militaire professional, 1895, p. xli.

220 Zur Genealogie der Moral, Dritte Abhandlung, § 14. I have abridged,
and in one place transposed, a sentence.

221 We all know _daft_ saints, and they inspire a queer kind of
aversion. But in comparing saints with strong men we must choose
individuals on the same intellectual level. The under‐witted strong
man, homologous in his sphere with the under‐witted saint, is the
bully of the slums, the hooligan or rowdy. Surely on this level also
the saint preserves a certain superiority.

222 See above, p. 327.

223 Above, pp. 327‐334.

224 Newman’s _Securus judicat orbis terrarum_ is another instance.

225 “Mesopotamia” is the stock comic instance.—An excellent old German
lady, who had done some traveling in her day, used to describe to me
her _Sehnsucht_ that she might yet visit “Philadelphiā,” whose
wondrous name had always haunted her imagination. Of John Foster it
is said that “single words (as _chalcedony_), or the names of
ancient heroes, had a mighty fascination over him. ‘At any time the
word _hermit_ was enough to transport him.’ The words _woods_ and
_forests_ would produce the most powerful emotion.” Foster’s Life,
by RYLAND, New York, 1846, p. 3.

226 The Two Voices. In a letter to Mr. B. P. Blood, Tennyson reports of
himself as follows:—

“I have never had any revelations through anæsthetics, but a kind of
waking trance—this for lack of a better word—I have frequently had,
quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has come
upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently, till all
at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of
individuality, individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away
into boundless being, and this not a confused state but the
clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words—where death
was an almost laughable impossibility—the loss of personality (if so
it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life. I am ashamed
of my feeble description. Have I not said the state is utterly
beyond words?”

Professor Tyndall, in a letter, recalls Tennyson saying of this
condition: “By God Almighty! there is no delusion in the matter! It
is no nebulous ecstasy, but a state of transcendent wonder,
associated with absolute clearness of mind.” Memoirs of Alfred
Tennyson, ii. 473.

227 The Lancet, July 6 and 13, 1895, reprinted as the Cavendish Lecture,
on Dreamy Mental States, London, Baillière, 1895. They have been a
good deal discussed of late by psychologists. See, for example,
BERNARD‐LEROY: L’Illusion de Fausse Reconnaissance, Paris, 1898.

228 Charles Kingsley’s Life, i. 55, quoted by INGE: Christian Mysticism,
London, 1899, p. 341.

229 H. F. BROWN: J. A. Symonds, a Biography, London, 1895, pp. 29‐31,
abridged.

230 Crichton‐Browne expressly says that Symonds’s “highest nerve centres
were in some degree enfeebled or damaged by these dreamy mental
states which afflicted him so grievously.” Symonds was, however, a
perfect monster of many‐sided cerebral efficiency, and his critic
gives no objective grounds whatever for his strange opinion, save
that Symonds complained occasionally, as all susceptible and
ambitious men complain, of lassitude and uncertainty as to his
life’s mission.

231 What reader of Hegel can doubt that that sense of a perfected Being
with all its otherness soaked up into itself, which dominates his
whole philosophy, must have come from the prominence in his
consciousness of mystical moods like this, in most persons kept
subliminal? The notion is thoroughly characteristic of the mystical
level, and the _Aufgabe_ of making it articulate was surely set to
Hegel’s intellect by mystical feeling.

