Absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both become
one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. This is the
everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by
differences of clime or creed. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in
Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note, so
that there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity which ought
to make a critic stop and think, and which brings it about that the
mystical classics have, as has been said, neither birthday nor native
land. Perpetually telling of the unity of man with God, their speech
antedates languages, and they do not grow old.(269)
“That art Thou!” say the Upanishads, and the Vedantists add: “Not a part,
not a mode of That, but identically That, that absolute Spirit of the
World.” “As pure water poured into pure water remains the same, thus, O
Gautama, is the Self of a thinker who knows. Water in water, fire in fire,
ether in ether, no one can distinguish them; likewise a man whose mind has
entered into the Self.”(270) “ ‘Every man,’ says the Sufi Gulshan‐Râz,
‘whose heart is no longer shaken by any doubt, knows with certainty that
there is no being save only One.... In his divine majesty the _me_, the
_we_, the _thou_, are not found, for in the One there can be no
distinction. Every being who is annulled and entirely separated from
himself, hears resound outside of him this voice and this echo: _I am
God_: he has an eternal way of existing, and is no longer subject to
death.’ ”(271) In the vision of God, says Plotinus, “what sees is not our
reason, but something prior and superior to our reason.... He who thus
sees does not properly see, does not distinguish or imagine two things. He
changes, he ceases to be himself, preserves nothing of himself. Absorbed
in God, he makes but one with him, like a centre of a circle coinciding
with another centre.”(272) “Here,” writes Suso, “the spirit dies, and yet
is all alive in the marvels of the Godhead ... and is lost in the
stillness of the glorious dazzling obscurity and of the naked simple
unity. It is in this modeless _where_ that the highest bliss is to be
found.”(273) “Ich bin so gross als Gott,” sings Angelus Silesius again,
“Er ist als ich so klein; Er kann nicht über mich, ich unter ihm nicht
sein.”(274)
In mystical literature such self‐contradictory phrases as “dazzling
obscurity,” “whispering silence,” “teeming desert,” are continually met
with. They prove that not conceptual speech, but music rather, is the
element through which we are best spoken to by mystical truth. Many
mystical scriptures are indeed little more than musical compositions.
“He who would hear the voice of Nada, ‘the Soundless Sound,’ and
comprehend it, he has to learn the nature of Dhâranâ.... When to
himself his form appears unreal, as do on waking all the forms he
sees in dreams; when he has ceased to hear the many, he may
discern the ONE—the inner sound which kills the outer.... For then
the soul will hear, and will remember. And then to the inner ear
will speak THE VOICE OF THE SILENCE.... And now thy _Self_ is lost
in SELF, _thyself_ unto THYSELF, merged in that SELF from which
thou first didst radiate.... Behold! thou hast become the Light,
thou hast become the Sound, thou art thy Master and thy God. Thou
art THYSELF the object of thy search: the VOICE unbroken, that
resounds throughout eternities, exempt from change, from sin
exempt, the seven sounds in one, the VOICE OF THE SILENCE. _Om tat
Sat._”(275)
These words, if they do not awaken laughter as you receive them, probably
stir chords within you which music and language touch in common. Music
gives us ontological messages which non‐musical criticism is unable to
contradict, though it may laugh at our foolishness in minding them. There
is a verge of the mind which these things haunt; and whispers therefrom
mingle with the operations of our understanding, even as the waters of the
infinite ocean send their waves to break among the pebbles that lie upon
our shores.
“Here begins the sea that ends not till the world’s end. Where we
stand,
Could we know the next high sea‐mark set beyond these waves that
gleam,
We should know what never man hath known, nor eye of man hath
scanned....
Ah, but here man’s heart leaps, yearning towards the gloom with
venturous glee,
From the shore that hath no shore beyond it, set in all the
sea.”(276)
That doctrine, for example, that eternity is timeless, that our
“immortality,” if we live in the eternal, is not so much future as already
now and here, which we find so often expressed to‐day in certain
philosophic circles, finds its support in a “hear, hear!” or an “amen,”
which floats up from that mysteriously deeper level.(277) We recognize the
passwords to the mystical region as we hear them, but we cannot use them
ourselves; it alone has the keeping of “the password primeval.”(278)
I have now sketched with extreme brevity and insufficiency, but as fairly
as I am able in the time allowed, the general traits of the mystic range
of consciousness. _It is on the whole pantheistic and optimistic, or at
least the opposite of pessimistic. It is anti‐naturalistic, and harmonizes
best with twice‐bornness and so‐called other‐worldly states of mind._
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My next task is to inquire whether we can invoke it as authoritative. Does
it furnish any _warrant for the truth_ of the twice‐bornness and
supernaturality and pantheism which it favors? I must give my answer to
this question as concisely as I can.
