to be thrown at them. Some they evaded, being all except one
dexterous warriors; and others they literally received with their
bare hands, and turned them aside in an incredible manner. The
heathen, apparently thunderstruck at these men thus approaching them
without weapons of war, and not even flinging back their own spears
which they had caught, after having thrown what the old chief called
‘a shower of spears,’ desisted from mere surprise. Our Christian
chief called out, as he and his companions drew up in the midst of
them on the village public ground:—
“ ‘Jehovah thus protects us. He has given us all your spears! Once
we would have thrown them back at you and killed you. But now we
come, not to fight but to tell you about Jesus. He has changed our
dark hearts. He asks you now to lay down all these your other
weapons of war, and to hear what we can tell you about the love of
God, our great Father, the only living God.’
“The heathen were perfectly overawed. They manifestly looked on
these Christians as protected by some Invisible One. They listened
for the first time to the story of the Gospel and of the Cross. We
lived to see that chief and all his tribe sitting in the school of
Christ. And there is perhaps not an island in these southern seas,
amongst all those won for Christ, where similar acts of heroism on
the part of converts cannot be recited.” JOHN G. PATON, Missionary
to the New Hebrides, An Autobiography, second part, London, 1890, p.
243.
214 Saint Peter, Saint Teresa tells us in her autobiography (French
translation, p. 333), “had passed forty years without ever sleeping
more than an hour and a half a day. Of all his mortifications, this
was the one that had cost him the most. To compass it, he kept
always on his knees or on his feet. The little sleep he allowed
nature to take was snatched in a sitting posture, his head leaning
against a piece of wood fixed in the wall. Even had he wished to lie
down, it would have been impossible, because his cell was only four
feet and a half long. In the course of all these years he never
raised his hood, no matter what the ardor of the sun or the rain’s
strength. He never put on a shoe. He wore a garment of coarse
sackcloth, with nothing else upon his skin. This garment was as
scant as possible, and over it a little cloak of the same stuff.
When the cold was great he took off the cloak and opened for a while
the door and little window of his cell. Then he closed them and
resumed the mantle,—his way, as he told us, of warming himself, and
making his body feel a better temperature. It was a frequent thing
with him to eat once only in three days; and when I expressed my
surprise, he said that it was very easy if one once had acquired the
habit. One of his companions has assured me that he has gone
sometimes eight days without food.... His poverty was extreme; and
his mortification, even in his youth, was such that he told me he
had passed three years in a house of his order without knowing any
of the monks otherwise than by the sound of their voice, for he
never raised his eyes, and only found his way about by following the
others. He showed this same modesty on public highways. He spent
many years without ever laying eyes upon a woman; but he confessed
to me that at the age he had reached it was indifferent to him
whether he laid eyes on them or not. He was very old when I first
came to know him, and his body so attenuated that it seemed formed
of nothing so much as of so many roots of trees. With all this
sanctity he was very affable. He never spoke unless he was
questioned, but his intellectual right‐mindedness and grace gave to
all his words an irresistible charm.”
215 F. MAX MÜLLER: Ramakrishna, his Life and Sayings, 1899, p. 180.
216 OLDENBERG: Buddha; translated by W. HOEY, London, 1882, p. 127.
217 “The vanities of all others may die out, but the vanity of a saint
as regards his sainthood is hard indeed to wear away.” Ramakrishna,
his Life and Sayings, 1899, p. 172.
218 “When a church has to be run by oysters, ice‐cream, and fun,” I read
in an American religious paper, “you may be sure that it is running
away from Christ.” Such, if one may judge by appearances, is the
present plight of many of our churches.
219 C. V. B. K.: Friedens‐ und Kriegs‐moral der Heere. Quoted by HAMON:
Psychologie du Militaire professional, 1895, p. xli.
220 Zur Genealogie der Moral, Dritte Abhandlung, § 14. I have abridged,
and in one place transposed, a sentence.
221 We all know _daft_ saints, and they inspire a queer kind of
aversion. But in comparing saints with strong men we must choose
individuals on the same intellectual level. The under‐witted strong
man, homologous in his sphere with the under‐witted saint, is the
bully of the slums, the hooligan or rowdy. Surely on this level also
the saint preserves a certain superiority.
