i

the revival of mysticism which has been one of the noteworthy features in the christianity of our time has presented us with a number of interesting and important questions. we want to know, first of all, what mysticism really is. secondly, we want to know whether it is a normal or abnormal experience. and omitting many other questions which must wait their turn, we want to know whether mystical experiences actually enlarge our sphere of knowledge, i.e., whether they are trustworthy sources of authentic information and authoritative truth concerning realities which lie beyond the range of human senses.

the answer to the first question appears to be as difficult to accomplish as the return of ulysses was. the secret is kept in book after book. one can marshall a formidable array of definitions, but they oppose and challenge one another,[134] like the men sprung from the dragon’s teeth. for the purposes of the present consideration we can eliminate what is usually included under psychical phenomena, that is, the phenomena of dreams, visions and trances, hysteria and dissociation and esoteric and occult phenomena. thirty years ago professor royce said: “in the father’s house are many mansions, and their furniture is extremely manifold. astral bodies and palmistry, trances and mental healing, communications from the dead and ‘phantasms of the living’—such things are for some people to-day the sole quite unmistakable evidences of the supremacy of the spiritual world.” these phenomena are worthy of careful painstaking study and attention, for they will eventually throw much light upon the deep and complex nature of human personality, are in fact already throwing much light upon it. but they furnish us slender data for understanding what is properly meant by mystical experience and its religious and spiritual bearing.

we can, too, leave on one side the metaphysical doctrines which fill a large amount of space in the books of the great mystics. these doctrines had a long historical development and they would have taken essentially the same form if the exponents of them had not been mystics. mystical[135] experience is confined to no one form of philosophy, though some ways of thinking no doubt favor and other ways retard the experience, as they also often do in the case of religious faith in general. mystical experience, furthermore, must not be confused with what technical expert writers call “the mystic way.” there are as many mystical “ways” as there are gates to the new jerusalem: “on the east three gates, on the north three gates, on the south three gates, and on the west three gates.” one might as well try to describe the way of making love, or the way of appreciating the grand canyon as to describe the way to the discovery of god, as though there were only one way.

i am not interested in mysticism as an ism. it turns out in most accounts to be a dry and abstract thing, hardly more like the warm and intimate experience than the color of a map is like the country for which it stands. “canada is very pink,” seems quite an inadequate description of the noble country north of our border. it is mystical experience and not mysticism that is worthy of our study. we are concerned with the experience itself, not with second-hand formulations of it. “the mystic,” says professor royce, “is a thorough-going empiricist;” “god[136] ceases to be an object and becomes an experience,” says professor pringle-pattison. if it is an experience we want to find out what happens to the mystic himself inside where he lives. according to those who have been there the experience which we call mystical is charged with the conviction of real, direct contact and commerce with god. it is the almost universal testimony of those who are mystics that they find god through their experience. john tauler says that in his best moments of “devout prayer and the uplifting of the mind to god,” he experiences “the pure presence of god in his own soul,” but he adds that all he can tell others about the experience is “as poor and unlike it as the point of a needle is to the heavens above us.” “i have met with my god; i have met with my savior. i have felt the healings drop upon my soul from under his wings,” says isaac penington in the joy of his first mystical experience. without needlessly multiplying such testimonies for data, we can say with considerable assurance that mystical experience is consciousness of direct and immediate relationship with some transcendent reality which in the moment of experience is believed to be god. “this is he, this is he,” exclaims isaac penington, “there is no other: this is he whom i have[137] waited for and sought after from my childhood.” angela of foligno says that she experienced god, and saw that the whole world was full of god.

ii

there are many different degrees of intensity, concentration and conviction in the experiences of different individual mystics, and also in the various experiences of the same individual from time to time. there has been a tendency in most studies of mysticism to regard the state of ecstasy as par excellence mystical experience. that is, however, a grave mistake. the calmer, more meditative, less emotional, less ecstatic experiences of god are not less convincing and possess greater constructive value for life and character than do ecstatic experiences which presuppose a peculiar psychical frame and disposition. the seasoned quaker in the corporate hush and stillness of a silent meeting is far removed from ecstasy, but he is not the less convinced that he is meeting with god. for the essentia of mysticism we do not need to insist upon a certain “sacred” mystic way nor upon ecstasy, nor upon any peculiar type of rare psychic upheavals. we do need to insist, however, upon a consciousness of[138] commerce with god amounting to conviction of his presence.

