WHAT DOES RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE TELL US ABOUT GOD
“A noiseless, patient spider,
I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them.
“And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,—seeking the spheres, to
connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my soul.”
—WALT WHITMAN.
There are many forms of experience which in the primary, unanalyzed,
unreflective stage appear to bring us into immediate contact with
self-transcending reality. We seem to be nearer the heart of things,
more imbedded in life and in reality itself when consciousness is fused
and unified in an undifferentiated whole of experience than in the
later stage of reflection and description. This later stage necessarily
involves reduction because it involves abstraction. We cannot bring any
object or any experience to exact description without stripping it of its
life and its mystery and without reducing it to the abstract qualities
which are unvarying and repeatable.
There can be no doubt that our experiences of beauty, for instance, have
a physical and describable aspect. The sunset which thrills us is for
descriptive purposes an aggregation of minute water-drops which set ether
waves vibrating at different velocities, and, as a result, we receive
certain nerve shocks that are pleasurable. These nerve shocks modify
brain cells and affect arterial and visceral vibrations, all of which
might conceivably be accurately described. But no complete account of
these minute cloud particles, or of these ether vibrations; no catalogue
of these nerve shocks, cell changes, or arterial throbs can catch or
present to us what we get in the naïve and palpitating experience of
beauty itself. Something there in the field of perception has suddenly
fused our consciousness into an undifferentiated whole in which sensuous
elements, intellectual and ideal elements, emotional and conative
elements are indissolubly merged into a vital _system_ which baffles all
analysis. Something got through perception puts all the powers of the
inner self into play and into harmony, overcomes all dualisms of self and
other, annuls all contradictions that may later be discovered, lifts the
mind to the apprehension of objects of a higher order than that of sense,
and liberates and vitalizes the soul with a consciousness of possession
and joy and freedom.
The flower of the botanist is an aggregation of ovary, calyx, petals,
pistil, and pollen—a thing which can be exactly analyzed and described.
The poet’s flower, on the other hand, is never a flower which could be
pressed in a book or dried in an herbarium. It is a tiny finite object
which suddenly opens a glimpse into a world which mere sense-eyes
never see. It gives “thoughts that do lie too deep for tears.” It is
something so bound in with the whole of things that if one understood it
altogether, he would know “what God and man is.”
These experiences, even if they do not _prove_ that there is a world of
a higher order than that of mechanism and causal systems, at least bring
the recipient moments of relief when he no longer cares for proof and
they enable him to feel that he has authentic tidings of a world which is
as it ought to be.
Our world of “inner experience” can in a similar way be dealt with
by either one of these two characteristically different methods of
approach. We can say, if we wish to do so, as Professor Leuba does in
his _Psychology of Religion_, that “inner experience belongs entirely
to psychology,” “the conscious life belongs entirely to science,”[16]
“we must deal with inner experience according to the best scientific
methods;”[17] or we can seize by an interior integral insight the
rich concrete _meaning_ and significance of the unanalyzed whole of
consciousness, as it lives and moves in us.
Psychology, like all sciences, proceeds by analysis and limitation.
It breaks up the integral whole of inner experience. It strips away
all mystery, all that is private and unique, and it selects for exact
description the permanent and repeatable aspects, and ends with a
consciousness which consists of “mind-states,” or describable “contents.”
Everything that will not reduce to this scientific “form” is ousted
from the lists as negligible. All independent variables, all aspects of
“meaning,” all will-attitudes, the unique feature of personal ideals,
the integral consciousness of self-identity, the inherent tendency to
transcend the “given”—all these features are either ignored or explained
in terms of substitutes. Psychology confines itself, and must confine
itself, to an empirical and describable order of facts. It could no more
discover a transcendent world-order than could geology or astronomy. Its
field is phenomena and the “man” it reports upon is “a naturalistic man,”
as completely describable as the sunset cloud or the botanist’s flower.
What I insist upon, however, is that this “described, naturalistic
man” is not a real existing, living, acting man possessed of interior
experience. He is a constructed man. No addition of described
“mind-states,” no summation of “mind-contents” would ever give
consciousness in its inner living wholeness. The reality whose presence
makes all the difference may be named “fringe,” or “connecting
principle,” or “synthetic unity” or anything you please—“but oh! the
difference to me!” The “psychic elements” of the psychologist are never
really _parts_. Every psychical state is in reality what it is because
it belongs to a person, is flooded with unique life, and is imbedded
in a peculiar whole of personality. Forever psychology by its method
of analysis misses, and must miss, the central core of the reality.