232 BENJAMIN PAUL BLOOD: The Anæsthetic Revelation and the Gist of
Philosophy, Amsterdam, N. Y., 1874, pp. 35, 36. Mr. Blood has made
several attempts to adumbrate the anæsthetic revelation, in
pamphlets of rare literary distinction, privately printed and
distributed by himself at Amsterdam. Xenos Clark, a philosopher, who
died young at Amherst in the ’80’s, much lamented by those who knew
him, was also impressed by the revelation. “In the first place,” he
once wrote to me, “Mr. Blood and I agree that the revelation is, if
anything, non‐emotional. It is utterly flat. It is, as Mr. Blood
says, ‘the one sole and sufficient insight why, or not why, but how,
the present is pushed on by the past, and sucked forward by the
vacuity of the future. Its inevitableness defeats all attempts at
stopping or accounting for it. It is all precedence and
presupposition, and questioning is in regard to it forever too late.
It is an _initiation of the past_.’ The real secret would be the
formula by which the ‘now’ keeps exfoliating out of itself, yet
never escapes. What is it, indeed, that keeps existence exfoliating?
The formal being of anything, the logical definition of it, is
static. For mere logic every question contains its own answer—we
simply fill the hole with the dirt we dug out. Why are twice two
four? Because, in fact, four is twice two. Thus logic finds in life
no propulsion, only a momentum. It goes because it is a‐going. But
the revelation adds: it goes because it is and _was_ a‐going. You
walk, as it were, round yourself in the revelation. Ordinary
philosophy is like a hound hunting his own trail. The more he hunts
the farther he has to go, and his nose never catches up with his
heels, because it is forever ahead of them. So the present is
already a foregone conclusion, and I am ever too late to understand
it. But at the moment of recovery from anæsthesis, just then,
_before starting on life_, I catch, so to speak, a glimpse of my
heels, a glimpse of the eternal process just in the act of starting.
The truth is that we travel on a journey that was accomplished
before we set out; and the real end of philosophy is accomplished,
not when we arrive at, but when we remain in, our destination (being
already there),—which may occur vicariously in this life when we
cease our intellectual questioning. That is why there is a smile
upon the face of the revelation, as we view it. It tells us that we
are forever half a second too late—that’s all. ‘You could kiss your
own lips, and have all the fun to yourself,’ it says, if you only
knew the trick. It would be perfectly easy if they would just stay
there till you got round to them. Why don’t you manage it somehow?”

Dialectically minded readers of this farrago will at least recognize
the region of thought of which Mr. Clark writes, as familiar. In his
latest pamphlet, “Tennyson’s Trances and the Anæsthetic Revelation,”
Mr. Blood describes its value for life as follows:—

“The Anæsthetic Revelation is the Initiation of Man into the
Immemorial Mystery of the Open Secret of Being, revealed as the
Inevitable Vortex of Continuity. Inevitable is the word. Its motive
is inherent—it is what has to be. It is not for any love or hate,
nor for joy nor sorrow, nor good nor ill. End, beginning, or
purpose, it knows not of.

“It affords no particular of the multiplicity and variety of things;
but it fills appreciation of the historical and the sacred with a
secular and intimately personal illumination of the nature and
motive of existence, which then seems reminiscent—as if it should
have appeared, or shall yet appear, to every participant thereof.

“Although it is at first startling in its solemnity, it becomes
directly such a matter of course—so old‐fashioned, and so akin to
proverbs, that it inspires exultation rather than fear, and a sense
of safety, as identified with the aboriginal and the universal. But
no words may express the imposing certainty of the patient that he
is realizing the primordial, Adamic surprise of Life.

“Repetition of the experience finds it ever the same, and as if it
could not possibly be otherwise. The subject resumes his normal
consciousness only to partially and fitfully remember its
occurrence, and to try to formulate its baffling import,—with only
this consolatory afterthought: that he has known the oldest truth,
and that he has done with human theories as to the origin, meaning,
or destiny of the race. He is beyond instruction in ‘spiritual
things.’

“The lesson is one of central safety: the Kingdom is within. All
days are judgment days: but there can be no climacteric purpose of
eternity, nor any scheme of the whole. The astronomer abridges the
row of bewildering figures by increasing his unit of measurement: so
may we reduce the distracting multiplicity of things to the unity
for which each of us stands.

“This has been my moral sustenance since I have known of it. In my
first printed mention of it I declared: ‘The world is no more the
alien terror that was taught me. Spurning the cloud‐grimed and still
sultry battlements whence so lately Jehovan thunders boomed, my gray
gull lifts her wing against the nightfall, and takes the dim leagues
with a fearless eye.’ And now, after twenty‐seven years of this
experience, the wing is grayer, but the eye is fearless still, while
I renew and doubly emphasize that declaration. I know—as having
known—the meaning of Existence: the sane centre of the universe—at
once the wonder and the assurance of the soul—for which the speech
of reason has as yet no name but the Anæsthetic Revelation.”—I have
considerably abridged the quotation.

233 Op. cit., pp. 78‐80, abridged. I subjoin, also abridging it, another
interesting anæsthetic revelation communicated to me in manuscript
by a friend in England. The subject, a gifted woman, was taking
ether for a surgical operation.