In brief my answer is this,—and I will divide it into three parts:—
(1) Mystical states, when well developed, usually are, and have the right
to be, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come.
(2) No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for those
who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically.
(3) They break down the authority of the non‐mystical or rationalistic
consciousness, based upon the understanding and the senses alone. They
show it to be only one kind of consciousness. They open out the
possibility of other orders of truth, in which, so far as anything in us
vitally responds to them, we may freely continue to have faith.
I will take up these points one by one.
1.
As a matter of psychological fact, mystical states of a well‐pronounced
and emphatic sort _are_ usually authoritative over those who have
them.(279) They have been “there,” and know. It is vain for rationalism to
grumble about this. If the mystical truth that comes to a man proves to be
a force that he can live by, what mandate have we of the majority to order
him to live in another way? We can throw him into a prison or a madhouse,
but we cannot change his mind—we commonly attach it only the more
stubbornly to its beliefs.(280) It mocks our utmost efforts, as a matter
of fact, and in point of logic it absolutely escapes our jurisdiction. Our
own more “rational” beliefs are based on evidence exactly similar in
nature to that which mystics quote for theirs. Our senses, namely, have
assured us of certain states of fact; but mystical experiences are as
direct perceptions of fact for those who have them as any sensations ever
were for us. The records show that even though the five senses be in
abeyance in them, they are absolutely sensational in their epistemological
quality, if I may be pardoned the barbarous expression,—that is, they are
face to face presentations of what seems immediately to exist.
The mystic is, in short, _invulnerable_, and must be left, whether we
relish it or not, in undisturbed enjoyment of his creed. Faith, says
Tolstoy, is that by which men live. And faith‐state and mystic state are
practically convertible terms.
2.
But I now proceed to add that mystics have no right to claim that we ought
to accept the deliverance of their peculiar experiences, if we are
ourselves outsiders and feel no private call thereto. The utmost they can
ever ask of us in this life is to admit that they establish a presumption.
They form a consensus and have an unequivocal outcome; and it would be
odd, mystics might say, if such a unanimous type of experience should
prove to be altogether wrong. At bottom, however, this would only be an
appeal to numbers, like the appeal of rationalism the other way; and the
appeal to numbers has no logical force. If we acknowledge it, it is for
“suggestive,” not for logical reasons: we follow the majority because to
do so suits our life.
But even this presumption from the unanimity of mystics is far from being
strong. In characterizing mystic states as pantheistic, optimistic, etc.,
I am afraid I over‐simplified the truth. I did so for expository reasons,
and to keep the closer to the classic mystical tradition. The classic
religious mysticism, it now must be confessed, is only a “privileged
case.” It is an _extract_, kept true to type by the selection of the
fittest specimens and their preservation in “schools.” It is carved out
from a much larger mass; and if we take the larger mass as seriously as
religious mysticism has historically taken itself, we find that the
supposed unanimity largely disappears. To begin with, even religious
mysticism itself, the kind that accumulates traditions and makes schools,
is much less unanimous than I have allowed. It has been both ascetic and
antinomianly self‐indulgent within the Christian church.(281) It is
dualistic in Sankhya, and monistic in Vedanta philosophy. I called it
pantheistic; but the great Spanish mystics are anything but pantheists.
They are with few exceptions non‐metaphysical minds, for whom “the
category of personality” is absolute. The “union” of man with God is for
them much more like an occasional miracle than like an original
identity.(282) How different again, apart from the happiness common to
all, is the mysticism of Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter, Richard
Jefferies, and other naturalistic pantheists, from the more distinctively
Christian sort.(283) The fact is that the mystical feeling of enlargement,
union, and emancipation has no specific intellectual content whatever of
its own. It is capable of forming matrimonial alliances with material
furnished by the most diverse philosophies and theologies, provided only
they can find a place in their framework for its peculiar emotional mood.
We have no right, therefore, to invoke its prestige as distinctively in
favor of any special belief, such as that in absolute idealism, or in the
absolute monistic identity, or in the absolute goodness, of the world. It
is only relatively in favor of all these things—it passes out of common
human consciousness in the direction in which they lie.
