and thrust away for the sake of a freer pursuit of the soul's kingdom. There is, too, a still deeper principle of negativity involved in the very fibre of personal life itself. No one can advance without {xxvi} surrender, no one can have gains without losses, no one can reach great goals without giving up many things in themselves desirable. There is "a rivalry of me's" which no person can ever escape, for in order to choose and achieve one typical self another possible self must be sternly sacrificed. In a very real sense it remains forever true that we must die to live, we must die to the narrow self in order to be raised to the wider and richer self.

But the negative way of mysticism is more rigorous and more thorough in its negation than that. Its negations "wind up the hill all the way to the very top." Even the self must be absolutely negated. "The self, the I, the me and the like, all belong to the evil spirit. The whole matter can be set forth in these words: Be simply and wholly bereft of self." "The I, the me, and the mine, nature, selfhood, the Devil, sin, are all one and the same thing."[11] Not only so, but all desire for any particular thing, or any particular experience must be utterly extirpated. "Whatever Good the creature as creature can conceive of and understand is something this or that," and therefore not the One Real Good.[12] "So long as thy soul has an image, it is without simplicity, and so long as it is without simplicity it doth not rightly love God."[13] "Divine love can brook no rival." He who seeks God must "rid himself of all that pertains to the creature." He that would find the absolute Good must withdraw not only beyond all his senses, but beyond all desires, into an inner "solitude where no word is spoken, where is neither creature nor image nor fancy." "Everything depends," Tauler counsels us, "upon a fathomless sinking into a fathomless nothingness. . . . God has really no place to work in but the ground where all has been annihilated. . . . Then when all forms have ceased, in the twinkling of an eye, the man is transformed. . . . Thou must sink into the unknown and unnamed abyss, and above all ways, images, forms, and above all powers, {xxvii} lose thyself, deny thyself, and even unform thyself."[14] The moment the will focusses upon any concrete aim as its goal, it must thereby miss that Good which is above and beyond all particular "things" that can be conceived or named.

But the negative way winds up farther still. It ends in the absolutely negative Silent Desert of Godhead "where no one is at home." Its way up is the way of abstraction and withdrawal from everything finite. He whom the soul seeks cannot be found in anything "here" or "now"; He must be "yonder." "It is by no means permitted," says one of the great experts in negation, "to speak or even to think anything concerning the super-essential and hidden Deity. . . . It is a Unity above mind, a One above conception and inconceivable to all conceptions, a Good unutterable by word."[15] "Thou must love God," Eckhart says, "as not-God, not-Spirit, not-person, not-image, but as He is, a sheer, pure, absolute One, sundered from all two-ness and in whom we must eternally sink from nothingness to nothingness."[16] God, the Godhead, is thus the absolute "Dark," "the nameless Nothing," an empty God, a characterless Infinite. "Why dost thou prate of God," Eckhart says, "whatever thou sayest of Him is untrue!" The rapt soul at the end of his road, at the top of the hill, only knows that every finite account is false and that the only adequate word is an everlasting Nay.

  Whatever idea your mind comes at,
  I tell you flat
  God is not that.[17]

The great mystics have always saved themselves by neglecting to be consistent with this rigorous negation and abstraction. In their practice they have cut through their theory and gone on living the rich concrete life. {xxviii} But the theory itself is a false theory of life, and it leads only to a God of abstraction, not to the God of spiritual religion. The false trail, however, is to be charged, as I have said, not so much to mystical experience as to the metaphysics through which the mystics, not only of Christian communions, but of other faiths, were compelled to do their thinking. There was no other way of thinking known to them except this way of negation. The Infinite was the not-finite; the Absolute was precisely what the contingent was not. The perfect was free of every mark of imperfection. Behind all manifestations was the essential Substance which made the manifestations. The completely Real was above all mutation and process. "For one to assign," therefore, "to God any human attributes," as Spinoza, the supreme apostle of this negative way has said, "is to reveal that he has no true idea of God." It has taken all the philosophical and spiritual travail of the centuries to discover that there may be a concrete Infinite, an organic Absolute, an immanent Reality, and that the way to share in this comprehending Life is at least as much a way of affirmation as of negation, a way that leads not into "the Dark" but into the Light, and not into a "fathomless nothing," but into an abundant and radiant life.

Mysticism, as a type of religion, has further staked its precious realities too exclusively upon the functions of what to-day we call the sub-conscious. Impressed with the divine significance of "inward bubblings," the mystic has made too slight an account of the testimony of Reason and the contribution of history. The subconscious functions are very real and very important aspects of personal life, and can never again be ignored in any full account of personality. They influence every thought, feeling, attitude, volition, opinion, mood, and insight, and are thus operative in all the higher as well as in all the lower phases of human life and character. Metaphorically, but only metaphorically, we speak of the sub-conscious as a vast zone, an indefinable margin, surrounding the narrow focus of attention, and we may {xxix} figuratively, but only figuratively, call it the subliminal "region" where all our life-gains, and often the gains of the race, are garnered. The contributions from this mental underworld are inestimable—we could not be men without them—but this subconscious zone is a source of things bad as well as good, things silly as well as things wise, of rubbish as well as of treasures, and it is diabolical as well as divine. It seems in rare moments to connect, as though it were a hidden inland stream, with the "immortal sea which brought us hither," and we feel at times, through its incomes, as though we were aware of tides from beyond our own margin. And, in fact, I believe we are.

But obviously we cannot assume that whatever comes spontaneously out of the subconscious is divinely given. It mothers strange offspring—Esaus as well as Jacobs; its openings, its inrushes, its bubblings must be severely tested. Impulses of many sorts feel categorically imperative, but some call to deeds of light and some to deeds of darkness. They cannot be taken at their face value; they must be judged in some Court which is less capricious and which is guided by a more universal principle—something semper et ubique. A spiritual religion of the full and complete type will, I believe, have inward, mystical depth, it will keep vitalized and intensified with its experiences of divine supplies, and of union and unification with an environing Spirit, but it must at the same time soundly supplement its more or less capricious and subjective, and always fragmentary, mystical insights with the steady and unwavering testimony of Reason, and no less with the immense objective illumination of History.

III

The men whom I am here calling Spiritual Reformers are examples of this