222 See above, p. 327.
223 Above, pp. 327‐334.
224 Newman’s _Securus judicat orbis terrarum_ is another instance.
225 “Mesopotamia” is the stock comic instance.—An excellent old German
lady, who had done some traveling in her day, used to describe to me
her _Sehnsucht_ that she might yet visit “Philadelphiā,” whose
wondrous name had always haunted her imagination. Of John Foster it
is said that “single words (as _chalcedony_), or the names of
ancient heroes, had a mighty fascination over him. ‘At any time the
word _hermit_ was enough to transport him.’ The words _woods_ and
_forests_ would produce the most powerful emotion.” Foster’s Life,
by RYLAND, New York, 1846, p. 3.
226 The Two Voices. In a letter to Mr. B. P. Blood, Tennyson reports of
himself as follows:—
“I have never had any revelations through anæsthetics, but a kind of
waking trance—this for lack of a better word—I have frequently had,
quite up from 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 an almost laughable impossibility—the loss of personality (if so
it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life. I am ashamed
of my feeble description. Have I not said the state is utterly
beyond words?”
Professor Tyndall, in a letter, recalls Tennyson saying of this
condition: “By God Almighty! there is no delusion in the matter! It
is no nebulous ecstasy, but a state of transcendent wonder,
associated with absolute clearness of mind.” Memoirs of Alfred
Tennyson, ii. 473.
227 The Lancet, July 6 and 13, 1895, reprinted as the Cavendish Lecture,
on Dreamy Mental States, London, Baillière, 1895. They have been a
good deal discussed of late by psychologists. See, for example,
BERNARD‐LEROY: L’Illusion de Fausse Reconnaissance, Paris, 1898.
228 Charles Kingsley’s Life, i. 55, quoted by INGE: Christian Mysticism,
London, 1899, p. 341.
229 H. F. BROWN: J. A. Symonds, a Biography, London, 1895, pp. 29‐31,
abridged.
230 Crichton‐Browne expressly says that Symonds’s “highest nerve centres
were in some degree enfeebled or damaged by these dreamy mental
states which afflicted him so grievously.” Symonds was, however, a
perfect monster of many‐sided cerebral efficiency, and his critic
gives no objective grounds whatever for his strange opinion, save
that Symonds complained occasionally, as all susceptible and
ambitious men complain, of lassitude and uncertainty as to his
life’s mission.
231 What reader of Hegel can doubt that that sense of a perfected Being
with all its otherness soaked up into itself, which dominates his
whole philosophy, must have come from the prominence in his
consciousness of mystical moods like this, in most persons kept
subliminal? The notion is thoroughly characteristic of the mystical
level, and the _Aufgabe_ of making it articulate was surely set to
Hegel’s intellect by mystical feeling.
232 BENJAMIN PAUL BLOOD: The Anæsthetic Revelation and the Gist of
Philosophy, Amsterdam, N. Y., 1874, pp. 35, 36. Mr. Blood has made
several attempts to adumbrate the anæsthetic revelation, in
pamphlets of rare literary distinction, privately printed and
distributed by himself at Amsterdam. Xenos Clark, a philosopher, who
died young at Amherst in the ’80’s, much lamented by those who knew
him, was also impressed by the revelation. “In the first place,” he
once wrote to me, “Mr. Blood and I agree that the revelation is, if
anything, non‐emotional. It is utterly flat. It is, as Mr. Blood
says, ‘the one sole and sufficient insight why, or not why, but how,
the present is pushed on by the past, and sucked forward by the
vacuity of the future. Its inevitableness defeats all attempts at
stopping or accounting for it. It is all precedence and
presupposition, and questioning is in regard to it forever too late.
It is an _initiation of the past_.’ The real secret would be the
formula by which the ‘now’ keeps exfoliating out of itself, yet
never escapes. What is it, indeed, that keeps existence exfoliating?
The formal being of anything, the logical definition of it, is
static. For mere logic every question contains its own answer—we
simply fill the hole with the dirt we dug out. Why are twice two
four? Because, in fact, four is twice two. Thus logic finds in life
no propulsion, only a momentum. It goes because it is a‐going. But
the revelation adds: it goes because it is and _was_ a‐going. You
walk, as it were, round yourself in the revelation. Ordinary
philosophy is like a hound hunting his own trail. The more he hunts
the farther he has to go, and his nose never catches up with his
heels, because it is forever ahead of them. So the present is
already a foregone conclusion, and I am ever too late to understand
it. But at the moment of recovery from anæsthesis, just then,
_before starting on life_, I catch, so to speak, a glimpse of my
heels, a glimpse of the eternal process just in the act of starting.