“I wondered if I was in a prison being tortured, and why I
remembered having heard it said that people ‘learn through
suffering,’ and in view of what I was seeing, the inadequacy of this
saying struck me so much that I said, aloud, ‘to suffer _is_ to
learn.’

“With that I became unconscious again, and my last dream immediately
preceded my real coming to. It only lasted a few seconds, and was
most vivid and real to me, though it may not be clear in words.

“A great Being or Power was traveling through the sky, his foot was
on a kind of lightning as a wheel is on a rail, it was his pathway.
The lightning was made entirely of the spirits of innumerable people
close to one another, and I was one of them. He moved in a straight
line, and each part of the streak or flash came into its short
conscious existence only that he might travel. I seemed to be
directly under the foot of God, and I thought he was grinding his
own life up out of my pain. Then I saw that what he had been trying
with all his might to do was to _change his course_, to _bend_ the
line of lightning to which he was tied, in the direction in which he
wanted to go. I felt my flexibility and helplessness, and knew that
he would succeed. He bended me, turning his corner by means of my
hurt, hurting me more than I had ever been hurt in my life, and at
the acutest point of this, as he passed, I _saw_. I understood for a
moment things that I have now forgotten, things that no one could
remember while retaining sanity. The angle was an obtuse angle, and
I remember thinking as I woke that had he made it a right or acute
angle, I should have both suffered and ‘seen’ still more, and should
probably have died.

“He went on and I came to. In that moment the whole of my life
passed before me, including each little meaningless piece of
distress, and I _understood_ them. _This_ was what it had all meant,
_this_ was the piece of work it had all been contributing to do. I
did not see God’s purpose, I only saw his intentness and his entire
relentlessness towards his means. He thought no more of me than a
man thinks of hurting a cork when he is opening wine, or hurting a
cartridge when he is firing. And yet, on waking, my first feeling
was, and it came with tears, ‘Domine non sum digna,’ for I had been
lifted into a position for which I was too small. I realized that in
that half hour under ether I had served God more distinctly and
purely than I had ever done in my life before, or that I am capable
of desiring to do. I was the means of his achieving and revealing
something, I know not what or to whom, and that, to the exact extent
of my capacity for suffering.

“While regaining consciousness, I wondered why, since I had gone so
deep, I had seen nothing of what the saints call the _love_ of God,
nothing but his relentlessness. And then I heard an answer, which I
could only just catch, saying, ‘Knowledge and Love are One, and the
_measure_ is suffering’—I give the words as they came to me. With
that I came finally to (into what seemed a dream world compared with
the reality of what I was leaving), and I saw that what would be
called the ‘cause’ of my experience was a slight operation under
insufficient ether, in a bed pushed up against a window, a common
city window in a common city street. If I had to formulate a few of
the things I then caught a glimpse of, they would run somewhat as
follows:—

“The eternal necessity of suffering and its eternal vicariousness.
The veiled and incommunicable nature of the worst sufferings;—the
passivity of genius, how it is essentially instrumental and
defenseless, moved, not moving, it must do what it does;—the
impossibility of discovery without its price;—finally, the excess of
what the suffering ‘seer’ or genius pays over what his generation
gains. (He seems like one who sweats his life out to earn enough to
save a district from famine, and just as he staggers back, dying and
satisfied, bringing a lac of rupees to buy grain with, God lifts the
lac away, dropping _one_ rupee, and says, ‘That you may give them.
That you have earned for them. The rest is for ME.’) I perceived
also in a way never to be forgotten, the excess of what we see over
what we can demonstrate.

“And so on!—these things may seem to you delusions, or truisms; but
for me they are dark truths, and the power to put them into even
such words as these has been given me by an ether dream.”

234 In Tune with the Infinite, p. 137.

235 The larger God may then swallow up the smaller one. I take this from
Starbuck’s manuscript collection:—

“I never lost the consciousness of the presence of God until I stood
at the foot of the Horseshoe Falls, Niagara. Then I lost him in the
immensity of what I saw. I also lost myself, feeling that I was an
atom too small for the notice of Almighty God.”