It can analyze, reduce, and describe the abstract, universal, and
repeatable aspects, but it cannot catch the thing itself any more than a
cinematograph can.
Here in the inner life, if anywhere, we are justified in seizing and
valuing the unified and undifferentiated whole of experience in its
central meaning. If this primary experience of integral wholeness and
unity of self be treated as an illusion, to what other pillar and
ground of truth can we fasten? The object of beauty always reveals to
us something which must be comprehended as a totality greater than the
sum of its parts. The thing of beauty takes us beyond the range of the
method of description. So, too, in the case of our richest, most intense,
and unified moments of inner consciousness, we cannot get an adequate
account by the method of analysis. We must supplement science by the
best testimony we can get of the worth and meaning and implications of
interior insight. We must get, where possible, appreciative accounts of
the undifferentiated and unreduced experience and then we can raise the
question as to what is rationally involved in such personal experiences.
As mystical experience supplies us with moments of the highest integral
unity, the richest wholes of consciousness, I shall deal mainly with
that type, and I shall endeavor to see whether it gives any proof of
a trans-subjective reality. There can be no doubt that this type of
experience brings the recipient spiritual holidays from strain and
stress, that it gives life an optimistic tone, and leaves behind a fresh
supply of energy to live by, but can it carry us any farther? Does it
supply us with a ladder or a bridge by which we can get “yonder”?
Josiah Royce in _The World and the Individual_ says that the mystic “gets
his reality not by thinking, but by consulting the data of experience. He
is trying very skillfully to be a pure empiricist.” “Indeed,” he adds, “I
should maintain that the mystics are the only thoroughgoing empiricists
in the history of philosophy.”[18] “Finite as we are,” Royce says
elsewhere in the same book, “lost though we may seem to be in the woods
or in the wide air’s wilderness, in the world of time and chance, we have
still, like the strayed animals or like the migrating birds, our homing
instinct.”[19]
Now the mystics in all ages have insisted that, whether the process
be named “instinct,” or “intuition,” or “inner sense,” or “uprushes,”
the spirit of man is capable of immediate experience of God. There is
something in man, “a soul-center” or “an apex of soul,” which directly
apprehends God. It is an immense claim, but those who have the experience
are as sure that they have found a wider world of life as is the person
who thrills with the appreciation of beauty.
Cases of the experience are so well known to us all to-day that I shall
quote only a very few accounts. It looks to me as though some of this
direct and immediate experience underlay the entire fabric of St. Paul’s
transforming and dynamic religious life. “It pleased God to reveal His
Son in me.” “It is no longer I that live but Christ liveth in me.” “God
sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying _Abba_, Father.”
“God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness hath shined in our
hearts.” The entire autobiographical story, wherever it comes into light,
lets us see a man who is able to face immense tasks and to die daily
because he feels in some real way that his life has become “a habitation
of God through the Spirit” and that he is being “filled to all fullness
with God.” St. Augustine in the same way makes the reader of the
_Confessions_ feel that the most wonderful thing about this strange
African who was for a thousand years to be the Atlas, on whose shoulders
the Church rested, was his experience of God. He is speaking out of
experience when he says, “My God is the Life of my life.” “Thou, O God,
hast made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless until they rest in
Thee.” “I tremble and I burn; I tremble feeling that I am unlike Him; I
burn feeling that I am like Him.” “I heard God as the heart heareth.” “We
climbed in inner thought and speech, and in wonder of Thy works, until we
reached our own minds and passed beyond them and touched That which is
not made but is now as it ever shall be, or rather in It is neither ‘hath
been’ nor ‘shall be’ but only ‘is’—just for an instant touched It and in
one trembling glance arrived at That which is.”
Jacob Boehme’s testimony is very familiar, but it is such a good
interior account that I must repeat it.
