with the happiness which you aroused in me this morning. It
overwhelms me; I want to _do_ something, yet I can do nothing and am
fit for nothing.... I would fain do _great things_.” Again, after an
inspiring interview, he writes: “I went homewards, intoxicated with
joy, hope, and strength. I wanted to feed upon my happiness in
solitude, far from all men. It was late; but, unheeding that, I took
a mountain path and went on like a madman, looking at the heavens,
regardless of earth. Suddenly an instinct made me draw hastily
back—I was on the very edge of a precipice, one step more and I must
have fallen. I took fright and gave up my nocturnal promenade.” A.
GRATRY: Henri Perreyve, London, 1872, pp. 92, 89.
This primacy, in the faith‐state, of vague expansive impulse over
direction is well expressed in Walt Whitman’s lines (Leaves of
Grass, 1872, p. 190):—
“O to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs,
as the trees and animals do....
Dear Camerado! I confess I have urged you onward with me, and still
urge you, without the least idea what is our destination,
Or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell’d and defeated.”
This readiness for great things, and this sense that the world by
its importance, wonderfulness, etc., is apt for their production,
would seem to be the undifferentiated germ of all the higher faiths.
Trust in our own dreams of ambition, or in our country’s expansive
destinies, and faith in the providence of God, all have their source
in that onrush of our sanguine impulses, and in that sense of the
exceedingness of the possible over the real.
344 Compare LEUBA: Loc. cit., pp. 346‐349.
345 The Contents of Religious Consciousness, in The Monist, xi. 536,
July, 1901.
346 Loc. cit., pp. 571, 572, abridged. See, also, this writer’s
extraordinarily true criticism of the notion that religion primarily
seeks to solve the intellectual mystery of the world. Compare what
W. BENDER says (in his Wesen der Religion, Bonn, 1888, pp. 85, 38):
“Not the question about God, and not the inquiry into the origin and
purpose of the world is religion, but the question about Man. All
religious views of life are anthropocentric.” “Religion is that
activity of the human impulse towards self‐preservation by means of
which Man seeks to carry his essential vital purposes through
against the adverse pressure of the world by raising himself freely
towards the world’s ordering and governing powers when the limits of
his own strength are reached.” The whole book is little more than a
development of these words.
347 Remember that for some men it arrives suddenly, for others
gradually, whilst others again practically enjoy it all their life.
348 The practical difficulties are: 1, to “realize the reality” of one’s
higher part; 2, to identify one’s self with it exclusively; and 3,
to identify it with all the rest of ideal being.
349 “When mystical activity is at its height, we find consciousness
possessed by the sense of a being at once _excessive_ and
_identical_ with the self: great enough to be God; interior enough
to be me. The ‘objectivity’ of it ought in that case to be called
_excessivity_, rather, or exceedingness.” RÉCÉJAC: Essai sur les
fondements de la conscience mystique, 1897, p. 46.
350 The word “truth” is here taken to mean something additional to bare
value for life, although the natural propensity of man is to believe
that whatever has great value for life is thereby certified as true.
351 Above, p. 455.
352 Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. vii. p. 305.
For a full statement of Mr. Myers’s views, I may refer to his
posthumous work, “Human Personality in the Light of Recent
Research,” which is already announced by Messrs. Longmans, Green &
Co. as being in press. Mr. Myers for the first time proposed as a
general psychological problem the exploration of the subliminal
region of consciousness throughout its whole extent, and made the
first methodical steps in its topography by treating as a natural
series a mass of subliminal facts hitherto considered only as
curious isolated facts, and subjecting them to a systematized
nomenclature. How important this exploration will prove, future work
upon the path which Myers has opened can alone show. Compare my
paper: “Frederic Myers’s Services to Psychology,” in the said
Proceedings, part xlii., May, 1901.
353 Compare the inventory given above on pp. 483‐4, and also what is
said of the subconscious self on pp. 233‐236, 240‐242.