“where one heard noise

and one saw flame,

i only knew he named my name.”

jacob boehme calls the experience which came to him, “breaking through the gate,” into “a new birth or resurrection from the dead,” so that, he says, “i knew god.” “i am certain,” says eckhart, “as certain as that i live, that nothing is so near to me as god. god is nearer to me than i am to myself.” one of these experiences—the first one—was an ecstasy, and the other, so far as we can tell, was not. it was the flooding in of a moment of god-consciousness in the act of preaching a sermon to the common people of cologne. the experience of penington, again, was not an ecstasy; it was the vital surge of fresh life on the first occasion of hearing george fox preach after a long period of waiting silence. a simple normal case of a mild type is given in a little book of recent date, reprinted from the atlantic monthly: “after a long time of jangling conflict and inner misery, i one day, quite quietly and with no conscious effort, stopped doing the dis-ingenuous thing [i had been[139] doing]. then the marvel happened. it was as if a great rubber band which had been stretched almost to the breaking point were suddenly released and snapped back to its normal condition. heaven and earth were changed for me. everything was glorious because of its relation to some great central life—nothing seemed to matter but that life.” brother lawrence, a barefooted lay-brother of the seventeenth century, according to the testimony of the brotherhood, attained “an unbroken and undisturbed sense of the presence of god.” he was not an ecstatic; he was a quiet, faithful man who did his ordinary daily tasks with what seemed to his friends “an unclouded vision, an illuminated love and an uninterrupted joy.” simple and humble though he was, he nevertheless acquired, through his experience of god, “an extraordinary spaciousness of mind.”

the more normal, expansive mystical experiences come apparently when the personal self is at its best. its powers and capacities are raised to an unusual unity and fused together. the whole being, with its accumulated submerged life, finds itself. the process of preparing for any high achievement is a severe and laborious one, but nothing seems easier in the moment of success than is the accomplishment for which the[140] life has been prepared. there comes to be formed within the person what aristotle called “a dexterity of soul,” so that the person does with ease what he has become skilled to do. clement of alexandria called a fully organized and spiritualized person “a harmonized man,” that is, adjusted, organized and ready to be a transmissive organ for the revelation of god. brother lawrence, who was thus “harmonized,” finely says, “the most excellent method which i found of going to god was that of doing my common business, purely for the love of god.” an earlier mystic of the fourteenth century stated the same principle in these words: “it is my aim to be to the eternal god what a man’s hand is to a man.”

there are many human experiences which carry a man up to levels where he has not usually been before and where he finds himself possessed of insight and energies he had hardly suspected were his until that moment. one leaps to his full height when the right inner spring is reached. we are quite familiar with the way in which instinctive tendencies in us and emotions both egoistic and social, become organized under a group of ideas and ideals into a single system which we call a sentiment, such as love, or patriotism, or[141] devotion to truth. it forms slowly and one hardly realizes that it has formed until some occasion unexpectedly brings it into full operation, and we find ourselves able with perfect ease to overcome the most powerful inhibitory and opposing instincts and habits, which, until then, had usually controlled us. we are familiar, too, with the way in which a well-trained and disciplined mind, confronted by a concrete situation, will sometimes—alas not always—in a sudden flash of imaginative insight, discover a universal law revealed there and then in the single phenomenon, as sir isaac newton did and as, in a no less striking way, sir william rowan hamilton did in his discovery of quaternions. literary and artistic geniuses supply us with many instances in which, in a sudden flash, the crude material at hand is shot through with vision, and the complicated plot of a drama, the full significance of a character, or the complete glory of a statue stands revealed, as though, to use r. l. stevenson’s illustration, a genie had brought it on a golden tray as a gift from another world. abraham lincoln, striking off in a few intense minutes his gettysburg address, as beautiful in style and perfect in form as anything in human literature, is as good an illustration as we need of the way in which a highly[142] organized person, by a kindling flash, has at his hand all the moral and spiritual gains of a life time.

