“a noiseless, patient spider,
i mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
it launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them.
“and you, o my soul, where you stand,
surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,—seeking the spheres, to connect them;
till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold;
till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, o my soul.”—walt whitman.
there are many forms of experience which in the primary, unanalyzed, unreflective stage appear to bring us into[165] immediate contact with self-transcending reality. we seem to be nearer the heart of things, more imbedded in life and in reality itself when consciousness is fused and unified in an undifferentiated whole of experience than in the later stage of reflection and description. this later stage necessarily involves reduction because it involves abstraction. we cannot bring any object or any experience to exact description without stripping it of its life and its mystery and without reducing it to the abstract qualities which are unvarying and repeatable.
there can be no doubt that our experiences of beauty, for instance, have a physical and describable aspect. the sunset which thrills us is for descriptive purposes an aggregation of minute water-drops which set ether waves vibrating at different velocities, and, as a result, we receive certain nerve shocks that are pleasurable. these nerve shocks modify brain cells and affect arterial and visceral vibrations, all of which might conceivably[166] be accurately described. but no complete account of these minute cloud particles, or of these ether vibrations; no catalogue of these nerve shocks, cell changes, or arterial throbs can catch or present to us what we get in the na?ve and palpitating experience of beauty itself. something there in the field of perception has suddenly fused our consciousness into an undifferentiated whole in which sensuous elements, intellectual and ideal elements, emotional and conative elements are indissolubly merged into a vital system which baffles all analysis. something got through perception puts all the powers of the inner self into play and into harmony, overcomes all dualisms of self and other, annuls all contradictions that may later be discovered, lifts the mind to the apprehension of objects of a higher order than that of sense, and liberates and vitalizes the soul with a consciousness of possession and joy and freedom.
the flower of the botanist is an aggregation of ovary, calyx, petals, pistil, and[167] pollen—a thing which can be exactly analyzed and described. the poet’s flower, on the other hand, is never a flower which could be pressed in a book or dried in an herbarium. it is a tiny finite object which suddenly opens a glimpse into a world which mere sense-eyes never see. it gives “thoughts that do lie too deep for tears.” it is something so bound in with the whole of things that if one understood it altogether, he would know “what god and man is.”
these experiences, even if they do not prove that there is a world of a higher order than that of mechanism and causal systems, at least bring the recipient moments of relief when he no longer cares for proof and they enable him to feel that he has authentic tidings of a world which is as it ought to be.
our world of “inner experience” can in a similar way be dealt with by either one of these two characteristically different methods of approach. we can say, if we wish to do so, as professor leuba does in[168] his psychology of religion, that “inner experience belongs entirely to psychology,” “the conscious life belongs entirely to science,”[16] “we must deal with inner experience according to the best scientific methods;”[17] or we can seize by an interior integral insight the rich concrete meaning and significance of the unanalyzed whole of consciousness, as it lives and moves in us.
psychology, like all sciences, proceeds by analysis and limitation. it breaks up the integral whole of inner experience. it strips away all mystery, all that is private and unique, and it selects for exact description the permanent and repeatable aspects, and ends with a consciousness which consists of “mind-states,” or describable “contents.” everything that will not reduce to this scientific “form” is ousted from the lists as negligible. all independent variables, all aspects of “meaning,” all will-attitudes, the[169] unique feature of personal ideals, the integral consciousness of self-identity, the inherent tendency to transcend the “given”—all these features are either ignored or explained in terms of substitutes. psychology confines itself, and must confine itself, to an empirical and describable order of facts. it could no more discover a transcendent world-order than could geology or astronomy. its field is phenomena and the “man” it reports upon is “a naturalistic man,” as completely describable as the sunset cloud or the botanist’s flower.
what i insist upon, however, is that this “described, naturalistic man” is not a real existing, living, acting man possessed of interior experience. he is a constructed man. no addition of described “mind-states,” no summation of “mind-contents” would ever give consciousness in its inner living wholeness. the reality whose presence makes all the difference may be named “fringe,” or “connecting principle,” or “synthetic unity” or anything[170] you please—“but oh! the difference to me!” the “psychic elements” of the psychologist are never really parts. every psychical state is in reality what it is because it belongs to a person, is flooded with unique life, and is imbedded in a peculiar whole of personality. forever psychology by its method of analysis misses, and must miss, the central core of the reality. it can analyze, reduce, and describe the abstract, universal, and repeatable aspects, but it cannot catch the thing itself any more than a cinematograph can.