I subjoin another similar case from Starbuck’s collection:—

“In that time the consciousness of God’s nearness came to me
sometimes. I say God, to describe what is indescribable. A presence,
I might say, yet that is too suggestive of personality, and the
moments of which I speak did not hold the consciousness of a
personality, but something in myself made me feel myself a part of
something bigger than I, that was controlling. I felt myself one
with the grass, the trees, birds, insects, everything in Nature. I
exulted in the mere fact of existence, of being a part of it all—the
drizzling rain, the shadows of the clouds, the tree‐trunks, and so
on. In the years following, such moments continued to come, but I
wanted them constantly. I knew so well the satisfaction of losing
self in a perception of supreme power and love, that I was unhappy
because that perception was not constant.” The cases quoted in my
third lecture, pp. 66, 67, 70, are still better ones of this type.
In her essay, The Loss of Personality, in The Atlantic Monthly (vol.
lxxxv. p. 195), Miss Ethel D. Puffer explains that the vanishing of
the sense of self, and the feeling of immediate unity with the
object, is due to the disappearance, in these rapturous experiences,
of the motor adjustments which habitually intermediate between the
constant background of consciousness (which is the Self) and the
object in the foreground, whatever it may be. I must refer the
reader to the highly instructive article, which seems to me to throw
light upon the psychological conditions, though it fails to account
for the rapture or the revelation‐value of the experience in the
Subject’s eyes.

236 Op. cit., i. 43‐44.

237 Memoiren einer Idealistin, 5te Auflage, 1900, iii. 166. For years
she had been unable to pray, owing to materialistic belief.

238 Whitman in another place expresses in a quieter way what was
probably with him a chronic mystical perception: “There is,” he
writes, “apart from mere intellect, in the make‐up of every superior
human identity, a wondrous something that realizes without argument,
frequently without what is called education (though I think it the
goal and apex of all education deserving the name), an intuition of
the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this
multifariousness, this revel of fools, and incredible make‐believe
and general unsettledness, we call _the world_; a soul‐sight of that
divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of
things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial,
however momentous, like a leashed dog in the hand of the hunter.
[Of] such soul‐sight and root‐centre for the mind mere optimism
explains only the surface.” Whitman charges it against Carlyle that
he lacked this perception. Specimen Days and Collect, Philadelphia,
1882, p. 174.

239 My Quest for God, London, 1897, pp. 268, 269, abridged.

240 Op. cit., pp. 256, 257, abridged.

241 Cosmic Consciousness: a study in the evolution of the human Mind,
Philadelphia, 1901, p. 2.

242 Loc. cit., pp. 7, 8. My quotation follows the privately printed
pamphlet which preceded Dr. Bucke’s larger work, and differs
verbally a little from the text of the latter.

243 My quotations are from VIVEKANANDA, Raja Yoga, London, 1896. The
completest source of information on Yoga is the work translated by
VIHARI LALA MITRA: Yoga Vasishta Maha Ramayana, 4 vols., Calcutta,
1891‐99.

244 A European witness, after carefully comparing the results of Yoga
with those of the hypnotic or dreamy states artificially producible
by us, says: “It makes of its true disciples good, healthy, and
happy men.... Through the mastery which the yogi attains over his
thoughts and his body, he grows into a ‘character.’ By the
subjection of his impulses and propensities to his will, and the
fixing of the latter upon the ideal of goodness, he becomes a
‘personality’ hard to influence by others, and thus almost the
opposite of what we usually imagine a ‘medium’ so‐called, or
‘psychic subject’ to be.” KARL KELLNER: Yoga: Eine Skizze, München,
1896, p. 21.

245 I follow the account in C. F. KOEPPEN: Die Religion des Buddha,
Berlin, 1857, i. 585 ff.

246 For a full account of him, see D. B. MACDONALD: The Life of Al‐
Ghazzali, in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1899,
vol. xx. p. 71.

247 A. SCHMÖLDERS: Essai sur les écoles philosophiques chez les Arabes,
Paris, 1842, pp. 54‐68, abridged.

248 GÖRRES’S Christliche Mystik gives a full account of the facts. So
does RIBET’S Mystique Divine, 2 vols., Paris, 1890. A still more
methodical modern work is the Mystica Theologia of VALLGORNERA, 2
vols., Turin, 1890.

249 M. RÉCÉJAC, in a recent volume, makes them essential. Mysticism he
defines as “the tendency to draw near to the Absolute morally, _and
by the aid of Symbols_.” See his Fondements de la Connaissance
mystique, Paris, 1897, p. 66. But there are unquestionably mystical
conditions in which sensible symbols play no part.