there is a famous account of the flash of inspiration given by philo, which can hardly be improved. it is as follows: “i am not ashamed to recount my own experience. at times, when i have proposed to enter upon my wonted task of writing on philosophical doctrines, with an exact knowledge of the materials which were to be put together, i have had to leave off without any work accomplished, finding my mind barren and fruitless, and upbraiding it for its self-complacency, while startled at the might of the existent one, in whose power it lies to open and close the wombs of the soul. but at other times, when i had come empty, all of a sudden i have been filled with thoughts, showered down and sown upon me unseen from above, so that by divine possession i have fallen into a rapture and become ignorant of everything, the place, those present, myself, what was spoken or written. for i have received a stream of interpretation, a fruition of light, the most clear-cut sharpness of vision, the most vividly distinct view of the matter before me, such as might be received through the eyes from the most luminous presentation.”

[143]

the most important mystical experiences are something like that. they occur usually not at the beginning of the religious life but rather in the ripe and developed stage of it. they are the fruit of long-maturing processes. clement’s “the harmonized man” is always a person who has brought his soul into parallelism with divine currents, has habitually practiced his religious insights and has finally formed a unified central self, subtly sensitive, acutely responsive to the beyond within him. in such experiences which may come suddenly or may come as a more gradual process, the whole self operates and masses all the cumulations of a lifetime. they are no more emotional than they are rational and volitional. we have a total personality, awake, active, and “aware of his life’s flow.” instead of seeing in a flash a law of gravitation, or the plot and character of hamlet, or the uncarven form of moses the law-giver in a block of marble, one sees at such times the moral demonstrations of a lifetime and vividly feels the implications that are essentially involved in a spiritual life. in the high moment god is seen to be as sure as the soul is.

“i stood at naples once, a night so dark

i could have scarce conjectured there was earth

anywhere, sky or sea or world at all:

[144]

but the night’s black was burst through by a blaze—

thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore,

through her whole length of mountain visible:

there lay the city thick and plain with spires,

and, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea.

so may the truth be flashed out by one blow.”

to some the truth of god never comes closer than a logical conclusion. he is held to be as a living item in a creed. to the mystic he becomes real in the same sense that experienced beauty is real, or the feel of spring is real, or that summer sunlight is real—he has been found, he has been met, he is present.

before discussing the crucial question whether these experiences are evidential and are worthy of consideration as an addition to the world’s stock of truth and knowledge i must say a few words about the normality or abnormality of them. nothing of any value can be said on this point of mystical experience in the abstract. one must first catch his concrete case. some instances are normal and some are undoubtedly abnormal. trance, ecstasy and rapture are unusual experiences and in that sense not normal occurrences. they usually indicate, furthermore, a pathological condition of personality and are thus abnormal in the more technical sense. there is, however,[145] something more to be said on this point. it seems pretty well established that some persons—and they have often been creative leaders and religious geniuses—have succeeded in organizing their lives, in finding their trail, in charging their whole personality with power, in attaining a moral dynamic and in tapping vast reservoirs of energy by means of states which, if occurring in other persons, would no doubt be called pathological. the real test here is a pragmatic one. it seems hardly sound to call a state abnormal if it has raised the experiencer, as a mystic experience often does, into a hundred horse-power man and through his influence has turned multitudes of other men and women into more joyous, hopeful and efficient persons. this question of abnormality and reality is thus not one to be settled off-hand by a superficial diagnosis.

an experience which brings spaciousness of mind, new interior dimensions, ability to stand the universe—and the people in it—and capacity to work at human tasks with patience, endurance and wisdom may quite intelligently be called normal, though to an external beholder it may look like what he usually calls a trance of hysteria, a state of dissociation, or hypnosis by auto-suggestion. it should be added, however, as i have[146] already said, that mystical experience is not confined to these extremer types. they may or may not be pathological. the calmer and more restrained stages of mysticism are more important and significant and are no more marked with the stigma of hysteria than is love-making, enjoyment of music, devotion to altruistic causes, risking one’s life for country, or any lofty experience of value.