“While I was in affliction and trouble, I elevated my spirit,
and earnestly raised it up unto God, as with a great stress
and onset, lifting up my whole heart and mind and will and
resolution to wrestle with the love and mercy of God and not
to give over unless He blessed me—then the Spirit did break
through. When in my resolved zeal I made such an assault,
storm, and onset upon God, as if I had more reserves of virtue
and power ready, with a resolution to hazard my life upon it,
suddenly my spirit did break through the Gate, not without the
assistance of the Holy Spirit, and I reached to the innermost
Birth of the Deity, and there I was embraced with love as a
bridegroom embraces his bride. My triumphing can be compared to
nothing but the experience in which life is generated in the
midst of death or like the resurrection from the dead. In this
Light my spirit suddenly saw through all, and in all created
things, even in herbs and grass, I knew God—who He is, how He
is, and what His will is.”[20]
Very impressive are the less well-known words of Isaac Penington: “This
is He, this is He: There is no other. This is He whom I have waited for
and sought after from my childhood. I have met with my God; I have met
with my Savior. I have felt the healings drop into my soul from under His
wings.”[21]
Edward Carpenter has given many accounts of the transforming experience
when he felt himself united in a living junction with the infinite
“including Self.” “The prince of love,” he says, “touched the walls of
my hut with his finger from within, and passing through like a great
fire delivered me with unspeakable deliverance.”[22] It brought him,
as he himself says, “an absolute freedom from mortality accompanied
by an indescribable calm and joy.”[23] A nameless writer in the
“Atlantic Monthly” for May, 1916, has given a remarkable description
of an experience which is called “Twenty Minutes of Reality.” “I only
remember,” the writer says, “finding myself in the very midst of those
wonderful moments, beholding life for the first time in all its
young intoxication of loveliness in its unspeakable joy, beauty, and
importance. I cannot say what the mysterious change was—I saw no new
thing, but I saw all the usual things in a miraculous new light—in
what I believe is their true light.... Once out of all the gray days
of my life I have looked into the heart of reality; I have witnessed
the truth; I have seen life as it really is—ravishingly, ecstatically,
madly beautiful, and filled to overflowing with a wild joy and a value
unspeakable.”
Finally, I shall give a modern Russian writer’s appreciative report of a
typical mystical experience:
“There are seconds when you suddenly feel the presence of
the eternal harmony perfectly attained. It’s something not
earthly—I don’t mean in the sense that it’s heavenly—but in
that sense that man cannot endure it in his earthly aspect.
He must be physically changed or die. This feeling is clear
and unmistakable; it’s as though you apprehend all nature and
suddenly say, ‘Yes, that’s right.’ God, when He created the
world, said at the end of each day of creation, ‘Yes, it’s
right, it’s good.’ It ... it’s not being deeply moved, but
simply joy. You don’t forgive anything because there is no
more need of forgiveness. It’s not that you love—oh, there’s
something in it higher than love—what’s most awful is that
it’s terribly clear and such joy. In those five seconds I
live through a lifetime, and I’d give my whole life for them,
because they are worth it.”[24]
It should always be noted that the number of persons who are subject to
mystical experiences—that is to say, persons who feel themselves brought
into contact with an environing Presence and supplied with new energy to
live by—is much larger than we usually suppose. We know only the mystics
who were dowered with a literary gift and who could tell in impressive
language what had come to them, but of the multitude of those who have
felt and seen and who yet were unable to tell in words about their
experience, of these we are ignorant. An undeveloped and uncultivated
form of mystical consciousness is present, I think, in most religious
souls, and whenever it is unusually awake and vivid the whole inner and
outer life is intensified by such experiences, even though there may
be little that can be put into explicit account in language. There are
multitudes of men and women now living, often in out-of-the-way places,
in remote hamlets or on isolated farms, who are the salt of the earth
and the light of the world in their communities, because they have had
vital experiences that revealed to them realities which their neighbors
missed and that supplied them with energy to live by which the mere
“church-goers” failed to find.
I am more and more convinced, as I pursue my studies on the meaning and
value of mysticism, with the conviction that religion, _i.e._ religion
when it is real, alive, vital, and transforming, is essentially and at
bottom a mystical act, a direct response to an inner world of spiritual
reality, an implicit relationship between the finite and infinite,
between the part and the whole. The French philosopher, Émile Boutroux,
has finely called this junction of finite and infinite in us, by which
these mystical experiences are made possible, “the Beyond that is
within”—“the Beyond,” as he says, “with which man comes in touch on the
inner side of his nature.”