250 Saint John of the Cross: The Dark Night of the Soul, book ii. ch.
xvii., in Vie et Œuvres, 3me édition, Paris, 1893, iii. 428‐432.
Chapter xi. of book ii. of Saint John’s Ascent of Carmel is devoted
to showing the harmfulness for the mystical life of the use of
sensible imagery.

251 In particular I omit mention of visual and auditory hallucinations,
verbal and graphic automatisms, and such marvels as “levitation,”
stigmatization, and the healing of disease. These phenomena, which
mystics have often presented (or are believed to have presented),
have no essential mystical significance, for they occur with no
consciousness of illumination whatever, when they occur, as they
often do, in persons of non‐mystical mind. Consciousness of
illumination is for us the essential mark of “mystical” states.

252 The Interior Castle, Fifth Abode, ch. i., in Œuvres, translated by
Bouix, iii. 421‐424.

253 BARTOLI‐MICHEL: Vie de Saint Ignace de Loyola, i. 34‐36. Others have
had illuminations about the created world, Jacob Boehme, for
instance. At the age of twenty‐five he was “surrounded by the divine
light, and replenished with the heavenly knowledge; insomuch as
going abroad into the fields to a green, at Görlitz, he there sat
down, and viewing the herbs and grass of the field, in his inward
light he saw into their essences, use, and properties, which was
discovered to him by their lineaments, figures, and signatures.” Of
a later period of experience he writes: “In one quarter of an hour I
saw and knew more than if I had been many years together at an
university. For I saw and knew the being of all things, the Byss and
the Abyss, and the eternal generation of the holy Trinity, the
descent and original of the world and of all creatures through the
divine wisdom. I knew and saw in myself all the three worlds, the
external and visible world being of a procreation or extern birth
from both the internal and spiritual worlds; and I saw and knew the
whole working essence, in the evil and in the good, and the mutual
original and existence; and likewise how the fruitful bearing womb
of eternity brought forth. So that I did not only greatly wonder at
it, but did also exceedingly rejoice, albeit I could very hardly
apprehend the same in my external man and set it down with the pen.
For I had a thorough view of the universe as in a chaos, wherein all
things are couched and wrapt up, but it was impossible for me to
explicate the same.” Jacob Behmen’s Theosophic Philosophy, etc., by
EDWARD TAYLOR, London, 1691, pp. 425, 427, abridged. So George Fox:
“I was come up to the state of Adam in which he was before he fell.
The creation was opened to me; and it was showed me, how all things
had their names given to them, according to their nature and virtue.
I was at a stand in my mind, whether I should practice physic for
the good of mankind, seeing the nature and virtues of the creatures
were so opened to me by the Lord.” Journal, Philadelphia, no date,
p. 69. Contemporary “Clairvoyance” abounds in similar revelations.
Andrew Jackson Davis’s cosmogonies, for example, or certain
experiences related in the delectable “Reminiscences and Memories of
Henry Thomas Butterworth,” Lebanon, Ohio, 1886.

254 Vie, pp. 581, 582.

255 Loc. cit., p. 574.

256 Saint Teresa discriminates between pain in which the body has a part
and pure spiritual pain (Interior Castle, 6th Abode, ch. xi.). As
for the bodily part in these celestial joys, she speaks of it as
“penetrating to the marrow of the bones, whilst earthly pleasures
affect only the surface of the senses. I think,” she adds, “that
this is a just description, and I cannot make it better.” Ibid., 5th
Abode, ch. i.

257 Vie, p. 198.

258 Œuvres, ii. 320.

259 Above, p. 21.

260 Vie, pp. 229, 200, 231‐233, 243.

261 MÜLLER’S translation, part ii. p. 180.

262 T. DAVIDSON’S translation, in Journal of Speculative Philosophy,
1893, vol. xxii. p. 399.

263 “Deus propter excellentiam non immerito Nihil vocatur.” Scotus
Erigena, quoted by ANDREW SETH: Two Lectures on Theism, New York,
1897, p. 55.

