THE MYSTIC’S EXPERIENCE OF GOD
I
The revival of mysticism which has been one of the noteworthy features
in the Christianity of our time has presented us with a number of
interesting and important questions. We want to know, first of all, what
mysticism really is. Secondly, we want to know whether it is a normal or
abnormal experience. And omitting many other questions which must wait
their turn, we want to know whether mystical experiences actually enlarge
our sphere of knowledge, i.e., whether they are trustworthy sources of
authentic information and authoritative truth concerning realities which
lie beyond the range of human senses.
The answer to the first question appears to be as difficult to accomplish
as the return of Ulysses was. The secret is kept in book after book.
One can marshall a formidable array of definitions, but they oppose and
challenge one another, like the men sprung from the dragon’s teeth.
For the purposes of the present consideration we can eliminate what is
usually included under psychical phenomena, that is, the phenomena of
dreams, visions and trances, hysteria and dissociation and esoteric
and occult phenomena. Thirty years ago Professor Royce said: “In the
Father’s house are many mansions, and their furniture is extremely
manifold. Astral bodies and palmistry, trances and mental healing,
communications from the dead and ‘phantasms of the living’—such things
are for some people to-day the sole quite unmistakable evidences of the
supremacy of the spiritual world.” These phenomena are worthy of careful
painstaking study and attention, for they will eventually throw much
light upon the deep and complex nature of human personality, are in fact
already throwing much light upon it. But they furnish us slender data
for understanding what is properly meant by mystical experience and its
religious and spiritual bearing.
We can, too, leave on one side the metaphysical doctrines which fill a
large amount of space in the books of the great mystics. These doctrines
had a long historical development and they would have taken essentially
the same form if the exponents of them had not been mystics. Mystical
experience is confined to no one form of philosophy, though some ways of
thinking no doubt favor and other ways retard the experience, as they
also often do in the case of religious _faith_ in general. Mystical
experience, furthermore, must not be confused with what technical expert
writers call “the mystic way.” There are as many mystical “ways” as there
are gates to the New Jerusalem: “On the east three gates, on the north
three gates, on the south three gates, and on the west three gates.” One
might as well try to describe _the way_ of making love, or _the way_ of
appreciating the grand canyon as to describe _the way_ to the discovery
of God, as though there were only one way.
I am not interested in mysticism as an _ism_. It turns out in most
accounts to be a dry and abstract thing, hardly more like the warm and
intimate experience than the color of a map is like the country for which
it stands. “Canada is very pink,” seems quite an inadequate description
of the noble country north of our border. It is mystical experience and
not mysticism that is worthy of our study. We are concerned with the
experience itself, not with second-hand formulations of it. “The mystic,”
says Professor Royce, “is a thorough-going empiricist;” “God ceases to
be an object and becomes an experience,” says Professor Pringle-Pattison.
If it is an experience we want to find out what happens to the mystic
himself inside where he lives. According to those who have been there
the experience which we call mystical is charged with the conviction of
real, direct contact and commerce with God. It is the almost universal
testimony of those who are mystics that they find God through their
experience. John Tauler says that in his best moments of “devout prayer
and the uplifting of the mind to God,” he experiences “the pure presence
of God in his own soul,” but he adds that all he can tell others about
the experience is “as poor and unlike it as the point of a needle is
to the heavens above us.” “I have met with my God; I have met with
my Savior. I have felt the healings drop upon my soul from under His
wings,” says Isaac Penington in the joy of his first mystical experience.
Without needlessly multiplying such testimonies for data, we can say
with considerable assurance that mystical experience is consciousness of
direct and immediate relationship with some transcendent reality which in
the moment of experience is believed to be God. “This is He, this is He,”
exclaims Isaac Penington, “there is no other: This is He whom I have
waited for and sought after from my childhood.” Angela of Foligno says
that she experienced God, and saw that the whole world was full of God.
II
There are many different degrees of intensity, concentration and
conviction in the experiences of different individual mystics, and also
in the various experiences of the same individual from time to time.
There has been a tendency in most studies of mysticism to regard the
state of ecstasy as _par excellence_ mystical experience. That is,
however, a grave mistake. The calmer, more meditative, less emotional,
less ecstatic experiences of God are not less convincing and possess
greater constructive value for life and character than do ecstatic
experiences which presuppose a peculiar psychical frame and disposition.