The truth is that we travel on a journey that was accomplished
before we set out; and the real end of philosophy is accomplished,
not when we arrive at, but when we remain in, our destination (being
already there),—which may occur vicariously in this life when we
cease our intellectual questioning. That is why there is a smile
upon the face of the revelation, as we view it. It tells us that we
are forever half a second too late—that’s all. ‘You could kiss your
own lips, and have all the fun to yourself,’ it says, if you only
knew the trick. It would be perfectly easy if they would just stay
there till you got round to them. Why don’t you manage it somehow?”
Dialectically minded readers of this farrago will at least recognize
the region of thought of which Mr. Clark writes, as familiar. In his
latest pamphlet, “Tennyson’s Trances and the Anæsthetic Revelation,”
Mr. Blood describes its value for life as follows:—
“The Anæsthetic Revelation is the Initiation of Man into the
Immemorial Mystery of the Open Secret of Being, revealed as the
Inevitable Vortex of Continuity. Inevitable is the word. Its motive
is inherent—it is what has to be. It is not for any love or hate,
nor for joy nor sorrow, nor good nor ill. End, beginning, or
purpose, it knows not of.
“It affords no particular of the multiplicity and variety of things;
but it fills appreciation of the historical and the sacred with a
secular and intimately personal illumination of the nature and
motive of existence, which then seems reminiscent—as if it should
have appeared, or shall yet appear, to every participant thereof.
“Although it is at first startling in its solemnity, it becomes
directly such a matter of course—so old‐fashioned, and so akin to
proverbs, that it inspires exultation rather than fear, and a sense
of safety, as identified with the aboriginal and the universal. But
no words may express the imposing certainty of the patient that he
is realizing the primordial, Adamic surprise of Life.
“Repetition of the experience finds it ever the same, and as if it
could not possibly be otherwise. The subject resumes his normal
consciousness only to partially and fitfully remember its
occurrence, and to try to formulate its baffling import,—with only
this consolatory afterthought: that he has known the oldest truth,
and that he has done with human theories as to the origin, meaning,
or destiny of the race. He is beyond instruction in ‘spiritual
things.’
“The lesson is one of central safety: the Kingdom is within. All
days are judgment days: but there can be no climacteric purpose of
eternity, nor any scheme of the whole. The astronomer abridges the
row of bewildering figures by increasing his unit of measurement: so
may we reduce the distracting multiplicity of things to the unity
for which each of us stands.
“This has been my moral sustenance since I have known of it. In my
first printed mention of it I declared: ‘The world is no more the
alien terror that was taught me. Spurning the cloud‐grimed and still
sultry battlements whence so lately Jehovan thunders boomed, my gray
gull lifts her wing against the nightfall, and takes the dim leagues
with a fearless eye.’ And now, after twenty‐seven years of this
experience, the wing is grayer, but the eye is fearless still, while
I renew and doubly emphasize that declaration. I know—as having
known—the meaning of Existence: the sane centre of the universe—at
once the wonder and the assurance of the soul—for which the speech
of reason has as yet no name but the Anæsthetic Revelation.”—I have
considerably abridged the quotation.
233 Op. cit., pp. 78‐80, abridged. I subjoin, also abridging it, another
interesting anæsthetic revelation communicated to me in manuscript
by a friend in England. The subject, a gifted woman, was taking
ether for a surgical operation.
“I wondered if I was in a prison being tortured, and why I
remembered having heard it said that people ‘learn through
suffering,’ and in view of what I was seeing, the inadequacy of this
saying struck me so much that I said, aloud, ‘to suffer _is_ to
learn.’
“With that I became unconscious again, and my last dream immediately
preceded my real coming to. It only lasted a few seconds, and was
most vivid and real to me, though it may not be clear in words.
“A great Being or Power was traveling through the sky, his foot was
on a kind of lightning as a wheel is on a rail, it was his pathway.