iii

we come at length to the central question of our consideration: do mystical experiences settle anything? are they purely subjective and one-sided, or do they prove to have objective reference and so to be two-sided? do they take the experiencer across the chasm that separates “self” from “other”? mystical experience undoubtedly feels as though it had objective reference. it comes to the individual with indubitable authority. he is certain that he has found some thing other than himself. he has an unescapable conviction that he is in contact and commerce with reality beyond the margins of his personal self. “a tremendous muchness is suddenly revealed,” as william james once put it.

we do not get very far when we undertake to[147] reduce knowledge to an affair of sense-experience. “they reckon ill who leave me out,” can be said by the organized, personal, creative mind as truly as by brahma. there are many forms of human experience in which the data of the senses are so vastly transcended that they fail to furnish any real explanation of what occurs in consciousness. this is true of all our experiences of value, which apparently spring out of synthetic or synoptic activities of the mind, i.e., activities in which the mind is unified and creative. the vibrations of ether which bombard the rods and cones of the retina may be the occasion for the appreciation of beauty in sky or sea or flower, but they are surely not the cause of it. the concrete event which confronts me is very likely the occasion for the august pronouncement of moral issues which my conscience makes, but it can not be said that the concrete event in any proper sense causes this consciousness of moral obligation. the famous answer of leibnitz to the crude sense-philosophy of his time is still cogent. to the phrase: “there is nothing in the mind that has not come through the senses,” leibnitz added, “except the mind itself.” that means that the creative activity of the mind is always an important factor in experience and one that can not be ignored in any[148] of the processes of knowledge. unfortunately we have done very little yet in the direction of comprehending the interior depth of the personal mind or of estimating adequately the part which mind itself in its creative capacity plays in all knowledge functions. it will only be when we have succeeded in getting beyond what plato called the bird-cage theory of knowledge to a sound theory of knowledge and to a solid basis for spiritual values that we shall be able to discuss intelligently the “findings” of the mystic.

the world at the present moment is pitiably “short” in its stock of sound theories of knowledge. the prevailing psychologies do not explain knowledge at all. the behaviorists do not try to explain it any more than the astronomer or the physicist does. the psychologist who reduces mind to an aggregation of describable “mind-states” has started out on a course which makes an explanation forever impossible, since knowledge can be explained only through unity and integral wholeness, never through an aggregation of parts, as though it were a mental “shower of shot.” if we expect to talk about knowledge and seriously propose to use that great word truth, we must at least begin with the assumption of an intelligent, creative, organizing center of[149] self-consciousness which can transcend itself and can know what is beyond and other than itself. in short, the talk about a “chasm” between subject and object—knower and thing known—is as absurd as it would be to talk of a chasm between the convex and the concave sides of a curve. knowledge is always knowledge of an object and mystical experience has all the essential marks of objective reference, as certainly as other forms of experience have.

professor j. m. baldwin very well says that there is a form of contemplation in which, as in ?sthetic experience, the strands of the mind’s diverging dualisms are “merged and fused.” he adds: “in this experience of a fusion which is not a mixture but which issues in a meaning of its own sort and kind, an experience whose essential character is just this unity of comprehension, consciousness attains its completest, its most direct, and its final apprehension of what reality is and means.” it really comes round to the question whether the mind of a self-conscious person has any way of approach, except by way of the senses, to any kind of reality. there is no a priori answer to that question. it can only be settled by experience. it is, therefore, pure dogmatism to say, as professor dunlap in his recent attack on[150] mysticism does, that all conscious processes are based on sense-stimulation and all thought as well as perception depends on reaction to sense-stimulus. it is no doubt true that behavior psychology must resort to some such formula, but that only means that such psychology is always dealing with greatly transformed and reduced beings, when it attempts to deal with persons like us who, in the richness of our concrete lives, are never reduced to “behavior-beings.” we have interior dimensions and that is the end on’t! some persons—and they are by no means feeble-minded individuals—are as certain that they have commerce with a world within as they are that they have experiences of a world outside in space. thomas aquinas, who neither in method nor in doctrine leaned toward mysticism, though he was most certainly “a harmonized man,” and who in theory postponed the vision of god to a realm beyond death, nevertheless had an experience two years before he died which made him put his pen and inkhorn on the shelf and never write another word of his summa theologiae. when he was reminded of the incomplete state of his great work and was urged to go on with it, he only replied, “i have seen that which makes all that i have written look small to me.”