The seasoned Quaker in the corporate hush and stillness of a silent
meeting is far removed from ecstasy, but he is not the less convinced
that he is meeting with God. For the _essentia_ of mysticism we do not
need to insist upon a certain “sacred” mystic way nor upon ecstasy,
nor upon any peculiar type of rare psychic upheavals. We do need to
insist, however, upon a consciousness of commerce with God amounting to
conviction of his presence.
“Where one heard noise
And one saw flame,
I only knew He named my name.”
Jacob Boehme calls the experience which came to him, “breaking through
the gate,” into “a new birth or resurrection from the dead,” so that, he
says, “I knew God.” “I am certain,” says Eckhart, “as certain as that I
live, that nothing is so near to me as God. God is nearer to me than I
am to myself.” One of these experiences—the first one—was an ecstasy,
and the other, so far as we can tell, was not. It was the flooding in of
a moment of God-consciousness in the act of preaching a sermon to the
common people of Cologne. The experience of Penington, again, was not
an ecstasy; it was the vital surge of fresh life on the first occasion
of hearing George Fox preach after a long period of waiting silence. A
simple normal case of a mild type is given in a little book of recent
date, reprinted from the _Atlantic Monthly_: “After a long time of
jangling conflict and inner misery, I one day, _quite quietly and with
no conscious effort_, stopped doing the dis-ingenuous thing [I had been
doing]. Then the marvel happened. It was as if a great rubber band which
had been stretched almost to the breaking point were suddenly released
and snapped back to its normal condition. Heaven and earth were changed
for me. Everything was glorious because of its relation to some great
central life—nothing seemed to matter but that life.” Brother Lawrence,
a barefooted lay-brother of the seventeenth century, according to the
testimony of the brotherhood, attained “an unbroken and undisturbed sense
of the Presence of God.” He was not an ecstatic; he was a quiet, faithful
man who did his ordinary daily tasks with what seemed to his friends
“an unclouded vision, an illuminated love and an uninterrupted joy.”
Simple and humble though he was, he nevertheless acquired, through his
experience of God, “an extraordinary spaciousness of mind.”
The more normal, expansive mystical experiences come apparently when the
personal self is at its best. Its powers and capacities are raised to an
unusual unity and fused together. The whole being, with its accumulated
submerged life, _finds itself_. The process of preparing for any high
achievement is a severe and laborious one, but nothing seems easier in
the moment of success than is the accomplishment for which the life
has been prepared. There comes to be formed within the person what
Aristotle called “a dexterity of soul,” so that the person does with ease
what he has become skilled to do. Clement of Alexandria called a fully
organized and spiritualized person “a harmonized man,” that is, adjusted,
organized and ready to be a transmissive organ for the revelation of
God. Brother Lawrence, who was thus “harmonized,” finely says, “The most
excellent method which I found of going to God was that of _doing my
common business_, purely for the love of God.” An earlier mystic of the
fourteenth century stated the same principle in these words: “It is my
aim to be to the Eternal God what a man’s hand is to a man.”
There are many human experiences which carry a man up to levels where
he has not usually been before and where he finds himself possessed of
insight and energies he had hardly suspected were his until that moment.
One leaps to his full height when the right inner spring is reached. We
are quite familiar with the way in which instinctive tendencies in us
and emotions both egoistic and social, become organized under a group
of ideas and ideals into a single system which we call a sentiment,
such as love, or patriotism, or devotion to truth. It forms slowly and
one hardly realizes that it has formed until some occasion unexpectedly
brings it into full operation, and we find ourselves able with perfect
ease to overcome the most powerful inhibitory and opposing instincts
and habits, which, until then, had usually controlled us. We are
familiar, too, with the way in which a well-trained and disciplined mind,
confronted by a concrete situation, will sometimes—alas not always—in a
sudden flash of imaginative insight, discover a universal law revealed
there and then in the single phenomenon, as Sir Isaac Newton did and
as, in a no less striking way, Sir William Rowan Hamilton did in his
discovery of Quaternions. Literary and artistic geniuses supply us with
many instances in which, in a sudden flash, the crude material at hand is
shot through with vision, and the complicated plot of a drama, the full
significance of a character, or the complete glory of a statue stands
revealed, as though, to use R. L. Stevenson’s illustration, a genie
had brought it on a golden tray as a gift from another world. Abraham
Lincoln, striking off in a few intense minutes his Gettysburg address, as
beautiful in style and perfect in form as anything in human literature,
is as good an illustration as we need of the way in which a highly
organized person, by a kindling flash, has at his hand all the moral and
spiritual gains of a life time.
