and transcendence of time and space is brought out in the following sentence. "We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the external ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one." And again: "Time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. A man is capable of abolishing them both. The spirit sports with time:

"Can crowd eternity into an hour,

Or stretch an hour into eternity."1

Man, by apprehending God, grows into an organ of the Universal Soul. "The simplest person, who in his integrity worships God, becomes God; yet forever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and unsearchable." Again: "I, the imperfect, adore my own Perfect. I am somehow respective of the great soul, and thereby I do overlook the sun and the stars, and feel them to be but the fair accidents and effects which change and pass." So, speaking of the contemplation of Nature: "I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God,"2 etc.

With Plotinus and the other mystics, he teaches the doctrine of passive reception. "I desire, and look up, and put myself in the attitude of reception. I am a pensioner, not the source of this ethereal water; from some higher energy these visions come."

MYSTICISM AMONG PRIMITIVE PEOPLES.

The mysticism of primitive peoples is not the product of lofty speculation and over-refined emotions; it is the result of vivid dreams, trances, hallucinations, trancoidal states, and the like. Prospero's pessimistic remark,

"We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep"

1 Emerson loc. cit., pp. 141-143.

2 Vaughan: 2, p. 22.

is literally true of primitive man. "To primitive man," writes Dr. Brinton, "they (dreams) are real; he sees and hears in them as he does in his waking hours; he does not distinguish between the subjective creation of his brain cells and objective existence. In what they differ from daily life they are divine. They reveal the future and summon the absent." 1

The assertion of Lucretius that "the dreams of men peopled the heaven with gods," and of Tertullian that “the majority of men learn God from visions" may be untrue, but it is certain that they play a most important rôle in the religious lives of primitive and ancient peoples. A native Australian, for example, when asked if he has ever seen the great Creator, Baiame, replied: "No, not seen him, but I have felt (or inwardly perceived) him." Likewise, a Basuto chief, when asked whether his people knew of God before the missionaries came replied: "We did not know Him, but we dreamed of Him." 2 The Kamschatkans, we are told, gather together every morning to relate their dreams and to guess at their interpretation, and the Esquimos regulate their lives to a large extent in accordance with their dreams. The Bororos, of Brazil, take a dream so literally that a whole village will decamp and seek a distant site if one dreams of the approach of an enemy.

"3

66

So great is the belief among primitive peoples that dreams and hallucinations are divine revelations that many artificial devices such as solitude, fasting, self-hypnotization, the use of various drugs, herbs, and plants are employed to induce them during the day. Thus it came that the whole of life, waking and sleeping, assumed a dreamy, unreal character. The traveller Spix says of the forest tribes of Brazil that they never seem fully awake; and a Pawnee war song begins by an appeal to the gods to decide if this life is aught but a dream." 4

The ancient Mexicans and the more backward of the East Indians were certain it was. This life they taught was a dream from which death is the awakening. And the awakening which they pictured to themselves was a happy one indeed. The spirit world of the American Indians was a real Utopia. There old age, wars, hunger, disease, and other

1 Religions of Primitive Peoples, p. 65. 2 Religions of Primitive Peoples, p. 51.

3 Ibid., p. 65. 4 Ibid., p. 67.

evils are unknown. "Every one is happy in the simple happiness which he knew on earth, hunting, feasting, and playing the old games with former friends."

Mr. James Mooney traces in a very interesting manner the parallel between the religion of the American Indians and the mystical elements in the religions of civilized peoples. "The Indian messiah religion" he tells us, "is the inspiration of a dream. Its ritual is the dance, the ecstasy, and the trance. Its priests are hypnotics and cataleptics."1 He then shows that this is largely true of the religion of the ancient Hebrews, the Mohammedans, and to some extent of Christianity. We have but to recall the numerous dreams and trances of the patriarchs, the priests and prophets, of the cataleptic Mohammed, the visions of Jesus and especially of Paul, the second founder of Christianity, to appreciate the force of this analogy. Russia fairly teems with mystics and mystical sects of this primitive sort, The tyrannical government which exposes its subjects to the arbitrary will of the officials and nobles; the poverty, misery, fear, and uncertainty in which they live have so shattered the nervous systems of the illiterate peasants that epidemics of hysteria are of frequent occurrence, new prophets and leaders arise every day, and countless sects are born and grow with mushroom-like rapidity.2