[151]

it may be just possible that there is a universe of spiritual reality upon which our finite spirits open inward as inlets open into the sea.

“like the tides on the crescent sea-beach

when the moon is new and thin

into our hearts high yearnings

come welling and surging in;

come from that mystic ocean

whose rim no foot has trod.

some call it longing

but others call it god.”

such a view is perfectly sane and tenable; it conflicts with no proved and demonstrated facts either in the nature of the universe or of mind. it seems anyway to the mystic that there is such a world, that he has found it as surely as columbus found san salvador, and that his experience is a truth-telling experience.

iv

but granting that it is truth-telling and has objective reference, is the mystic justified in claiming that he has found and knows god? one does not need to be a very wide and extensive student of mystical experience to discover what a meager[152] stock of knowledge the genuine mystic reports. william james’ remarkable experience in the adirondack woods very well illustrates the type. it had, he says, “an intense significance of some sort, if one could only tell the significance.... in point of fact, i can’t find a single word for all that significance and don’t know what it was significant of, so that it remains a mere boulder of impression.”[7] at a later date james refers to that “extraordinary vivacity of man’s psychological commerce with something ideal that feels as if it were also actual.”[8] the greatest of all the fourteenth century mystics, meister eckhart, could not put his impression into words or ideas. what he found was a “wilderness of the godhead where no one is at home,” i.e., an object with no particular differentiated, concrete characteristics. it was not an accident that so many of the mystics hit upon the via negativa, the way of negation, or that they called their discovery “the divine dark.”

“whatever your mind comes at

i tell you flat

god is not that.”

[153]

mystical experience does not supply concrete information. it does not bring new finite facts, new items that can be used in a description of “the scenery and circumstance” of the realm beyond our sense horizons. it is the awareness of a presence, the consciousness of a beyond, the discovery, as james puts it, that “we are continuous with a more of the same quality, which is operative in us and in touch with us.”

the most striking effect of such experience is not new fact-knowledge, not new items of empirical information, but new moral energy, heightened conviction, increased caloric quality, enlarged spiritual vision, an unusual radiant power of life. in short, the whole personality, in the case of the constructive mystics, appears to be raised to a new level of life and to have gained from somewhere many calories of life-feeding, spiritual substance. we are quite familiar with the way in which adrenalin suddenly flushes into the physical system and adds a new and incalculable power to brain and muscle. under its stimulus a man can carry out a piano when the house is on fire. may not, perhaps, some energy from some source with which our spirits are allied flush our inner being with forces and powers by which we can be fortified to stand the universe and more than stand[154] it! “we are more than conquerors through him that loved us,” is the way one of the world’s greatest mystics felt.

mystical experience—and we must remember as santayana has said, that “experience is like a shrapnel shell and bursts into a thousand meanings”—does at least one thing. it makes god sure to the person who has had the experience. it raises faith and conviction to the nth power. “the god who said, ‘let light shine out of darkness,’ has shined into my heart to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of god,” is st. paul’s testimony. “i knew god by revelation,” declares george fox. “i was as one who hath the key and doth open.” “the man who has attained this felicity,” plotinus says, “meets some turn of fortune that he would not have chosen, but there is not the slightest lessening of his happiness for that” (en. i: iv. 7). but this experience, with its overwhelming conviction and its dynamic effect, can not be put into the common coin of speech. frederic myers has well expressed the difficulty:

“oh could i tell ye surely would believe it!

oh could i only say what i have seen!

how should i tell or how can ye receive it,

how, till he bringeth you where i have been?”