So much for religious mysticism proper. But more remains to be told, for
religious mysticism is only one half of mysticism. The other half has no
accumulated traditions except those which the text‐books on insanity
supply. Open any one of these, and you will find abundant cases in which
“mystical ideas” are cited as characteristic symptoms of enfeebled or
deluded states of mind. In delusional insanity, paranoia, as they
sometimes call it, we may have a _diabolical_ mysticism, a sort of
religious mysticism turned upside down. The same sense of ineffable
importance in the smallest events, the same texts and words coming with
new meanings, the same voices and visions and leadings and missions, the
same controlling by extraneous powers; only this time the emotion is
pessimistic: instead of consolations we have desolations; the meanings are
dreadful; and the powers are enemies to life. It is evident that from the
point of view of their psychological mechanism, the classic mysticism and
these lower mysticisms spring from the same mental level, from that great
subliminal or transmarginal region of which science is beginning to admit
the existence, but of which so little is really known. That region
contains every kind of matter: “seraph and snake” abide there side by
side. To come from thence is no infallible credential. What comes must be
sifted and tested, and run the gauntlet of confrontation with the total
context of experience, just like what comes from the outer world of sense.
Its value must be ascertained by empirical methods, so long as we are not
mystics ourselves.
Once more, then, I repeat that non‐mystics are under no obligation to
acknowledge in mystical states a superior authority conferred on them by
their intrinsic nature.(284)
3.
Yet, I repeat once more, the existence of mystical states absolutely
overthrows the pretension of non‐mystical states to be the sole and
ultimate dictators of what we may believe. As a rule, mystical states
merely add a supersensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of
consciousness. They are excitements like the emotions of love or ambition,
gifts to our spirit by means of which facts already objectively before us
fall into a new expressiveness and make a new connection with our active
life. They do not contradict these facts as such, or deny anything that
our senses have immediately seized.(285) It is the rationalistic critic
rather who plays the part of denier in the controversy, and his denials
have no strength, for there never can be a state of facts to which new
meaning may not truthfully be added, provided the mind ascend to a more
enveloping point of view. It must always remain an open question whether
mystical states may not possibly be such superior points of view, windows
through which the mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive
world. The difference of the views seen from the different mystical
windows need not prevent us from entertaining this supposition. The wider
world would in that case prove to have a mixed constitution like that of
this world, that is all. It would have its celestial and its infernal
regions, its tempting and its saving moments, its valid experiences and
its counterfeit ones, just as our world has them; but it would be a wider
world all the same. We should have to use its experiences by selecting and
subordinating and substituting just as is our custom in this ordinary
naturalistic world; we should be liable to error just as we are now; yet
the counting in of that wider world of meanings, and the serious dealing
with it, might, in spite of all the perplexity, be indispensable stages in
our approach to the final fullness of the truth.
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In this shape, I think, we have to leave the subject. Mystical states
indeed wield no authority due simply to their being mystical states. But
the higher ones among them point in directions to which the religious
sentiments even of non‐mystical men incline. They tell of the supremacy of
the ideal, of vastness, of union, of safety, and of rest. They offer us
_hypotheses_, hypotheses which we may voluntarily ignore, but which as
thinkers we cannot possibly upset. The supernaturalism and optimism to
which they would persuade us may, interpreted in one way or another, be
after all the truest of insights into the meaning of this life.
“Oh, the little more, and how much it is; and the little less, and what
worlds away!” It may be that possibility and permission of this sort are
all that the religious consciousness requires to live on. In my last
lecture I shall have to try to persuade you that this is the case.
Meanwhile, however, I am sure that for many of my readers this diet is too
slender. If supernaturalism and inner union with the divine are true, you
think, then not so much permission, as compulsion to believe, ought to be
found. Philosophy has always professed to prove religious truth by
coercive argument; and the construction of philosophies of this kind has
always been one favorite function of the religious life, if we use this
term in the large historic sense. But religious philosophy is an enormous
subject, and in my next lecture I can only give that brief glance at it
which my limits will allow.
LECTURE XVIII. PHILOSOPHY.
The subject of Saintliness left us face to face with the question, Is the
sense of divine presence a sense of anything objectively true? We turned
first to mysticism for an answer, and found that although mysticism is
entirely willing to corroborate religion, it is too private (and also too
various) in its utterances to be able to claim a universal authority. But
philosophy publishes results which claim to be universally valid if they
are valid at all, so we now turn with our question to philosophy. Can
philosophy stamp a warrant of veracity upon the religious man’s sense of
the divine?
I imagine that many of you at this point begin to indulge in guesses at
the goal to which I am tending. I have undermined the authority of
mysticism, you say, and the next thing I shall probably do is to seek to
discredit that of philosophy. Religion, you expect to hear me conclude, is
nothing but an affair of faith, based either on vague sentiment, or on
that vivid sense of the reality of things unseen of which in my second
lecture and in the lecture on Mysticism I gave so many examples. It is
essentially private and individualistic; it always exceeds our powers of
formulation; and although attempts to pour its contents into a philosophic
mould will probably always go on, men being what they are, yet these
attempts are always secondary processes which in no way add to the
authority, or warrant the veracity, of the sentiments from which they
derive their own stimulus and borrow whatever glow of conviction they may
themselves possess. In short, you suspect that I am planning to defend
feeling at the expense of reason, to rehabilitate the primitive and
unreflective, and to dissuade you from the hope of any Theology worthy of
the name.