There is a famous account of the flash of inspiration given by Philo,
which can hardly be improved. It is as follows: “I am not ashamed to
recount my own experience. At times, when I have proposed to enter upon
my wonted task of writing on philosophical doctrines, with an exact
knowledge of the materials which were to be put together, I have had
to leave off without any work accomplished, finding my mind barren and
fruitless, and upbraiding it for its self-complacency, while startled at
the might of the Existent One, in whose power it lies to open and close
the wombs of the soul. But at other times, when I had come empty, all of
a sudden I have been filled with thoughts, showered down and sown upon
me unseen from above, so that by Divine possession I have fallen into
a rapture and become ignorant of everything, the place, those present,
myself, what was spoken or written. For I have received a stream of
interpretation, a fruition of light, the most clear-cut sharpness of
vision, the most vividly distinct view of the matter before me, such as
might be received through the eyes from the most luminous presentation.”
The most important mystical experiences are something like that. They
occur usually not at the beginning of the religious life but rather in
the ripe and developed stage of it. They are the fruit of long-maturing
processes. Clement’s “the harmonized man” is always a person who has
brought his soul into parallelism with divine currents, has habitually
practiced his religious insights and has finally formed a unified
central self, subtly sensitive, acutely responsive to the Beyond within
him. In such experiences which may come suddenly or may come as a more
gradual process, the whole self operates and masses all the cumulations
of a lifetime. They are no more emotional than they are rational and
volitional. We have a total personality, awake, active, and “aware of his
life’s flow.” Instead of seeing in a flash a law of gravitation, or the
plot and character of Hamlet, or the uncarven form of Moses the Law-giver
in a block of marble, one sees at such times the moral demonstrations
of a lifetime and vividly feels the implications that are essentially
involved in a spiritual life. In the high moment God is seen to be as
sure as the soul is.
“I stood at Naples once, a night so dark
I could have scarce conjectured there was earth
Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all:
But the night’s black was burst through by a blaze—
Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore,
Through her whole length of mountain visible:
There lay the city thick and plain with spires,
And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea.
So may the truth be flashed out by one blow.”
To some the truth of God never comes closer than a logical conclusion. He
is held to be as a living item in a creed. To the mystic he becomes real
in the same sense that experienced beauty is real, or the feel of spring
is real, or that summer sunlight is real—he has been found, he has been
met, he is present.
Before discussing the crucial question whether these experiences are
evidential and are worthy of consideration as an addition to the world’s
stock of truth and knowledge I must say a few words about the normality
or abnormality of them. Nothing of any value can be said on this point
of mystical experience in the _abstract_. One must first catch his
concrete case. Some instances are normal and some are undoubtedly
abnormal. Trance, ecstasy and rapture are unusual experiences and in
that sense not normal occurrences. They usually indicate, furthermore, a
pathological condition of personality and are thus abnormal in the more
technical sense. There is, however, something more to be said on this
point. It seems pretty well established that some persons—and they have
often been creative leaders and religious geniuses—have succeeded in
organizing their lives, in finding their trail, in charging their whole
personality with power, in attaining a moral dynamic and in tapping vast
reservoirs of energy by means of states which, if occurring in other
persons, would no doubt be called pathological. The real test here is
a pragmatic one. It seems hardly sound to call a state abnormal if it
has raised the experiencer, as a mystic experience often does, into a
hundred horse-power man and through his influence has turned multitudes
of other men and women into more joyous, hopeful and efficient persons.
This question of abnormality and reality is thus not one to be settled
off-hand by a superficial diagnosis.
An experience which brings spaciousness of mind, new interior dimensions,
ability to stand the universe—and the people in it—and capacity to
work at human tasks with patience, endurance and wisdom may quite
intelligently be called normal, though to an external beholder it
may look like what he usually calls a trance of hysteria, a state of
dissociation, or hypnosis by auto-suggestion. It should be added,
however, as I have already said, that mystical experience is not
confined to these extremer types. They may or may not be pathological.
