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