The lightning was made entirely of the spirits of innumerable people
close to one another, and I was one of them. He moved in a straight
line, and each part of the streak or flash came into its short
conscious existence only that he might travel. I seemed to be
directly under the foot of God, and I thought he was grinding his
own life up out of my pain. Then I saw that what he had been trying
with all his might to do was to _change his course_, to _bend_ the
line of lightning to which he was tied, in the direction in which he
wanted to go. I felt my flexibility and helplessness, and knew that
he would succeed. He bended me, turning his corner by means of my
hurt, hurting me more than I had ever been hurt in my life, and at
the acutest point of this, as he passed, I _saw_. I understood for a
moment things that I have now forgotten, things that no one could
remember while retaining sanity. The angle was an obtuse angle, and
I remember thinking as I woke that had he made it a right or acute
angle, I should have both suffered and ‘seen’ still more, and should
probably have died.
“He went on and I came to. In that moment the whole of my life
passed before me, including each little meaningless piece of
distress, and I _understood_ them. _This_ was what it had all meant,
_this_ was the piece of work it had all been contributing to do. I
did not see God’s purpose, I only saw his intentness and his entire
relentlessness towards his means. He thought no more of me than a
man thinks of hurting a cork when he is opening wine, or hurting a
cartridge when he is firing. And yet, on waking, my first feeling
was, and it came with tears, ‘Domine non sum digna,’ for I had been
lifted into a position for which I was too small. I realized that in
that half hour under ether I had served God more distinctly and
purely than I had ever done in my life before, or that I am capable
of desiring to do. I was the means of his achieving and revealing
something, I know not what or to whom, and that, to the exact extent
of my capacity for suffering.
“While regaining consciousness, I wondered why, since I had gone so
deep, I had seen nothing of what the saints call the _love_ of God,
nothing but his relentlessness. And then I heard an answer, which I
could only just catch, saying, ‘Knowledge and Love are One, and the
_measure_ is suffering’—I give the words as they came to me. With
that I came finally to (into what seemed a dream world compared with
the reality of what I was leaving), and I saw that what would be
called the ‘cause’ of my experience was a slight operation under
insufficient ether, in a bed pushed up against a window, a common
city window in a common city street. If I had to formulate a few of
the things I then caught a glimpse of, they would run somewhat as
follows:—
“The eternal necessity of suffering and its eternal vicariousness.
The veiled and incommunicable nature of the worst sufferings;—the
passivity of genius, how it is essentially instrumental and
defenseless, moved, not moving, it must do what it does;—the
impossibility of discovery without its price;—finally, the excess of
what the suffering ‘seer’ or genius pays over what his generation
gains. (He seems like one who sweats his life out to earn enough to
save a district from famine, and just as he staggers back, dying and
satisfied, bringing a lac of rupees to buy grain with, God lifts the
lac away, dropping _one_ rupee, and says, ‘That you may give them.
That you have earned for them. The rest is for ME.’) I perceived
also in a way never to be forgotten, the excess of what we see over
what we can demonstrate.
“And so on!—these things may seem to you delusions, or truisms; but
for me they are dark truths, and the power to put them into even
such words as these has been given me by an ether dream.”
234 In Tune with the Infinite, p. 137.
235 The larger God may then swallow up the smaller one. I take this from
Starbuck’s manuscript collection:—
“I never lost the consciousness of the presence of God until I stood
at the foot of the Horseshoe Falls, Niagara. Then I lost him in the
immensity of what I saw. I also lost myself, feeling that I was an
atom too small for the notice of Almighty God.”
I subjoin another similar case from Starbuck’s collection:—
“In that time the consciousness of God’s nearness came to me
sometimes. I say God, to describe what is indescribable. A presence,
I might say, yet that is too suggestive of personality, and the
moments of which I speak did not hold the consciousness of a
personality, but something in myself made me feel myself a part of
something bigger than I, that was controlling. I felt myself one
with the grass, the trees, birds, insects, everything in Nature. I
exulted in the mere fact of existence, of being a part of it all—the
drizzling rain, the shadows of the clouds, the tree‐trunks, and so
on. In the years following, such moments continued to come, but I
wanted them constantly. I knew so well the satisfaction of losing
self in a perception of supreme power and love, that I was unhappy
because that perception was not constant.” The cases quoted in my
third lecture, pp. 66, 67, 70, are still better ones of this type.