264 J. ROYCE: Studies in Good and Evil, p. 282.

265 Jacob Behmen’s Dialogues on the Supersensual Life, translated by
BERNARD HOLLAND, London, 1901, p. 48.

266 Cherubinischer Wandersmann, Strophe 25.

267 Op. cit., pp. 42, 74, abridged.

268 From a French book I take this mystical expression of happiness in
God’s indwelling presence:—

“Jesus has come to take up his abode in my heart. It is not so much
a habitation, an association, as a sort of fusion. Oh, new and
blessed life! life which becomes each day more luminous.... The wall
before me, dark a few moments since, is splendid at this hour
because the sun shines on it. Wherever its rays fall they light up a
conflagration of glory; the smallest speck of glass sparkles, each
grain of sand emits fire; even so there is a royal song of triumph
in my heart because the Lord is there. My days succeed each other;
yesterday a blue sky; to‐day a clouded sun; a night filled with
strange dreams; but as soon as the eyes open, and I regain
consciousness and seem to begin life again, it is always the same
figure before me, always the same presence filling my heart....
Formerly the day was dulled by the absence of the Lord. I used to
wake invaded by all sorts of sad impressions, and I did not find him
on my path. To‐day he is with me; and the light cloudiness which
covers things is not an obstacle to my communion with him. I feel
the pressure of his hand, I feel something else which fills me with
a serene joy; shall I dare to speak it out? Yes, for it is the true
expression of what I experience. The Holy Spirit is not merely
making me a visit; it is no mere dazzling apparition which may from
one moment to another spread its wings and leave me in my night, it
is a permanent habitation. He can depart only if he takes me with
him. More than that; he is not other than myself: he is one with me.
It is not a juxtaposition, it is a penetration, a profound
modification of my nature, a new manner of my being.” Quoted from
the MS. “of an old man” by WILFRED MONOD: Il Vit: six méditations
sur le mystère chrétien, pp. 280‐283.

269 Compare M. MAETERLINCK: L’Ornement des Noces spirituelles de
Ruysbroeck, Bruxelles, 1891, Introduction, p. xix.

270 Upanishads, M. MÜLLER’S translation, ii. 17, 334.

271 SCHMÖLDERS: Op. cit., p. 210.

272 Enneads, BOUILLIER’S translation, Paris, 1861, iii. 561. Compare pp.
473‐477, and vol. i. p. 27.

273 Autobiography, pp. 309, 310.

274 Op. cit., Strophe 10.

275 H. P. BLAVATSKY: The Voice of the Silence.

276 SWINBURNE: On the Verge, in “A Midsummer Vacation.”

277 Compare the extracts from Dr. Bucke, quoted on pp. 398, 399.

278 As serious an attempt as I know to mediate between the mystical
region and the discursive life is contained in an article on
Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, by F. C. S. SCHILLER, in Mind, vol. ix.,
1900.

279 I abstract from weaker states, and from those cases of which the
books are full, where the director (but usually not the subject)
remains in doubt whether the experience may not have proceeded from
the demon.

280 Example: Mr. John Nelson writes of his imprisonment for preaching
Methodism: “My soul was as a watered garden, and I could sing
praises to God all day long; for he turned my captivity into joy,
and gave me to rest as well on the boards, as if I had been on a bed
of down. Now could I say, ‘God’s service is perfect freedom,’ and I
was carried out much in prayer that my enemies might drink of the
same river of peace which my God gave so largely to me.” Journal,
London, no date, p. 172.

281 RUYSBROECK, in the work which Maeterlinck has translated, has a
chapter against the antinomianism of disciples. H. DELACROIX’S book
(Essai sur le mysticisme spéculatif en Allemagne au XIVme Siècle,
Paris, 1900) is full of antinomian material. Compare also A. JUNDT:
Les Amis de Dieu au XIVme Siècle, Thèse de Strasbourg, 1879.

282 Compare PAUL ROUSSELOT: Les Mystiques Espagnols, Paris, 1869, ch.
xii.

283 See CARPENTER’S Towards Democracy, especially the latter parts, and
JEFFERIES’S wonderful and splendid mystic rhapsody, The Story of my
Heart.

