and other similar cases, it will be remembered, were cited earlier in the book when we treated of the pathological relation between love and religion. We see here that "if" as Prof. Leuba says, "sex does not make religion it often gives it its particular form." His suggestion that mysticism is "an experiment tried by human nature to bring the sexual life more completely under the control of the higher nervous centres and thus to make it serve for the furtherance of that to which the individual ascribes greatest worth" is interesting. Certainly it is a more æsthetic, if unnatural way of satisfying an animal impulse. The mystic yearns to live a dematerialized, supernormal life; to dwell always in the supra-liminal regions of the emotions and the intellect, and in order to do this he must, so far as he is able, die to his material self and to all material objects about him.

"While aught thou art or know'st or lov'st or hast,
Not yet, believe me, is thy burden gone.

"Who is as though he were not-ne'er had been-
That man, oh joy! is made God absolute.

"Self is surpassed by self-annihilation :

The nearer nothing, so much more divine."

This necessitates that the mystic be ego-centric, 'inwardminded,' as Leuba terms it, and anti-social. His only care is his own soul and happiness, his only desire is to revel in feeling-intoxication. For the world, his family, friends, and fellow-beings he has little or no concern. Nothing is permitted to come between him and his God. The mystic is never a reformer or missionary; he is too busy with himself to make converts. He is the very antipode of the active fanatic.

The efforts to dematerialize himself, to reduce the contents of his consciousness to one idea,-God; and his will to one desire,-union with Him, are extremely laborious and painful, and frequently bring on physical and psychical disturbances of the gravest sort. In these long drawn out struggles between the mind and body the mystic is a very Jekyll and Hyde; when the former conquers he is a saint, when the latter conquers he is a sensuous madman.

From this point of view mysticism may be described as

1 Mind, Vol. 14, N. S., No. 53.

an attempt to put asunder what God hath joined together, namely, body and soul, in order that the latter might be able to communicate directly with God. With normal people, God is a lux et vis a tergo which brightens the path of life for them and makes their daily labor sweet. With the mystics, however, in whom the work-instinct is either undeveloped or atrophied, He is a light which forever shines in their eyes and dazzles and fatally attracts them somewhat as the flame does the moth. In spite of their strenuous ascetic exercises mystics, as a rule, belong to the passive type of men. It is stillness, solitude, death, annihilation, absorption that they yearn and strive for. Or, psychologically speaking, it is mental harmony and unity that they feel the need of, but cannot, like normal people, find them in many-sided interests, but only in one, all-absorbing occupation. They lack the will and energy to live and develop to their fullest the lives which Nature or God has given them. Finally, mysticism generally accompanies a lowered vitality. We might almost say the two vary in inverse ratio. In this respect it is akin to sleep, trance, and the hypnotic state in which an idea, innate or suggested, is most easily realized. It thrives best in hypersensitive and neurotic soil. Many of their claims and boasts remind us forcibly of the grandiose delusions of general paretics and paranoiacs.1

1 For excellent psychological analyses of mysticism see Murisier : Les Maladies du Sentiment Religieux, Paris, 1901, and Leuba : Tendences Fondamentales des Mystiques Chrétiens, Rev. Phil., July and Nov., 1902. Also, on the Psych. of a Group of Christian Mystics, Mind, Vol. 14, N. S., No. 53. A good English digest of Prof. Leuba's articles are to be found in the Am. Jour. of Religious Psy. and Ed., Vol. 1, pp. 87-89.

CHAPTER IV.

SYMBOLISM, FETICHISM, AND INTERPRETATION.

SYMBOLISM.

Closely akin to mysticism is symbolism, which may be defined as the attempt to give to spirituality a sensuous and perceptible body; or, to express mind in terms of matter, infinity in terms of finity, the abstract in terms of the concrete, the general in terms of the particular. "In the sym

bol proper," writes Carlyle, "what we call a symbol there is ever more or less distinctly and directly some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and, as it were, attainable there.1