The calmer and more restrained stages of mysticism are more important and
significant and are no more marked with the stigma of hysteria than is
love-making, enjoyment of music, devotion to altruistic causes, risking
one’s life for country, or any lofty experience of _value_.
III
We come at length to the central question of our consideration: Do
mystical experiences settle anything? Are they purely subjective and
one-sided, or do they prove to have objective reference and so to be
two-sided? Do they take the experiencer across the chasm that separates
“self” from “Other”? Mystical experience undoubtedly feels as though it
had objective reference. It comes to the individual with indubitable
authority. He is certain that he has found some thing other than himself.
He has an unescapable conviction that he is in contact and commerce with
reality beyond the margins of his personal self. “A tremendous muchness
is suddenly revealed,” as William James once put it.
We do not get very far when we undertake to reduce knowledge to an
affair of sense-experience. “They reckon ill who leave me out,” can be
said by the organized, personal, creative mind as truly as by Brahma.
There are many forms of human experience in which the data of the
senses are so vastly transcended that they fail to furnish any real
explanation of what occurs in consciousness. This is true of all our
experiences of _value_, which apparently spring out of synthetic or
synoptic activities of the mind, i.e., activities in which the mind is
unified and creative. The vibrations of ether which bombard the rods and
cones of the retina may be the occasion for the appreciation of beauty
in sky or sea or flower, but they are surely not the _cause_ of it. The
concrete event which confronts me is very likely the occasion for the
august pronouncement of moral issues which my conscience makes, but it
can not be said that the concrete event in any proper sense _causes_ this
consciousness of moral obligation. The famous answer of Leibnitz to the
crude sense-philosophy of his time is still cogent. To the phrase: “There
is nothing in the mind that has not come through the senses,” Leibnitz
added, “except the mind itself.” That means that the creative activity
of the mind is always an important factor in experience and one that can
not be ignored in any of the processes of knowledge. Unfortunately we
have done very little yet in the direction of comprehending the interior
depth of the personal mind or of estimating adequately the part which
mind itself in its creative capacity plays in all knowledge functions. It
will only be when we have succeeded in getting beyond what Plato called
the bird-cage theory of knowledge to a sound theory of knowledge and
to a solid basis for spiritual values that we shall be able to discuss
intelligently the “findings” of the mystic.
The world at the present moment is pitiably “short” in its stock of
sound theories of knowledge. The prevailing psychologies do not explain
knowledge at all. The behaviorists do not try to explain it any more
than the astronomer or the physicist does. The psychologist who reduces
mind to an aggregation of describable “mind-states” has started out on
a course which makes an explanation forever impossible, since knowledge
can be explained only through unity and integral wholeness, never through
an aggregation of parts, as though it were a mental “shower of shot.” If
we expect to talk about _knowledge_ and seriously propose to use that
great word _truth_, we must at least begin with the assumption of an
intelligent, creative, organizing center of self-consciousness which can
transcend itself and can _know_ what is beyond and other than itself. In
short, the talk about a “chasm” between subject and object—knower and
thing known—is as absurd as it would be to talk of a chasm between the
convex and the concave sides of a curve. Knowledge is always knowledge
of an object and mystical experience has all the essential marks of
objective reference, as certainly as other forms of experience have.
Professor J. M. Baldwin very well says that there is a form of
contemplation in which, as in æsthetic experience, the strands of
the mind’s diverging dualisms are “_merged and fused_.” He adds: “In
this experience of a fusion which is not a mixture but which issues
in a meaning of its own sort and kind, an experience whose essential
character is just this unity of comprehension, consciousness attains its
completest, its most direct, and its final apprehension of what Reality
is and means.” It really comes round to the question whether the mind of
a self-conscious person has any way of approach, except by way of the
senses, to any kind of reality. There is no _a priori_ answer to that
question. It can only be settled by experience. It is, therefore, pure
dogmatism to say, as Professor Dunlap in his recent attack on mysticism
does, that all conscious processes are based on sense-stimulation and
all thought as well as perception depends on reaction to sense-stimulus.
It is no doubt true that behavior psychology must resort to some such
formula, but that only means that such psychology is always dealing
with greatly transformed and reduced beings, when it attempts to deal
with persons like us who, in the richness of our concrete lives, are
never reduced to “behavior-beings.” We have interior dimensions and that
is the end on’t! Some persons—and they are by no means feeble-minded
individuals—are as certain that they have commerce with a world within
as they are that they have experiences of a world outside in space.