354 Compare above, pp. 419 ff.
355 One more expression of this belief, to increase the reader’s
familiarity with the notion of it:—
“If this room is full of darkness for thousands of years, and you
come in and begin to weep and wail, ‘Oh, the darkness,’ will the
darkness vanish? Bring the light in, strike a match, and light comes
in a moment. So what good will it do you to think all your lives,
‘Oh, I have done evil, I have made many mistakes’? It requires no
ghost to tell us that. Bring in the light, and the evil goes in a
moment. Strengthen the real nature, build up yourselves, the
effulgent, the resplendent, the ever pure, call that up in every one
whom you see. I wish that every one of us had come to such a state
that even when we see the vilest of human beings we can see the God
within, and instead of condemning, say, ‘Rise, thou effulgent One,
rise thou who art always pure, rise thou birthless and deathless,
rise almighty, and manifest your nature.’ ... This is the highest
prayer that the Advaita teaches. This is the one prayer: remembering
our nature.” ... “Why does man go out to look for a God?... It is
your own heart beating, and you did not know, you were mistaking it
for something external. He, nearest of the near, my own self, the
reality of my own life, my body and my soul.—I am Thee and Thou art
Me. That is your own nature. Assert it, manifest it. Not to become
pure, you are pure already. You are not to be perfect, you are that
already. Every good thought which you think or act upon is simply
tearing the veil, as it were, and the purity, the Infinity, the God
behind, manifests itself—the eternal Subject of everything, the
eternal Witness in this universe, your own Self. Knowledge is, as it
were, a lower step, a degradation. We are It already; how to know
It?” SWAMI VIVEKANANDA: Addresses, No. XII., Practical Vedanta, part
iv. pp. 172, 174, London, 1897; and Lectures, The Real and the
Apparent Man, p. 24, abridged.
356 For instance, here is a case where a person exposed from her birth
to Christian ideas had to wait till they came to her clad in
spiritistic formulas before the saving experience set in:—
“For myself I can say that spiritualism has saved me. It was
revealed to me at a critical moment of my life, and without it I
don’t know what I should have done. It has taught me to detach
myself from worldly things and to place my hope in things to come.
Through it I have learned to see in all men, even in those most
criminal, even in those from whom I have most suffered, undeveloped
brothers to whom I owed assistance, love, and forgiveness. I have
learned that I must lose my temper over nothing, despise no one, and
pray for all. Most of all I have learned to pray! And although I
have still much to learn in this domain, prayer ever brings me more
strength, consolation, and comfort. I feel more than ever that I
have only made a few steps on the long road of progress; but I look
at its length without dismay, for I have confidence that the day
will come when all my efforts shall be rewarded. So Spiritualism has
a great place in my life, indeed it holds the first place there.”
Flournoy Collection.
357 “The influence of the Holy Spirit, exquisitely called the Comforter,
is a matter of actual experience, as solid a reality as that of
electro‐magnetism.” W. C. BROWNELL, Scribner’s Magazine, vol. xxx.
p. 112.
358 That the transaction of opening ourselves, otherwise called prayer,
is a perfectly definite one for certain persons, appears abundantly
in the preceding lectures. I append another concrete example to
reinforce the impression on the reader’s mind:—
“Man can learn to transcend these limitations [of finite thought]
and draw power and wisdom at will.... The divine presence is known
through experience. The turning to a higher plane is a distinct act
of consciousness. It is not a vague, twilight or semi‐conscious
experience. It is not an ecstasy; it is not a trance. It is not
super‐consciousness in the Vedantic sense. It is not due to self‐
hypnotization. It is a perfectly calm, sane, sound, rational,
common‐sense shifting of consciousness from the phenomena of sense‐
perception to the phenomena of seership, from the thought of self to
a distinctively higher realm.... For example, if the lower self be
nervous, anxious, tense, one can in a few moments compel it to be
calm. This is not done by a word simply. Again I say, it is not
hypnotism. It is by the exercise of power. One feels the spirit of
peace as definitely as heat is perceived on a hot summer day. The
power can be as surely used as the sun’s rays can be focused and
made to do work, to set fire to wood.” The Higher Law, vol. iv. pp.
4, 6, Boston, August, 1901.
359 Transcendentalists are fond of the term “Over‐soul,” but as a rule
they use it in an intellectualist sense, as meaning only a medium of
communion. “God” is a causal agent as well as a medium of communion,
and that is the aspect which I wish to emphasize.
360 Transcendental idealism, of course, insists that its ideal world
makes _this_ difference, that facts _exist_. We owe it to the
Absolute that we have a world of fact at all. “A world” of
fact!—that exactly is the trouble. An entire world is the smallest
unit with which the Absolute can work, whereas to our finite minds
work for the better ought to be done within this world, setting in
at single points. Our difficulties and our ideals are all piecemeal
affairs, but the Absolute can do no piecework for us; so that all
the interests which our poor souls compass raise their heads too
late. We should have spoken earlier, prayed for another world
absolutely, before this world was born. It is strange, I have heard
a friend say, to see this blind corner into which Christian thought
has worked itself at last, with its God who can raise no particular
weight whatever, who can help us with no private burden, and who is
on the side of our enemies as much as he is on our own. Odd
evolution from the God of David’s psalms!
361 See my Will to Believe and other Essays in Popular Philosophy, 1897,
p. 165.
362 Such a notion is suggested in my Ingersoll Lecture On Human
Immortality, Boston and London, 1899.
363 Tertium Quid, 1887, p. 99. See also pp. 148, 149.