To a certain extent I have to admit that you guess rightly. I do believe
that feeling is the deeper source of religion, and that philosophic and
theological formulas are secondary products, like translations of a text
into another tongue. But all such statements are misleading from their
brevity, and it will take the whole hour for me to explain to you exactly
what I mean.
When I call theological formulas secondary products, I mean that in a
world in which no religious feeling had ever existed, I doubt whether any
philosophic theology could ever have been framed. I doubt if dispassionate
intellectual contemplation of the universe, apart from inner unhappiness
and need of deliverance on the one hand and mystical emotion on the other,
would ever have resulted in religious philosophies such as we now possess.
Men would have begun with animistic explanations of natural fact, and
criticised these away into scientific ones, as they actually have done. In
the science they would have left a certain amount of “psychical research,”
even as they now will probably have to re‐admit a certain amount. But
high‐flying speculations like those of either dogmatic or idealistic
theology, these they would have had no motive to venture on, feeling no
need of commerce with such deities. These speculations must, it seems to
me, be classed as over‐beliefs, buildings‐out performed by the intellect
into directions of which feeling originally supplied the hint.
But even if religious philosophy had to have its first hint supplied by
feeling, may it not have dealt in a superior way with the matter which
feeling suggested? Feeling is private and dumb, and unable to give an
account of itself. It allows that its results are mysteries and enigmas,
declines to justify them rationally, and on occasion is willing that they
should even pass for paradoxical and absurd. Philosophy takes just the
opposite attitude. Her aspiration is to reclaim from mystery and paradox
whatever territory she touches. To find an escape from obscure and wayward
personal persuasion to truth objectively valid for all thinking men has
ever been the intellect’s most cherished ideal. To redeem religion from
unwholesome privacy, and to give public status and universal right of way
to its deliverances, has been reason’s task.
I believe that philosophy will always have opportunity to labor at this
task.(286) We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect
from participating in any of our functions. Even in soliloquizing with
ourselves, we construe our feelings intellectually. Both our personal
ideals and our religious and mystical experiences must be interpreted
congruously with the kind of scenery which our thinking mind inhabits. The
philosophic climate of our time inevitably forces its own clothing on us.
Moreover, we must exchange our feelings with one another, and in doing so
we have to speak, and to use general and abstract verbal formulas.
Conceptions and constructions are thus a necessary part of our religion;
and as moderator amid the clash of hypotheses, and mediator among the
criticisms of one man’s constructions by another, philosophy will always
have much to do. It would be strange if I disputed this, when these very
lectures which I am giving are (as you will see more clearly from now
onwards) a laborious attempt to extract from the privacies of religious
experience some general facts which can be defined in formulas upon which
everybody may agree.
Religious experience, in other words, spontaneously and inevitably
engenders myths, superstitions, dogmas, creeds, and metaphysical
theologies, and criticisms of one set of these by the adherents of
another. Of late, impartial classifications and comparisons have become
possible, alongside of the denunciations and anathemas by which the
commerce between creeds used exclusively to be carried on. We have the
beginnings of a “Science of Religions,” so‐called; and if these lectures
could ever be accounted a crumb‐like contribution to such a science, I
should be made very happy.
But all these intellectual operations, whether they be constructive or
comparative and critical, presuppose immediate experiences as their
subject‐matter. They are interpretative and inductive operations,
operations after the fact, consequent upon religious feeling, not
coördinate with it, not independent of what it ascertains.
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The intellectualism in religion which I wish to discredit pretends to be
something altogether different from this. It assumes to construct
religious objects out of the resources of logical reason alone, or of
logical reason drawing rigorous inference from non‐subjective facts. It
calls its conclusions dogmatic theology, or philosophy of the absolute, as
the case may be; it does not call them science of religions. It reaches
them in an a priori way, and warrants their veracity.
Warranted systems have ever been the idols of aspiring souls. All‐
inclusive, yet simple; noble, clean, luminous, stable, rigorous,
true;—what more ideal refuge could there be than such a system would offer
to spirits vexed by the muddiness and accidentality of the world of
sensible things? Accordingly, we find inculcated in the theological
schools of to‐day, almost as much as in those of the fore‐time, a disdain
for merely possible or probable truth, and of results that only private
assurance can grasp. Scholastics and idealists both express this disdain.
Principal John Caird, for example, writes as follows in his Introduction
to the Philosophy of Religion:—