here in the inner life, if anywhere, we are justified in seizing and valuing the unified and undifferentiated whole of experience in its central meaning. if this primary experience of integral wholeness and unity of self be treated as an illusion, to what other pillar and ground of truth can we fasten? the object of beauty always reveals to us something which must be comprehended as a totality greater than the sum of its parts. the thing of beauty takes us beyond the range[171] of the method of description. so, too, in the case of our richest, most intense, and unified moments of inner consciousness, we cannot get an adequate account by the method of analysis. we must supplement science by the best testimony we can get of the worth and meaning and implications of interior insight. we must get, where possible, appreciative accounts of the undifferentiated and unreduced experience and then we can raise the question as to what is rationally involved in such personal experiences.
as mystical experience supplies us with moments of the highest integral unity, the richest wholes of consciousness, i shall deal mainly with that type, and i shall endeavor to see whether it gives any proof of a trans-subjective reality. there can be no doubt that this type of experience brings the recipient spiritual holidays from strain and stress, that it gives life an optimistic tone, and leaves behind a fresh supply of energy to live by, but can it carry us any farther? does it supply us[172] with a ladder or a bridge by which we can get “yonder”?
josiah royce in the world and the individual says that the mystic “gets his reality not by thinking, but by consulting the data of experience. he is trying very skillfully to be a pure empiricist.” “indeed,” he adds, “i should maintain that the mystics are the only thoroughgoing empiricists in the history of philosophy.”[18] “finite as we are,” royce says elsewhere in the same book, “lost though we may seem to be in the woods or in the wide air’s wilderness, in the world of time and chance, we have still, like the strayed animals or like the migrating birds, our homing instinct.”[19]
now the mystics in all ages have insisted that, whether the process be named “instinct,” or “intuition,” or “inner sense,” or “uprushes,” the spirit of man is capable of immediate experience of god. there is something in man, “a soul-center”[173] or “an apex of soul,” which directly apprehends god. it is an immense claim, but those who have the experience are as sure that they have found a wider world of life as is the person who thrills with the appreciation of beauty.
cases of the experience are so well known to us all to-day that i shall quote only a very few accounts. it looks to me as though some of this direct and immediate experience underlay the entire fabric of st. paul’s transforming and dynamic religious life. “it pleased god to reveal his son in me.” “it is no longer i that live but christ liveth in me.” “god sent forth the spirit of his son into our hearts, crying abba, father.” “god who commanded the light to shine out of darkness hath shined in our hearts.” the entire autobiographical story, wherever it comes into light, lets us see a man who is able to face immense tasks and to die daily because he feels in some real way that his life has become “a habitation of god through the spirit” and that he is being “filled to all[174] fullness with god.” st. augustine in the same way makes the reader of the confessions feel that the most wonderful thing about this strange african who was for a thousand years to be the atlas, on whose shoulders the church rested, was his experience of god. he is speaking out of experience when he says, “my god is the life of my life.” “thou, o god, hast made us for thyself and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” “i tremble and i burn; i tremble feeling that i am unlike him; i burn feeling that i am like him.” “i heard god as the heart heareth.” “we climbed in inner thought and speech, and in wonder of thy works, until we reached our own minds and passed beyond them and touched that which is not made but is now as it ever shall be, or rather in it is neither ‘hath been’ nor ‘shall be’ but only ‘is’—just for an instant touched it and in one trembling glance arrived at that which is.”
jacob boehme’s testimony is very[175] familiar, but it is such a good interior account that i must repeat it.
“while i was in affliction and trouble, i elevated my spirit, and earnestly raised it up unto god, as with a great stress and onset, lifting up my whole heart and mind and will and resolution to wrestle with the love and mercy of god and not to give over unless he blessed me—then the spirit did break through. when in my resolved zeal i made such an assault, storm, and onset upon god, as if i had more reserves of virtue and power ready, with a resolution to hazard my life upon it, suddenly my spirit did break through the gate, not without the assistance of the holy spirit, and i reached to the innermost birth of the deity, and there i was embraced with love as a bridegroom embraces his bride. my triumphing can be compared to nothing but the experience in which life is generated in the midst of death or like the resurrection from the dead. in this light my spirit suddenly saw through all, and in all created things, even in herbs and grass, i knew god—who he is, how he is, and what his will is.”[20]
very impressive are the less well-known words of isaac penington: “this is he, this is he: there is no other. this is[176] he whom i have waited for and sought after from my childhood. i have met with my god; i have met with my savior. i have felt the healings drop into my soul from under his wings.”[21]
edward carpenter has given many accounts of the transforming experience when he felt himself united in a living junction with the infinite “including self.” “the prince of love,” he says, “touched the walls of my hut with his finger from within, and passing through like a great fire delivered me with unspeakable deliverance.”[22] it brought him, as he himself says, “an absolute freedom from mortality accompanied by an indescribable calm and joy.”[23] a nameless writer in the “atlantic monthly” for may, 1916, has given a remarkable description of an experience which is called “twenty minutes of reality.” “i only remember,” the writer says, “finding myself in the very midst of those wonderful moments, beholding[177] life for the first time in all its young intoxication of loveliness in its unspeakable joy, beauty, and importance. i cannot say what the mysterious change was—i saw no new thing, but i saw all the usual things in a miraculous new light—in what i believe is their true light.... once out of all the gray days of my life i have looked into the heart of reality; i have witnessed the truth; i have seen life as it really is—ravishingly, ecstatically, madly beautiful, and filled to overflowing with a wild joy and a value unspeakable.”