Thomas Aquinas, who neither in method nor in doctrine leaned toward
mysticism, though he was most certainly “a harmonized man,” and who in
theory postponed the vision of God to a realm beyond death, nevertheless
had an experience two years before he died which made him put his pen
and inkhorn on the shelf and never write another word of his _Summa
Theologiae_. When he was reminded of the incomplete state of his great
work and was urged to go on with it, he only replied, “I have seen that
which makes all that I have written look small to me.”
It may be just possible that there is a universe of spiritual reality
upon which our finite spirits open inward as inlets open into the sea.
“Like the tides on the crescent sea-beach
When the moon is new and thin
Into our hearts high yearnings
Come welling and surging in;
Come from that mystic ocean
Whose rim no foot has trod.
Some call it longing
But others call it God.”
Such a view is perfectly sane and tenable; it conflicts with no proved
and demonstrated facts either in the nature of the universe or of
mind. It seems anyway to the mystic that there is such a world, that
he has found it as surely as Columbus found San Salvador, and that his
experience is a truth-telling experience.
IV
But granting that it is truth-telling and has objective reference, is the
mystic justified in claiming that he has found and knows God? One does
not need to be a very wide and extensive student of mystical experience
to discover what a meager stock of knowledge the genuine mystic reports.
William James’ remarkable experience in the Adirondack woods very well
illustrates the type. It had, he says, “an intense significance of some
sort, if one could only _tell_ the significance.... In point of fact, I
can’t find a single word for all that significance and don’t know what it
was significant of, so that it remains a mere boulder of impression.”[7]
At a later date James refers to that “extraordinary vivacity of man’s
psychological commerce with something Ideal that _feels as if_ it were
also actual.”[8] The greatest of all the fourteenth century mystics,
Meister Eckhart, could not put his _impression_ into words or ideas. What
he found was a “wilderness of the Godhead where no one is at home,” i.e.,
an Object with no particular differentiated, concrete characteristics.
It was not an accident that so many of the mystics hit upon the _via
negativa_, the way of negation, or that they called their discovery “the
divine Dark.”
“Whatever your mind comes at
I tell you flat
God is not that.”
Mystical experience does not supply concrete information. It does not
bring new finite facts, new items that can be used in a description of
“the scenery and circumstance” of the realm beyond our sense horizons.
It is the awareness of a Presence, the consciousness of a Beyond, the
discovery, as James puts it, that “we are continuous with a More of the
same quality, which is operative in us and in touch with us.”
The most striking effect of such experience is not new fact-knowledge,
not new items of empirical information, but new moral energy, heightened
conviction, increased caloric quality, enlarged spiritual vision, an
unusual radiant power of life. In short, the whole personality, in the
case of the constructive mystics, appears to be raised to a new level of
life and to have gained from somewhere many calories of life-feeding,
spiritual substance. We are quite familiar with the way in which
adrenalin suddenly flushes into the physical system and adds a new and
incalculable power to brain and muscle. Under its stimulus a man can
carry out a piano when the house is on fire. May not, perhaps, some
energy from some Source with which our spirits are allied flush our inner
being with forces and powers by which we can be fortified to stand the
universe and more than stand it! “We are more than conquerors through
Him that loved us,” is the way one of the world’s greatest mystics felt.
Mystical experience—and we must remember as Santayana has said, that
“experience is like a shrapnel shell and bursts into a thousand
meanings”—does at least one thing. It makes God sure to the person who
has had the experience. It raises faith and conviction to the nth power.
“The God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shined into my
heart to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God,” is St.
Paul’s testimony. “I knew God by revelation,” declares George Fox. “I was
as one who hath the key and doth open.” “The man who has attained this
felicity,” Plotinus says, “meets some turn of fortune that he would not
have chosen, but there is not the slightest lessening of his happiness
for that” (En. I: iv. 7). But this experience, with its overwhelming
conviction and its dynamic effect, can not be put into the common coin of
speech. Frederic Myers has well expressed the difficulty:
“Oh could I tell ye surely would believe it!
Oh could I only say what I have seen!
How should I tell or how can ye receive it,
How, till He bringeth you where I have been?”
