"In such cases as Kant and Beethoven," says Von Hügel, “a classifier of humanity according to its psycho-physical phenomena alone would put these great discoverers and creators, without hesitation, amongst hopeless and useless hypochondriacs."15 Yet, if this is insanity, most of us would like more of it. Indeed, one might well call a person insane whose ideas were all on the same level, the higher failing to rule the lower.

As between suggestion and autosuggestion, the mystic ranks as an autosuggestionist rather than as one who takes suggestion readily from others. He is reflective rather than mercurial, inhibiting ideas that do not commend themselves to his deeper spiritual intuition and judgment. As such he is the conservator of true religion and moral values, the foe alike of conventional and of hysterical ideas and activities.

If one would know the extent of the evil which these two latter types of mind-the conventional and the hysterical-have wrought, let him study, on the one side, the history of blind, unreflective religious conservatism, with its obscurantism, its sluggishness, its persecutions, its inquisitions, its heresy-hunting, and, on the other, the history of mental epi

15 Vol. ii, p. 42, quoted by Miss Underhill, Mysticism, p. 72.

demics, as he will find it outlined, for example, in Part III of Sidis's Psychology of Suggestion. It is to the mystic mind, as well as to the common-sense, rational mind,-quiet, self-assured, yet daring, and having something besides criticism to offer, that the progress toward religious sanity and true faith has been largely due.

In a sense, therefore, the mystic doubtless uses autosuggestion. But to allow that term to explain the nature of mysticism, or to decide the question of its objective reality, would be like defining love as a physical instinct and stopping with that. Love is a physical instinct, and more. Mysticism may be autosuggestive and more.

There is both suggestion and autosuggestion, thinks Bishop Brent, in prayer; but if so, that does not remove from it the character of communion with God.

Prayer, which is at once an appeal to the Source of Life to let loose saving health in our direction and an opening of our being for the reception of hidden and unknown aid, is a higher form of psychic effort than either suggestion or autosuggestion, in that it includes both, though not precluding the concurrent use of either.16

10 The Sixth Sense, p. 45.

"Autosuggestion," as Rufus M. Jones says, "may be only another way of saying that God and man are conjunct in the soul, and that, in the deeps of the soul, beyond our power of knowing how, Divine suggestions come to human consciousness."""

Psychology has undoubtedly opened a line of attack by which the detractors of the mystical to their own satisfaction and sometimes to the consternation of such as are easily overcome by superficial reasoning-may resolve religious experience away. On the other hand, rightly interpreted, psychology has greatly reemphasized the significance of the mystical element in religion and has shown how deeply it grounds in our total nature and constitution.

17 Studies in Mystical Religion, p. xxxiii.

CHAPTER VII

NORMAL MYSTICISM

As one looks back over its history mysticism appears an almost shoreless sea-intangible in its nature, multitudinous in its expression, swept by diverse winds and currents. And yet, with all its inclusiveness and wealth of meaning, its variations, its inconsistencies, its paradoxes, there is in it an untroubled deep, an underlying motive which gives it unity. It exalts spirit. It finds in life eternal realities and values. "The mystic is one who sees all things in God." Not that God is conceived in the same way by all the mystics. Their conceptions of him differ widely, some identifying him with Nature, others with Spirit; some conceiving him as the All, others as a Person. Yet to all alike he is the Supreme Reality.

This common principle serves to set off mysticism from all attitudes of mind which either deny the existence of God, or, admitting it, fail to make him real, and thus to "see all things in him." Mysticism is radically opposed,

1 George A. Gordon: "The Mystic and his Ideal," Revelation and the Ideal, p. 86.

that is, to all forms of naturalism, skepticism, positivism, agnosticism, rationalism, and institutionalism. Denial of God, or of direct access to him, is to the mystical mind the one great error and blindness, the one measureless loss.

That this consciousness of God is vital, and radically affects life and conduct, can hardly be open to doubt. That which chiefly concerns us in this chapter is to further differentiate within mysticism, to distinguish between its essential and peripheral, its normal and abnormal, forms and developments. In order to do this more fully let us make a brief review of mysticism in its broader aspects.

I

Three interblending but distinguishable mystical currents flow through the history of religion. The first may be called instinctive mysticism, the second contemplative or reflective mysticism, and the third personal mysticism.

The first, instinctive, or natural, mysticism, is characterized by its close association with sense experience and its comparative lack of reflection. It is uppermost in many phases of primitive religion, in certain crude social cults, and in nature worship. It may be induced by or accompany either the inhibiting or the stimu