Whenever we go back to the fundamental mystical experience, to the soul’s
first-hand testimony, we come upon a conviction that the human spirit
transcends itself and is environed by a spiritual world with which it
holds commerce and vital relationship. The constructive mystics, not
only of the Christian communions but also those of other religions, have
explored higher levels of life than those on which men usually live, and
they have given impressive demonstration through the heightened dynamic
quality of their lives and service that they have been drawing upon and
utilizing reservoirs of vital energy. They have revealed a peculiar
aptitude for correspondence with the Beyond that is within, and they
have exhibited a genius for living by their inner conviction of God, “of
practicing God,” as Jeremy Taylor called it.
But are we justified in making such large affirmations? Is there anything
in the nature of mystical experience that warrants us in taking the
leap from inner vision to existential reality? Can we legitimately get
from a finite, subjective feeling to an objective and infinite God?
The answer is of course obvious. There is no way to get a bridge from
finite to infinite, from subject to object, from _idea_ to that which
the idea _means_, from human to divine, from mere man to God, if they
are isolated, sundered, disparate entities to start with. No mere
finite experience of a mere finite thing can be anything but finite,
and no juggling can get out of the experience what is not in it. If we
mean by “empirical” that which is “given” as explicit sense-content of
consciousness, then the only empirical argument that could be would be
the statement that we experience what we experience. We should not get
beyond the consciousness of interjection—“lo!” “voila!”
In this sense of the term, of course nobody ever did or ever could
“experience God.” We are shut up entirely to a stream of inner states,
a seriatim consciousness, “a shower of shot,” which can give us no
_knowledge_ at all, either, in Berkeley’s words, of “the choir of heaven”
or of “the furniture of earth” or of “the mighty frame of the world,” or
in fact, of any permanent self within us.
Used in the narrow Humian sense there are no “empirical arguments” for
the existence of God, but the misery of it is there are no arguments
for anything else either! We must therefore widen out the meaning of
the term “empirical” and include in it not only the actual “content” of
experience, but all that is involved and implicated _in_ experience.
We cannot talk about any kind of reality until we interpret experience
through its rational implications. Nobody ever perceives “a black
beetle” and knows it as “a black beetle” without transcending “pure
empiricism,” _i.e._ without using categories which are not a product of
experience. All experience which has any knowledge-import, or value,
possesses within itself self-transcendence, that is to say, it apprehends
or takes by storm some sort of external or objective reality. Nobody
is ever disturbed by the fallacy of subjectivism until he has become
debauched by metaphysics. The fallacy of subjectivism is always the
product of the abstract intellect, _i.e._ the intellect which divides
experience, and takes an abstract part for a whole.
It is further true that all knowledge-experience possesses within itself
finite-transcendence, _i.e._ it contains in itself a principle of
infinity and could become absolutely rationalized only in an infinite
whole of reality with which the experience is in organic unity. I agree
fully with Professor Hocking that “it is doubtful whether there are
any finite ideas at all.” The consciousness of the finite has working
in it the reality of the whole. The finite can never be considered as
self-existent; it can never be real. There is forever present in the
very heart and nature of consciousness a trope, a nisus, a straining
of the fragment to link itself up with the self-complete whole, and
every flash of knowledge and every pursuit of the good reveals that
_trend_. Something of the _other_ is always in the _me_—and however
finite I may be I am always beyond myself, and am conjunct with “the
pulse beat of the whole system.” Either we must give up talking of
knowledge or we must affirm that knowledge involves a self-complete and
self-explanatory reality with which our consciousness has connection.
We cannot think finite and contingent things, or aim at goodness
however fragmentary, without rational appeal to something infinite and
necessary. Human experience cannot be rationally conceived except as a
fragment of a vastly more inclusive experience, always implied within
the finite spirit, unifying and binding together into one whole all that
is absolutely real and true. Whether we are dealing with the so-called
mystical experience or any other kind of experience we are bound to
postulate, or take for granted, whatever is rationally implicated in the
very nature of the experience on our hands.