Symbolism is a natural, and, therefore, a necessary and useful psychical activity; without it religion could not, perhaps, have been born; certainly it could not have thrived; and art, language, literature, philosophy, and even science could not have developed, for all these are built up more or less of symbols. The naïve and animistic mind of primitive man found it difficult to think in general terms, and abstraction was completely beyond its power. Attributes and qualities, such as color, taste, odor, cold, warmth, hardness, goodness, etc., were never separated from their objects. Thought was always of concrete things. And even now, Infinity, Eternity, Immortality, God, the Absolute, and other such abstract conceptions are, as purely such, meaningless for most of us. They are the unknown xs and ys, whose values we determine, as far as possible, by means of other xs and ys whose values we already know. We measure Infinity by yards, Eternity by years, and God by man. That is to say, our thoughts, imaginations, memories, ideas, and the like are all derived and developed from our multifarious sensations and perceptions, our life experiences; and

1 Sartor Resartus.

therefore, in a sense, more true than poetic, we create or recreate God and the Universe in our own images. In the whole hierarchy of divine attributes there is not a single one which is not human or an exaggeration of a human one. To quote the famous line of Locke, "Nihil est in intellectu quod non antea fuerit in sensu." TheNisi intellectus ipse" of Leibnitz is here impertinent. This truth is nowhere more strikingly manifest than in the evolution of language and its influeuce on the evolution of thought. Words among primitive peoples express action; they are endowed with life like living beings, and transmit their vitality to the objects to which they become attached. Everything has sex, for example, because their words have gender. M. André Lefèvre, in his scholarly work La Religion, maintains the thesis that all the supernatural agents and metaphysical beings of all peoples owe their life, their activity, and their sway over the thought and conduct of individuals and groups "to the metaphoric power inherent in the most rudimentary language." He tells us that the same god in different groups or even in the same region will, "according to the times or the caprices of language behold himself a male under one name and a female under another; and, invested with beauty or ugliness, benevolence or malignity, in the flower of youth or decline of age he must act conformably to the habits and proprieties of his sex."1

Whether or not this statement be true, whether words precede thoughts or thoughts words, it is certainly true that the carriers of our thoughts, in the act of transmission, leave indelible impressions of their symbolic nature on their burdens. Spirit takes on form and body, and mind becomes matter through language, just as matter mysteriously becomes mind through the senses.

Even philosophy, the clearing-house of all intellectual commerce, deals only in appearances or symbols, drawing now and then in its mystical hours upon the transcendent treasury for reality. Our thoughts, our lives, our universes are founded upon symbols. This is the burden of all philosophies worthy of the name.

Now, just as bits of paper bearing the government stamp are regarded by the masses as money, so are symbols bearing the divine stamp regarded by them as divine, and not

1 P. 20.

infrequently as divinities themselves. Witness the idols, fetiches, amulets, and charms of primitive peoples, the cross, crescent, pillar, wheel, and innumerable other symbols of more civilized peoples the world over.

But man must be sure that he is not deceived, that somewhere in the realm of space the reality actually exists. The Jews in the Wilderness insisted on seeing God or some unmistakable manifestation of his power, and centuries later the same God had to incarnate Himself and live and move among his human creatures as one of them. The time is perhaps ripe for a second incarnation, at any rate, millions are living in the hope that it will soon take place.

In religious symbolism as such, there is nothing abnormal any more than there is in secular symbolism; in treasuring bits of paper, for example, tattered flags, heirlooms, autographs, pieces of apparel of famous men and women, etc. These are the things which bring us as near as possible to reality; to the persons to whom they once belonged, they are the links which bind us to them and make us in so far, at least, related. "To possess a glove once worn by Shakespeare," " writes d'Alviella, "a bit of his manuscript, his autograph, is to possess a treasure which not even the greatest among us would not prize."1

Symbols are powerful aids to faith because by means of the many sensations they give rise to they keep the object or being symbolized, constantly in the foreground of consciousness. But just so soon as the being or idea, which was once represented in the symbol is forgotten, as soon as the soul within the body is neglected, there is spiritual degeneration and death. The symbol which was at first used merely to assist the mind to conceive of the Deity then becomes a fetich as important as the Deity itself and soon displaces it altogether. Bits of the cross on which Jesus was believed to have died were, during the Middle Ages and even later, considered sacred, and regarded as the best remedy for all diseases. Next in favor came the tears of the Saviour, then of the Virgin Mary and St. Peter, then the drops of blood of Jesus and the Martyrs. Hair and toe nails also had great remedial qualities and were sold at extravagant prices. A lucrative trade was carried on in iron filings from the chains with which it was claimed that Peter

1 See Goblet D'Alviella: The Migration of Symbols.' p. 3.