284 In chapter i. of book ii. of his work Degeneration, “MAX NORDAU”
seeks to undermine all mysticism by exposing the weakness of the
lower kinds. Mysticism for him means any sudden perception of hidden
significance in things. He explains such perception by the abundant
uncompleted associations which experiences may arouse in a
degenerate brain. These give to him who has the experience a vague
and vast sense of its leading further, yet they awaken no definite
or useful consequent in his thought. The explanation is a plausible
one for certain sorts of feeling of significance; and other
alienists (WERNICKE, for example, in his Grundriss der Psychiatrie,
Theil ii., Leipzig, 1896) have explained “paranoiac” conditions by a
laming of the association‐organ. But the higher mystical flights,
with their positiveness and abruptness, are surely products of no
such merely negative condition. It seems far more reasonable to
ascribe them to inroads from the subconscious life, of the cerebral
activity correlative to which we as yet know nothing.

285 They sometimes add subjective _audita et visa_ to the facts, but as
these are usually interpreted as transmundane, they oblige no
alteration in the facts of sense.

286 Compare Professor W. WALLACE’S Gifford Lectures, in Lectures and
Essays, Oxford, 1898, pp. 17 ff.

287 Op. cit., p. 174, abridged.

288 Ibid., p. 186, abridged and italicized.

289 Discourse II. § 7.

290 As regards the secondary character of intellectual constructions,
and the primacy of feeling and instinct in founding religious
beliefs, see the striking work of H. FIELDING, The Hearts of Men,
London, 1902, which came into my hands after my text was written.
“Creeds,” says the author, “are the grammar of religion, they are to
religion what grammar is to speech. Words are the expression of our
wants; grammar is the theory formed afterwards. Speech never
proceeded from grammar, but the reverse. As speech progresses and
changes from unknown causes, grammar must follow” (p. 313). The
whole book, which keeps unusually close to concrete facts, is little
more than an amplification of this text.

291 For convenience’ sake, I follow the order of A. STÖCKL’S Lehrbuch
der Philosophie, 5te Auflage, Mainz, 1881, Band ii. B. BOEDDER’S
Natural Theology, London, 1891, is a handy English Catholic Manual;
but an almost identical doctrine is given by such Protestant
theologians as C. HODGE: Systematic Theology, New York, 1873, or A.
H. STRONG: Systematic Theology, 5th edition, New York, 1896.

292 It must not be forgotten that any form of _dis_order in the world
might, by the design argument, suggest a God for just that kind of
disorder. The truth is that any state of things whatever that can be
named is logically susceptible of teleological interpretation. The
ruins of the earthquake at Lisbon, for example: the whole of past
history had to be planned exactly as it was to bring about in the
fullness of time just that particular arrangement of débris of
masonry, furniture, and once living bodies. No other train of causes
would have been sufficient. And so of any other arrangement, bad or
good, which might as a matter of fact be found resulting anywhere
from previous conditions. To avoid such pessimistic consequences and
save its beneficent designer, the design argument accordingly
invokes two other principles, restrictive in their operation. The
first is physical: Nature’s forces tend of their own accord only to
disorder and destruction, to heaps of ruins, not to architecture.
This principle, though plausible at first sight, seems, in the light
of recent biology, to be more and more improbable. The second
principle is one of anthropomorphic interpretation. No arrangement
that for _us_ is “disorderly” can possibly have been an object of
design at all. This principle is of course a mere assumption in the
interests of anthropomorphic Theism.

When one views the world with no definite theological bias one way
or the other, one sees that order and disorder, as we now recognize
them, are purely human inventions. We are interested in certain
types of arrangement, useful, æsthetic, or moral,—so interested that
whenever we find them realized, the fact emphatically rivets our
attention. The result is that we work over the contents of the world
selectively. It is overflowing with disorderly arrangements from our
point of view, but order is the only thing we care for and look at,
and by choosing, one can always find some sort of orderly
arrangement in the midst of any chaos. If I should throw down a
thousand beans at random upon a table, I could doubtless, by
eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave the rest in almost
any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and you might then
say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that
the other beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Our
dealings with Nature are just like this. She is a vast _plenum_ in
which our attention draws capricious lines in innumerable
directions. We count and name whatever lies upon the special lines
we trace, whilst the other things and the untraced lines are neither
named nor counted. There are in reality infinitely more things
’unadapted’ to each other in this world than there are things
’adapted’; infinitely more things with irregular relations than with
regular relations between them. But we look for the regular kind of
thing exclusively, and ingeniously discover and preserve it in our
memory. It accumulates with other regular kinds, until the
collection of them fills our encyclopædias. Yet all the while
between and around them lies an infinite anonymous chaos of objects
that no one ever thought of together, of relations that never yet
attracted our attention.