[155]

there is no concrete “information” which can be shared with others.

when columbus found san salvador he was able to describe it to those who did not sail with him in the santa maria, but when the mystic finds god he can not give us any “knowledge” in plain words of everyday speech. he can only refer to his boulder, or his gibraltar, of impression that situation is what we should expect. we can not, either, describe any of our great emotions. we can not impart what flushes into our consciousness in moments of lofty intuition. we have a submerged life within us which is certainly no less real than our hand or foot. it influences all that we do or say, but we do not find it easy to utter it. in the presence of the sublime we have nothing to say—or if we do say anything it is a great mistake! language is forged to deal with experiences which are common to many persons, i.e., to experiences which refer to objects in space. we have no vocabulary for the subtle, elusive flashes of vision which are unique, individual and unsharable, as for instance is our personal sense of “the tender grace of a day that is dead.” we are forced in all these matters to resort to symbolic suggestion and to artistic devices. coventry patmore said with much insight:

[156]

“in divinity and love

what’s best worth saying can’t be said.”

i believe that mystical experiences do in the long run expand our knowledge of god and do succeed in verifying themselves. mysticism is a sort of spiritual protoplasm that underlies, as a basic substance, much that is best in religion, in ethics and in life itself. it has generally been the mystic, the prophet, the seer that has spotted out new ways forward in the jungle of our world, or lifted our race to new spiritual levels. their experiences have in some way equipped them for unusual tasks, have given supplies of energy to them which their neighbors did not have, and have apparently brought them into vital correspondence with dimensions and regions of reality that others miss. the proof that they have found god, or at least a domain of spiritual reality, does not lie in some new stock of knowledge, not in some gnostic secret, which they bring back; it is to be seen rather in the moral and spiritual fruits which test out and verify the experience.

consciousness of beauty or of truth or of goodness baffles analysis as much as consciousness of god does. these values have no objective standing ground in current psychology. they are not[157] things in the world of space. they submit to no adequate casual explanation. they have their ground of being in some other kind of world than that of the mechanical order, a world composed of quantitative masses of matter in motion. these experiences of value, which are as real for consciousness as stone walls are, make very clear the fact that there are depths and capacities in the nature of the normal human mind which we do not usually recognize and of which we have scant and imperfect accounts in our text-books. our minds taken in their full range, in other words, have some sort of contact and relationship with an eternal nature of things far deeper than atoms and molecules. only very slowly and gradually has the race learned through finite symbols and temporal forms to interpret beauty and truth and goodness which in their essence are as ineffable and indescribable as the mystic’s experience of god is. plato often speaks as though he had high moments of experience when he rose to the naked vision of beauty—beauty “alone, separate and eternal,” as he says, and his myths are very likely told, as j. a. stewart believes, to assist others to experience this same vision—a beauty which “does not grow nor perish, is without increase or diminution and endures for everlasting.”[158] but as a matter of fact, however exalted heavenly and enduring beauty may be in its essence we know what it is only as it appears in fair forms of objects, of body, of soul, of actions; in harmonious blending of sounds or colors; in well-ordered or happily-combined groupings of many aspects in one unity which is as it ought to be. truth and moral goodness always transcend our attainments and we sometimes feel that the very end and goal of life is the pursuit of that truth or that goodness which eye hath not seen nor ear heard. but whatever truth we do attain or whatever goodness we do achieve is always concrete. truth is just this one more added fact that resists all attempts to doubt it. goodness is just this simple everyday deed that reveals a heroic spirit and a brave venture of faith in the midst of difficulties. so, too, the mystic knowledge of god is not some esoteric communication, supplied through trance or ecstasy; it is an intuitive personal touch with god, felt to be the essentially real, the bursting forth of an intense love for him which heightens all the capacities and activities of life, followed by the slow laboratory results which verify it. “all i could never be” now is. it seems possible to stand the universe—even to do something toward the transformation[159] of it. the bans are read for that most difficult of all marriages, the marriage of the possible with the actual, the ideal with the real. and if the experience does not prove that the soul has found god, it at least does this: it makes the soul feel that proofs of god are wholly unnecessary.