No type of consciousness carries the implication of self-transcendence,
or finite-transcendence, more coercively than does genuine mystical
experience. The central aspect of it is the fusion of the self into a
larger undifferentiated whole. It is thus much more the type of æsthetic
experience than it is the type of knowledge-experience. In both types—the
æsthetic and the mystical—consciousness is fused into union with its
object, that is to say, the usual dualistic character of consciousness
is transcended, though of course not wholly obliterated. A new level
of consciousness is gained in which the division of self and other is
minimal. But it is by no means, in either case, an empty or a negative
state. The impression which so many mystics have given of negation or
passivity springs, as Von Hügel declares, from an unusually large amount
of actualized energy, an energy which is now penetrating and finding
expression by every pore and fiber of the soul. The whole moral and
spiritual creature expands and rests, yes: but this very rest is produced
by action “unperceived because so fleet,” “so near, so all fulfilling;
or rather by a tissue of single acts, mental, emotional, volitional,
so finely interwoven, so exceptionally stimulative and expressive of
the soul’s deepest aspirations, that these acts are not perceived as
single acts, indeed that their very collective presence is apt to remain
unnoticed by the soul itself.”[25] Wordsworth’s account passes almost
unconsciously from appreciation of beauty into joyous apprehension of God
and it is a wonderful self-revelation of fused consciousness which is
positively affirmative.
“Sensation, soul and form
All melted into him; they swallowed up
His animal being; in them did he live,
And by them did he live; they were his life.
In such access of mind, in such high hours
Of visitation from the living God,
Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired.
No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request;
Rapt into still communion that transcends
The imperfect offices of prayer and praise,
His mind was a thanksgiving to the power
That made him; it was blessedness and love.”
Tennyson has given many accounts both in prose and poetry of similar
affirmation experiences, sometimes initiated from within and sometimes
from without. This account from the _Memoirs_ is a good specimen: “I
have frequently had a kind of waking trance—this for the lack of a
better word—quite up from my 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 almost
laughable impossibility—the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming
no extinction, but the only true life.”
Like the æsthetic experience, again, the mystical experience brings an
extraordinary integration, or unifying, of the self, a flooding of the
entire being with joy and an expansion which, as in the case of the
highest æsthetic experiences, takes the soul out into a world which
“never was on sea or land,” and which, nevertheless, for the moment seems
the only world.
Balfour has finely pointed out in his _Theism and Humanism_, that this
expansion and joy and infinite aspect which are inherent in the æsthetic
values cannot be rationally explained except on the supposition that
these values are in part dependent upon a spiritual conception of the
world—the experience must have a pedigree adequate to account for its
greatness. We cannot begin with an experience which gives an absolutely
new dimension of life and a new world of joy, and then end in our
explanation with a phenomenal play of cosmic atoms—“full of sound and
fury, signifying nothing.”
The same thing is true with our mystical experience. We cannot, of
course, say offhand that here we experience God as one experiences
an object of sense, or that we have at last found an infallible and
indubitable evidence of the infinite God. My only contention is that
here is a form of experience which implies one of two things. Either
there is far greater depth and complexity to the inmost nature of
personal self-consciousness than we usually take into account, that
is, we ourselves are bottomless and inwardly exhaustless in range
and scope; _or_ the fragmentary thing we call our self is continuous
inwardly with a wider spiritual world with which we have some sort of
contact-relationship and from which vitalizing energy comes in to us. It
is too soon to decide between these two alternatives. We are only at the
very beginning of the study of the submerged life within ourselves, and
we must know vastly more about it than we now know before we can draw the
boundaries of the soul or declare with certainty what comes from its own
deeps and what comes from beyond its farthest margins. The studies of
Bergson and still more emphatically the studies of Dr. William McDougall
in _Body and Mind_ show very conclusively that the consciousness of
_meaning_, the higher forms of memory, the richer and more subtle
emotional experiences and the more significant facts of attention,
conation, and will cannot be explained in terms of cerebral activities or
by any kind of mechanical causation.[26]
To arrive at any explanation of the most central activities of personal
consciousness we must assume that consciousness is a reality existing in
its own sphere and vastly transcending the physical mechanism which it
uses. If this is a fact—and McDougall’s argument is the work of one of
the most careful and scientifically trained of modern psychologists—then
there is no reason why what we call the “soul” might not on occasions
receive incomes of life and spiritual energy from the infinite source
of consciousness. I can only say that the mystic in his highest moments
feels himself to be and believes himself to be in vital fellowship with
Another than himself—and what is more, some power to live by does come
in from somewhere. Mystical experiences in a large number of instances
not only permanently integrate the self but also bring an added and
heightened moral and spiritual quality and a greatly increased dynamic
effect.