finally, i shall give a modern russian writer’s appreciative report of a typical mystical experience:
“there are seconds when you suddenly feel the presence of the eternal harmony perfectly attained. it’s something not earthly—i don’t mean in the sense that it’s heavenly—but in that sense that man cannot endure it in his earthly aspect. he must be physically changed or die. this feeling is clear and unmistakable; it’s as though you apprehend all nature and suddenly say, ‘yes, that’s right.’ god, when he created the world, said at[178] the end of each day of creation, ‘yes, it’s right, it’s good.’ it ... it’s not being deeply moved, but simply joy. you don’t forgive anything because there is no more need of forgiveness. it’s not that you love—oh, there’s something in it higher than love—what’s most awful is that it’s terribly clear and such joy. in those five seconds i live through a lifetime, and i’d give my whole life for them, because they are worth it.”[24]
it should always be noted that the number of persons who are subject to mystical experiences—that is to say, persons who feel themselves brought into contact with an environing presence and supplied with new energy to live by—is much larger than we usually suppose. we know only the mystics who were dowered with a literary gift and who could tell in impressive language what had come to them, but of the multitude of those who have felt and seen and who yet were unable to tell in words about their experience, of these we are ignorant. an undeveloped and uncultivated form of mystical consciousness[179] is present, i think, in most religious souls, and whenever it is unusually awake and vivid the whole inner and outer life is intensified by such experiences, even though there may be little that can be put into explicit account in language. there are multitudes of men and women now living, often in out-of-the-way places, in remote hamlets or on isolated farms, who are the salt of the earth and the light of the world in their communities, because they have had vital experiences that revealed to them realities which their neighbors missed and that supplied them with energy to live by which the mere “church-goers” failed to find.
i am more and more convinced, as i pursue my studies on the meaning and value of mysticism, with the conviction that religion, i.e. religion when it is real, alive, vital, and transforming, is essentially and at bottom a mystical act, a direct response to an inner world of spiritual reality, an implicit relationship between the finite and infinite, between[180] the part and the whole. the french philosopher, émile boutroux, has finely called this junction of finite and infinite in us, by which these mystical experiences are made possible, “the beyond that is within”—“the beyond,” as he says, “with which man comes in touch on the inner side of his nature.”
whenever we go back to the fundamental mystical experience, to the soul’s first-hand testimony, we come upon a conviction that the human spirit transcends itself and is environed by a spiritual world with which it holds commerce and vital relationship. the constructive mystics, not only of the christian communions but also those of other religions, have explored higher levels of life than those on which men usually live, and they have given impressive demonstration through the heightened dynamic quality of their lives and service that they have been drawing upon and utilizing reservoirs of vital energy. they have revealed a peculiar aptitude for correspondence with the[181] beyond that is within, and they have exhibited a genius for living by their inner conviction of god, “of practicing god,” as jeremy taylor called it.
but are we justified in making such large affirmations? is there anything in the nature of mystical experience that warrants us in taking the leap from inner vision to existential reality? can we legitimately get from a finite, subjective feeling to an objective and infinite god? the answer is of course obvious. there is no way to get a bridge from finite to infinite, from subject to object, from idea to that which the idea means, from human to divine, from mere man to god, if they are isolated, sundered, disparate entities to start with. no mere finite experience of a mere finite thing can be anything but finite, and no juggling can get out of the experience what is not in it. if we mean by “empirical” that which is “given” as explicit sense-content of consciousness, then the only empirical argument that could be would be the statement that we[182] experience what we experience. we should not get beyond the consciousness of interjection—“lo!” “voila!”
in this sense of the term, of course nobody ever did or ever could “experience god.” we are shut up entirely to a stream of inner states, a seriatim consciousness, “a shower of shot,” which can give us no knowledge at all, either, in berkeley’s words, of “the choir of heaven” or of “the furniture of earth” or of “the mighty frame of the world,” or in fact, of any permanent self within us.