In her essay, The Loss of Personality, in The Atlantic Monthly (vol.
lxxxv. p. 195), Miss Ethel D. Puffer explains that the vanishing of
the sense of self, and the feeling of immediate unity with the
object, is due to the disappearance, in these rapturous experiences,
of the motor adjustments which habitually intermediate between the
constant background of consciousness (which is the Self) and the
object in the foreground, whatever it may be. I must refer the
reader to the highly instructive article, which seems to me to throw
light upon the psychological conditions, though it fails to account
for the rapture or the revelation‐value of the experience in the
Subject’s eyes.
236 Op. cit., i. 43‐44.
237 Memoiren einer Idealistin, 5te Auflage, 1900, iii. 166. For years
she had been unable to pray, owing to materialistic belief.
238 Whitman in another place expresses in a quieter way what was
probably with him a chronic mystical perception: “There is,” he
writes, “apart from mere intellect, in the make‐up of every superior
human identity, a wondrous something that realizes without argument,
frequently without what is called education (though I think it the
goal and apex of all education deserving the name), an intuition of
the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this
multifariousness, this revel of fools, and incredible make‐believe
and general unsettledness, we call _the world_; a soul‐sight of that
divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of
things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial,
however momentous, like a leashed dog in the hand of the hunter.
[Of] such soul‐sight and root‐centre for the mind mere optimism
explains only the surface.” Whitman charges it against Carlyle that
he lacked this perception. Specimen Days and Collect, Philadelphia,
1882, p. 174.
239 My Quest for God, London, 1897, pp. 268, 269, abridged.
240 Op. cit., pp. 256, 257, abridged.
241 Cosmic Consciousness: a study in the evolution of the human Mind,
Philadelphia, 1901, p. 2.
242 Loc. cit., pp. 7, 8. My quotation follows the privately printed
pamphlet which preceded Dr. Bucke’s larger work, and differs
verbally a little from the text of the latter.
243 My quotations are from VIVEKANANDA, Raja Yoga, London, 1896. The
completest source of information on Yoga is the work translated by
VIHARI LALA MITRA: Yoga Vasishta Maha Ramayana, 4 vols., Calcutta,
1891‐99.
244 A European witness, after carefully comparing the results of Yoga
with those of the hypnotic or dreamy states artificially producible
by us, says: “It makes of its true disciples good, healthy, and
happy men.... Through the mastery which the yogi attains over his
thoughts and his body, he grows into a ‘character.’ By the
subjection of his impulses and propensities to his will, and the
fixing of the latter upon the ideal of goodness, he becomes a
‘personality’ hard to influence by others, and thus almost the
opposite of what we usually imagine a ‘medium’ so‐called, or
‘psychic subject’ to be.” KARL KELLNER: Yoga: Eine Skizze, München,
1896, p. 21.
245 I follow the account in C. F. KOEPPEN: Die Religion des Buddha,
Berlin, 1857, i. 585 ff.
246 For a full account of him, see D. B. MACDONALD: The Life of Al‐
Ghazzali, in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1899,
vol. xx. p. 71.
247 A. SCHMÖLDERS: Essai sur les écoles philosophiques chez les Arabes,
Paris, 1842, pp. 54‐68, abridged.
248 GÖRRES’S Christliche Mystik gives a full account of the facts. So
does RIBET’S Mystique Divine, 2 vols., Paris, 1890. A still more
methodical modern work is the Mystica Theologia of VALLGORNERA, 2
vols., Turin, 1890.
249 M. RÉCÉJAC, in a recent volume, makes them essential. Mysticism he
defines as “the tendency to draw near to the Absolute morally, _and
by the aid of Symbols_.” See his Fondements de la Connaissance
mystique, Paris, 1897, p. 66. But there are unquestionably mystical
conditions in which sensible symbols play no part.
250 Saint John of the Cross: The Dark Night of the Soul, book ii. ch.
xvii., in Vie et Œuvres, 3me édition, Paris, 1893, iii. 428‐432.
Chapter xi. of book ii. of Saint John’s Ascent of Carmel is devoted
to showing the harmfulness for the mystical life of the use of
sensible imagery.