We are still in the stage of mystery in dealing with the causes of
variations and mutations in the biological order. Something surprising
and novel, something that was not there before, something incalculable
and unpredictable suddenly appears and a little living creature arrives
equipped with a trait which no ancestor had and by means of which he can
endure better, can see farther or run faster, can survive longer, and is,
in fact, on a higher life-level. We do not know how the little midget
did it. But some _élan vital_ may have burst in from an invisible and
intangible environment, more real even than the environment we see. The
universe, as Professor Shaler once said, seems to be “a realm of unending
and infinitely varied originations.” So, too, these flushes of splendor
which break through the “Soul’s east window of divine surprise” may
come from a perfectly real spiritual environment without which a finite
spirit could not be at all or live at all. I do not know. Our fragmentary
experiences cannot enable us to furnish irrefragible proof. It only looks
_as though_ God were within reach and _as though_ at moments we were at
home with Him.
Gilbert Murray’s cautious conclusion in his fine essay on _Stoicism_ is a
good word with which to close this chapter.
“We seem to find,” he says, “not only in all religions, but in
practically all philosophies, some belief that man is not quite alone
in the universe, but is met in his endeavours towards the good by
some external help or sympathy.... It is important to realize that
the so-called belief is not really an intellectual judgment so much
as a craving of the whole nature [in us].... It is only of very late
years that psychologists have begun to realize the enormous dominion
of those forces in man of which he is normally unconscious. We cannot
escape as easily as these brave men [the Stoics] dreamed from the grip
of the blind powers beneath the threshold. Indeed, as I see philosophy
after philosophy falling into this unproven belief in the Friend behind
phenomena, as I find that I myself cannot, except for a moment and by
an effort, refrain from making the same assumption, it seems to me that
perhaps here, too, we are under the spell of a very old ineradicable
instinct. We are gregarious animals; our ancestors have been such for
countless ages. We cannot help looking out on the world as gregarious
animals do; we see it in terms of humanity and of fellowship. Students of
animals under domestication have shown us how the habits of a gregarious
creature, taken away from his kind, are shaped in a thousand details by
reference to the lost pack which is no longer there—the pack which a dog
tries to smell his way back to all the time he is out walking, the pack
he calls to for help when danger threatens. It is a strange and touching
thing, this eternal hunger of the gregarious animal for the herd of
friends who are not there. And it may be, it may very possibly be, that,
in the matter of this Friend behind phenomena, our own yearning and our
own almost ineradicable instinctive conviction, since they are certainly
not founded on either reason or observation, are in origin the groping of
a lonely-souled gregarious animal to find its herd or its herd-leader in
the great spaces between the stars.
“At any rate, it is a belief very difficult to get rid of.”
FOOTNOTES
[1] Mark I. 10-11.
[2] II Corinthians III. 17.
[3] Ephesians I. 23.
[4] It is true, no doubt, that the word “mystery” in the New Testament is
generally used with a technical meaning. I shall refer later to the true
significance of the word, but for the moment it is not overstraining it
to use it as I have done in the text.
[5] Bertrand Russell’s _Philosophical Essays_, pp. 60, 61.
[6] _Ibid._, p. 70.
[7] Arthur Balfour’s _Theism and Humanism_, p. 87.
[8] _Ibid._, p. 134.
[9] _Ibid._, p. 273.
[10] _Ibid._, p. 274.
[11] Tennyson’s _Two Voices_.
[12] Titchener’s _Beginner’s Psychology_, p. 19.
[13] Dr. William McDougall’s _Body and Mind_, p. 335.
[14] William James’ _Principles of Psychology_, Vol. II, p. 583.
[15] James’ _Psychology_ (Briefer Course), p. 237.
[16] Leuba’s _Psychology of Religion_, p. 212.
[17] _Ibid._, p. 277.
[18] _The World and the Individual_, Vol. I, p. 81.
[19] _Ibid._, p. 181.
[20] _The Aurora_, Chap. XIX, pp. 10-13.
[21] Isaac Penington, _Works_, Vol. I, p. xxxvii.
[22] _Towards Democracy_, p. 190.
[23] _Ibid._, p. 513.
[24] Dostoievsky’s _The Possessed_.
[25] _The Mystical Element_, Vol. II, p. 132.
[26] This point has been discussed in the previous chapter.
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