used in the narrow humian sense there are no “empirical arguments” for the existence of god, but the misery of it is there are no arguments for anything else either! we must therefore widen out the meaning of the term “empirical” and include in it not only the actual “content” of experience, but all that is involved and implicated in experience. we cannot talk about any kind of reality until we interpret experience through its rational implications. nobody ever perceives “a[183] black beetle” and knows it as “a black beetle” without transcending “pure empiricism,” i.e. without using categories which are not a product of experience. all experience which has any knowledge-import, or value, possesses within itself self-transcendence, that is to say, it apprehends or takes by storm some sort of external or objective reality. nobody is ever disturbed by the fallacy of subjectivism until he has become debauched by metaphysics. the fallacy of subjectivism is always the product of the abstract intellect, i.e. the intellect which divides experience, and takes an abstract part for a whole.
it is further true that all knowledge-experience possesses within itself finite-transcendence, i.e. it contains in itself a principle of infinity and could become absolutely rationalized only in an infinite whole of reality with which the experience is in organic unity. i agree fully with professor hocking that “it is doubtful whether there are any finite ideas at all.”[184] the consciousness of the finite has working in it the reality of the whole. the finite can never be considered as self-existent; it can never be real. there is forever present in the very heart and nature of consciousness a trope, a nisus, a straining of the fragment to link itself up with the self-complete whole, and every flash of knowledge and every pursuit of the good reveals that trend. something of the other is always in the me—and however finite i may be i am always beyond myself, and am conjunct with “the pulse beat of the whole system.” either we must give up talking of knowledge or we must affirm that knowledge involves a self-complete and self-explanatory reality with which our consciousness has connection. we cannot think finite and contingent things, or aim at goodness however fragmentary, without rational appeal to something infinite and necessary. human experience cannot be rationally conceived except as a fragment of a vastly more inclusive experience, always implied[185] within the finite spirit, unifying and binding together into one whole all that is absolutely real and true. whether we are dealing with the so-called mystical experience or any other kind of experience we are bound to postulate, or take for granted, whatever is rationally implicated in the very nature of the experience on our hands.
no type of consciousness carries the implication of self-transcendence, or finite-transcendence, more coercively than does genuine mystical experience. the central aspect of it is the fusion of the self into a larger undifferentiated whole. it is thus much more the type of ?sthetic experience than it is the type of knowledge-experience. in both types—the ?sthetic and the mystical—consciousness is fused into union with its object, that is to say, the usual dualistic character of consciousness is transcended, though of course not wholly obliterated. a new level of consciousness is gained in which the division of self and other is minimal. but it is by no means, in either case, an empty or a[186] negative state. the impression which so many mystics have given of negation or passivity springs, as von hügel declares, from an unusually large amount of actualized energy, an energy which is now penetrating and finding expression by every pore and fiber of the soul. the whole moral and spiritual creature expands and rests, yes: but this very rest is produced by action “unperceived because so fleet,” “so near, so all fulfilling; or rather by a tissue of single acts, mental, emotional, volitional, so finely interwoven, so exceptionally stimulative and expressive of the soul’s deepest aspirations, that these acts are not perceived as single acts, indeed that their very collective presence is apt to remain unnoticed by the soul itself.”[25] wordsworth’s account passes almost unconsciously from appreciation of beauty into joyous apprehension of god and it is a wonderful self-revelation of fused consciousness which is positively affirmative.
[187]
“sensation, soul and form
all melted into him; they swallowed up
his animal being; in them did he live,
and by them did he live; they were his life.
in such access of mind, in such high hours
of visitation from the living god,
thought was not; in enjoyment it expired.
no thanks he breathed, he proffered no request;
rapt into still communion that transcends
the imperfect offices of prayer and praise,
his mind was a thanksgiving to the power
that made him; it was blessedness and love.”
tennyson has given many accounts both in prose and poetry of similar affirmation experiences, sometimes initiated from within and sometimes from without. this account from the memoirs is a good specimen: “i have frequently had a kind of waking trance—this for the lack of a better word—quite up from my 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[188] into boundless being, and this not a confused state but the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words—where death was almost laughable impossibility—the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life.”
like the ?sthetic experience, again, the mystical experience brings an extraordinary integration, or unifying, of the self, a flooding of the entire being with joy and an expansion which, as in the case of the highest ?sthetic experiences, takes the soul out into a world which “never was on sea or land,” and which, nevertheless, for the moment seems the only world.
