that can be expected, or that this method is the only way of approach to truth and reality. Such claims to the rights of eminent domain and such dogmatic assertions of exclusive finality always reveal the blind spot in the scientist's vision. He sees steadily but he does not see wholes. He is of necessity dealing with a reduced and simplified "nature" which he constantly tends to substitute for the vastly richer whole of reality that boils over and inundates the fragment which submits to his categories. We do well to gather in every available fact which biology or anthropology or psychology can give us that throws light on human behaviour, or on primitive cults, or on the richer subjective and social religious functions of full-grown men. But the interior insight got from religion itself, the rich wholeness of religious experience, the discovery within us of an inner nature which defies description and baffles all plumb-lines, and which can draw out of itself more than it contains, indicate that we here have dealings with a type of reality which demands for adequate treatment other methods of comprehension than those available to science.

In the old Norse stories, Thor tried to empty the famous drinking-horn in the games of Utgard, but to his surprise he found that, though the horn looked small, he could not empty it, for it turned out that the horn was immersed in the limitless and bottomless ocean. Again he tried to lift a small and insignificant-looking animal, but, labour as he might, he could not lift it, for it was grown into, and was organic with, the whole world, and could not be raised without raising the very ground on which the lifter stood! Somewhat so, the reality of religion is so completely bound up with the whole personal life of man and with his conjunct life in the social group and in the world of nature; it is, in short, so much an {xix} affair of man's whole of experience, of his spirit in its undivided and synthetic aspects, that it can never be adequately dealt with by the analytic and descriptive method of this wonderful new god of science, however big with results that method may be.

The interior insight, the appreciation of religion, the rich and concrete whole of religious consciousness, is, and will always remain, the primary way to the secret of religion—religion in its "first intention"—as the experience of time-duration is the only possible way to the elemental meaning of time. It has in recent years in many quarters become the fashion to call this "interior insight," this appreciation of religion from within, "mysticism"; and to assume that here in mysticism we come upon the very essence of religion. This conclusion, however, is as narrow and as unwarranted as is the truncation of religion at the hands of science. The mystical element in religion is only one element in a vastly richer complex, and it must not be given undue emphasis and imperial sway in the appreciation of the complete whole of "spiritual religion." We must, too, carefully discriminate mystical experience from the elaborate body of doctrines and theories, historically known as "mysticism," which is as much an ism as are the other typical, partial, and more or less abstract formulations of religion.

Mysticism for the mystic himself is characterized by a personal experience through which the ordinary limitations of life and the passionate pursuits of the soul are transcended, and a self-evident conviction is attained that he is in communion, or even in union, with some self-transcending Reality that absolutely satisfies and is what he has always sought. "This is He, this is He," the mystic exclaims: "There is no other: This is He whom I have waited for and sought after from my childhood!"[7]

The experience is further characterized by the inrush {xx} of new energies as though a mysterious door had been pushed open—either out or in—admitting the human spirit to wider sources of life. "Fresh bubblings from the eternal streams of Life flowing into the soul" is the way the recipient often describes it. All the deep-lying powers of the inward self, usually so divergent and conflicting—the foreground purposes defeated by background inhibitions, and by doubts on the border,—become liberated and unified into one conscious life which is not merely intellectual, nor merely volitional, nor solely emotional, but an undivided whole of experience, intensely joyous, enriched with insight and pregnant with deeds of action. As in lofty experiences of appreciation of beauty, or of music, or when the chords of life are swept by a great love, or by a momentous moral issue, the spirit rises in mystical experience to a form of consciousness which no longer marks clock-time and succession of events, whether outward or inward. It may afterwards take hours or days or weeks or even years to spread out and review and apprehend and adjust to the experience—"the opening," to use George Fox's impressive word—but while it is there it is held in one unbroken synthetic time-span. It is, to revive a scholastic phrase, a totum simul, an all-at-once experience, in which parts, however many, make one integral whole, as in a melody or in a work of art; so that the mystic has a real experience of what we try to express by the word Eternity. It feels as though the usual insulations of our own narrow personal life were suddenly broken through and we were in actual contact with an enfolding presence, life-giving, joy-bringing, and light-supplying.

In instances where the intensity is great, unusual psychological phenomena appear. Sometimes voices are heard, or sounds "like a mighty rushing wind"; sometimes there are automatic visions of light, or of forms or figures, as, for instance, of Christ, or of a cross; sometimes automatic writing or speaking attends the experience; sometimes there are profound body-changes of a temporary, or even permanent character; sometimes there {xxi} is a state of swoon or ecstacy, lasting from a few seconds to entire days. These physical phenomena, however, are as spiritually unimportant and as devoid of religious significance as are the normal bodily resonances and reverberations which accompany, in milder degrees, all our psychic processes. They indicate no high rank of sainthood and they prove no miracle-working power. The significant features of the experience are the consciousness of fresh springs of life, the release of new energies, the inner integration and unification of personality, the inauguration of a sense of mission, the flooding of the life with hope and gladness, and the conviction, amounting in the mind of the recipient to certainty, that God is found as an environing and vitalizing presence—as the recipient already quoted reports his conviction: "I have met with my God; I have met with my Saviour. I have felt the healings drop upon my soul from under His wings."[8]

If everybody had experiences of that sort there would be no more doubt of the existence of an actual spiritual environment in vitalizing contact with the human spirit than there now is of an external world with which we correspond. There is a priori no reason against the reality of such an inner spiritual universe. It is precisely as conceivable that constructive and illuminating influences should stream into our inner selves from that central Light with which our inmost self is allied, as that objects in space and time should bombard us with messages adapted to our senses. The difference is that we all experience the outer environment and only a few of us experience the inner. The mystic himself has no doubt—he sees, but he cannot give quite his certainty of vision to any one else. He cannot, like "the weird sisters" of Greek story, lend out his eye for others to see with. He can only talk about, or write about, what he has seen, and his words are often words of little meaning to those who lack the vision.

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