There is no concrete “information” which can be shared with others.
When Columbus found San Salvador he was able to describe it to those who
did not sail with him in the Santa Maria, but when the mystic finds God
he can not give us any “knowledge” in plain words of everyday speech. He
can only refer to his boulder, or his Gibraltar, of _impression_ That
situation is what we should expect. We can not, either, describe any of
our great emotions. We can not impart what flushes into our consciousness
in moments of lofty intuition. We have a submerged life within us which
is certainly no less real than our hand or foot. It influences all that
we do or say, but we do not find it easy to utter it. In the presence of
the sublime we have nothing to say—or if we do say anything it is a great
mistake! Language is forged to deal with experiences which are common
to many persons, i.e., to experiences which refer to objects in space.
We have no vocabulary for the subtle, elusive flashes of vision which
are unique, individual and unsharable, as for instance is our personal
sense of “the tender grace of a day that is dead.” We are forced in all
these matters to resort to symbolic suggestion and to artistic devices.
Coventry Patmore said with much insight:
“In divinity and love
What’s best worth saying can’t be said.”
I believe that mystical experiences do in the long run expand our
knowledge of God and do succeed in verifying themselves. Mysticism is a
sort of spiritual protoplasm that underlies, as a basic substance, much
that is best in religion, in ethics and in life itself. It has generally
been the mystic, the prophet, the seer that has spotted out new ways
forward in the jungle of our world, or lifted our race to new spiritual
levels. Their experiences have in some way equipped them for unusual
tasks, have given supplies of energy to them which their neighbors did
not have, and have apparently brought them into vital correspondence with
dimensions and regions of reality that others miss. The proof that they
have found God, or at least a domain of spiritual reality, does not lie
in some new stock of knowledge, not in some gnostic secret, which they
bring back; it is to be seen rather in the moral and spiritual fruits
which test out and verify the experience.
Consciousness of beauty or of truth or of goodness baffles analysis
as much as consciousness of God does. These values have no objective
standing ground in current psychology. They are not things in the world
of space. They submit to no adequate casual explanation. They have their
ground of being in some other kind of world than that of the mechanical
order, a world composed of quantitative masses of matter in motion. These
experiences of value, which are as real for consciousness as stone walls
are, make very clear the fact that there are depths and capacities in
the nature of the normal human mind which we do not usually recognize
and of which we have scant and imperfect accounts in our text-books.
Our minds taken in their full range, in other words, have some sort of
contact and relationship with an eternal nature of things far deeper than
atoms and molecules. Only very slowly and gradually has the race learned
through finite symbols and temporal forms to interpret beauty and truth
and goodness which in their essence are as ineffable and indescribable
as the mystic’s experience of God is. Plato often speaks as though he
had high moments of experience when he rose to the naked vision of
beauty—beauty “alone, separate and eternal,” as he says, and his myths
are very likely told, as J. A. Stewart believes, to assist others to
experience this same vision—a beauty which “does not grow nor perish,
is without increase or diminution and endures for everlasting.” But as
a matter of fact, however exalted heavenly and enduring beauty may be
in its essence we know _what it is_ only as it appears in fair forms of
objects, of body, of soul, of actions; in harmonious blending of sounds
or colors; in well-ordered or happily-combined groupings of many aspects
in one unity which is as it ought to be. Truth and moral goodness always
transcend our attainments and we sometimes feel that the very end and
goal of life is the pursuit of that truth or that goodness which eye
hath not seen nor ear heard. But whatever truth we do attain or whatever
goodness we do achieve is always concrete. Truth is just this one more
added fact that resists all attempts to doubt it. Goodness is just this
simple everyday deed that reveals a heroic spirit and a brave venture of
faith in the midst of difficulties. So, too, the mystic knowledge of God
is not some esoteric communication, supplied through trance or ecstasy;
it is an intuitive personal touch with God, felt to be the essentially
real, the bursting forth of an intense love for him which heightens all
the capacities and activities of life, followed by the slow laboratory
results which verify it. “All I could never be” now is. It seems possible
to stand the universe—even to do something toward the transformation
of it. The bans are read for that most difficult of all marriages, the
marriage of the possible with the actual, the ideal with the real. And
if the experience does not prove that the soul has found God, it at
least does this: it makes the soul feel that proofs of God are wholly
unnecessary.