balfour has finely pointed out in his theism and humanism, that this expansion and joy and infinite aspect which are inherent in the ?sthetic values cannot be rationally explained except on the supposition that these values are in part dependent upon a spiritual conception of the world—the experience must have a pedigree adequate to account for[189] its greatness. we cannot begin with an experience which gives an absolutely new dimension of life and a new world of joy, and then end in our explanation with a phenomenal play of cosmic atoms—“full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
the same thing is true with our mystical experience. we cannot, of course, say offhand that here we experience god as one experiences an object of sense, or that we have at last found an infallible and indubitable evidence of the infinite god. my only contention is that here is a form of experience which implies one of two things. either there is far greater depth and complexity to the inmost nature of personal self-consciousness than we usually take into account, that is, we ourselves are bottomless and inwardly exhaustless in range and scope; or the fragmentary thing we call our self is continuous inwardly with a wider spiritual world with which we have some sort of contact-relationship and from which vitalizing energy comes in to us. it is too soon to[190] decide between these two alternatives. we are only at the very beginning of the study of the submerged life within ourselves, and we must know vastly more about it than we now know before we can draw the boundaries of the soul or declare with certainty what comes from its own deeps and what comes from beyond its farthest margins. the studies of bergson and still more emphatically the studies of dr. william mcdougall in body and mind show very conclusively that the consciousness of meaning, the higher forms of memory, the richer and more subtle emotional experiences and the more significant facts of attention, conation, and will cannot be explained in terms of cerebral activities or by any kind of mechanical causation.[26]
to arrive at any explanation of the most central activities of personal consciousness we must assume that consciousness is a reality existing in its own sphere and vastly transcending the physical mechanism which it uses. if this is a fact—and[191] mcdougall’s argument is the work of one of the most careful and scientifically trained of modern psychologists—then there is no reason why what we call the “soul” might not on occasions receive incomes of life and spiritual energy from the infinite source of consciousness. i can only say that the mystic in his highest moments feels himself to be and believes himself to be in vital fellowship with another than himself—and what is more, some power to live by does come in from somewhere. mystical experiences in a large number of instances not only permanently integrate the self but also bring an added and heightened moral and spiritual quality and a greatly increased dynamic effect.
we are still in the stage of mystery in dealing with the causes of variations and mutations in the biological order. something surprising and novel, something that was not there before, something incalculable and unpredictable suddenly appears and a little living creature arrives[192] equipped with a trait which no ancestor had and by means of which he can endure better, can see farther or run faster, can survive longer, and is, in fact, on a higher life-level. we do not know how the little midget did it. but some élan vital may have burst in from an invisible and intangible environment, more real even than the environment we see. the universe, as professor shaler once said, seems to be “a realm of unending and infinitely varied originations.” so, too, these flushes of splendor which break through the “soul’s east window of divine surprise” may come from a perfectly real spiritual environment without which a finite spirit could not be at all or live at all. i do not know. our fragmentary experiences cannot enable us to furnish irrefragible proof. it only looks as though god were within reach and as though at moments we were at home with him.
gilbert murray’s cautious conclusion in his fine essay on stoicism is a good word with which to close this chapter.
“we seem to find,” he says, “not only[193] in all religions, but in practically all philosophies, some belief that man is not quite alone in the universe, but is met in his endeavours towards the good by some external help or sympathy.... it is important to realize that the so-called belief is not really an intellectual judgment so much as a craving of the whole nature [in us].... it is only of very late years that psychologists have begun to realize the enormous dominion of those forces in man of which he is normally unconscious. we cannot escape as easily as these brave men [the stoics] dreamed from the grip of the blind powers beneath the threshold. indeed, as i see philosophy after philosophy falling into this unproven belief in the friend behind phenomena, as i find that i myself cannot, except for a moment and by an effort, refrain from making the same assumption, it seems to me that perhaps here, too, we are under the spell of a very old ineradicable instinct. we are gregarious animals; our ancestors have been such for countless ages. we cannot help[194] looking out on the world as gregarious animals do; we see it in terms of humanity and of fellowship. students of animals under domestication have shown us how the habits of a gregarious creature, taken away from his kind, are shaped in a thousand details by reference to the lost pack which is no longer there—the pack which a dog tries to smell his way back to all the time he is out walking, the pack he calls to for help when danger threatens. it is a strange and touching thing, this eternal hunger of the gregarious animal for the herd of friends who are not there. and it may be, it may very possibly be, that, in the matter of this friend behind phenomena, our own yearning and our own almost ineradicable instinctive conviction, since they are certainly not founded on either reason or observation, are in origin the groping of a lonely-souled gregarious animal to find its herd or its herd-leader in the great spaces between the stars.
“at any rate, it is a belief very difficult to get rid of.”