It should now be clear that mysticism is an experience of which, on account of its many varieties, different degrees of intensity, length of duration, and resulting effects, it is difficult, if not impossible, to give a satisfactory definition. As in the case of religion we should speak of mysticisms rather than of mysticism. We shall not, however, be far wrong when we say that in all its varieties it is a kind of psychical rapture or intoxication, a theistic or pantheistic narcosis in which the subject's self-consciousness loses itself in its object or absorbs the object in itself (be that object God, flower, landscape, music, or what not), and finds the greatest enjoyment and satisfaction in its enlargement and diffusion. Consciousness overflows its banks, so to speak, and spreads infinitely becoming more and more attenuated until it finally melts, according to their testimony, into the cosmic consciousness or sentiency, the primordial psychic

1 Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology.

2 See N. Tsakni: La Russie Sectaire, passim.

protoplasm, from which all life has evolved.

These are crude figures to be sure, but in our earthly experiences matter and mind are so inseparably connected that we are constrained to explain the one in terms of the other. Our conception of it is better and more beauifully expressed by the mystic poet, Mr. Kingsley.

"And yet what bliss,

When dying in the darkness of God's light

The soul can pierce these blinding webs of nature,
And float up to the nothing, which is all things-
The ground of being, where self-forgetful silence
Is emptiness-emptiness fullness,-fullness God,-
Till we touch Him, and, like a snowflake, melt
Upon His light sphere's keen circumference."

When consciousness reaches this state the mystic is no longer able to distinguish between himself and God or the Universal Soul; all distinctions vanish. The mystic then even dares to call himself God. His condition is analogous to that of the hypnotic subject who either feels that he is being controlled by a will stronger and other than his own, that his individuality has merged into another's, or believes that another's individuality is expressed through him.

It is only when we understand this peculiar psychical state of the mystics that their many pantheistic, and from the theist's point of view, sacrilegious boasts become explicable. Thus, for example, Angelus Silesius declares :

Or again,

"God in my nature is involved,

As I in the divine;

I help to make His being up,
As much as He does mine.

"As much as I to God, owes God to me
His blissfulness and self-sufficiency.

"I am as rich as God, no grain of dust
That is not mine too,-share with me he must.

"More than His love unto Himself,
God's love to me hath been;

If more than self I too love Him,
We twain are quits, I ween."1

"I am as great as God, and He as small as I;
He cannot me surpass, or I beneath Him lie.

"God cannot, without me, endure a moment's space,
Were I to be destroyed, he must give up the ghost.

1 R. A. Vaughan: Hours with the Mystics, Vol. 2, p. 7.

"Nought seemeth high to me, I am the highest thing;
Because e'en God Himself is poor deprived of me." 11 1

This sounds like mere bombast and arrogant self-deification, but it was not intended as such. Silesius sang of his blissful union and identity with God, whom he literally loved to distraction, and in whom his whole being lived, and moved, and had its existence.

A few more general statements and our already too long chapter is ended.

There is a difference between mysticism and the philosophy of mysticism. The former is an experience which is felt, the latter is a system of thought or beliefs based on these experiences. Philosophical mystics, or those who have written philosophically concerning mysticism are not, therefore, necessarily real mystics. Mysticism is a psychic condition and not a creed.

Natural mysticism, such as obtains among primitive and ancient peoples, may be described as psychical confusion due either to ignorance, as when they fail to discriminate between dreaming and waking states, or to some nervous disturbance like hyperesthesia, as when they have visions, trances, hallucinations, etc.

2

Religious mysticism is essentially an emotion akin to fervent love, so fervent, indeed, that it expels all the other contents of consciousness and alone rules supreme. Like the ardent youthful lover, the mystic feels that every fibre and atom of his being is steeped in love, and yet he is not rationally conscious of the fact or the reason why he loves so madly. He is all emotion, the intellect when not kept in abeyance or entirely silenced is employed to analyze and describe his mystical experiences. And, just as in the world of sensations an excessive amount of light blinds, and of sound deafens, so in the emotional world an excessive amount of it volatilizes consciousness, so to speak, and throws the subject into a trance. Moreover, the mystic's love is not all of the Platonic type; most frequently it is of the sensuous sort, born of the sexual impulse and bearing every mark of it, even jealousy. Ant. Bourignon could not endure the thought that others were able to share with her the sweet communication" of her celestial spouse,

1 R. A. Vaughan: Hours with the Mystics, Vol. 2, p. 22.

2 See Shakespeares' Sonnets, 147-152.