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The Art of Life Series
_The Sixth Sense_
THE ART OF LIFE SERIES
_Edward Howard Griggs, Editor_
The Sixth Sense
ITS CULTIVATION AND USE
BY
CHARLES H. BRENT
AUTHOR OF “WITH GOD IN THE WORLD,”
“LEADERSHIP,” “WITH GOD IN PRAYER,” ETC.
NEW YORK
B. W. HUEBSCH
1911
COPYRIGHT, 1911
BY B. W. HUEBSCH
PRINTED IN U. S. A.
TO
R. C. AND E. M. D.,
DEAR FRIENDS
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
This book was planned and promised to the publisher more than three years
ago. Exacting duties have compelled the writer from time to time, to
defer the completion of his undertaking. The delay has been profitable in
that it has afforded opportunity for the study of recent works on kindred
topics, which in some respects has modified and in some enlarged the
original conception of the subject in hand. A long ocean voyage at last
has provided the quiet in which to write out these thoughts.
_SS. Prinz Eitel Friedrich_,
Gulf of Aden,
8 January, 1911.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTORY NOTE 9
I THE SIXTH SENSE 13
II IN RELATION TO HEALTH 35
III IN RELATION TO THOUGHT 52
IV IN RELATION TO CHARACTER 69
V IN RELATION TO RELIGION 86
_The Sixth Sense_
CHAPTER I
THE SIXTH SENSE
By the Sixth Sense I mean the Mystic Sense, or that inner perceptive
faculty which distinguishes man from the highest below him and allies
him to the highest above him. So distinctive among created objects is it
of man that it might, not inaptly, be characterized as the Human Sense.
It is used for no one exclusive purpose; on the contrary it is only
under its operation that man’s activities, one and all, become human.
In its nature it differs essentially from the bodily senses though we
are justified in thinking of it as a sense because its function is, like
them, to perceive and to afford food for thought.
The five bodily senses originally, in the first stages of evolution,
were, and, in their ultimate aspect are, one sense—the sense of
touch. By means of it plant, mollusc and worm relate themselves to the
universe of which they are a part. By degrees the single sense, in the
evolutionary process, finds opportunity and occasion for specialization.
Sight is extraordinarily sensitized touch by means of which form and
color are perceived, and the distant object comes bowing to our feet; the
stars, leaping across space, are converted into intimate friends, and
earth’s farthest horizon lies at our door. Hearing is touch localized
and specialized so as to be capable of perceiving the vibrations caused
by the impact of one body upon another; its enlarged capacity classifies
sound in such a way as to offer its mutations and subtleties for our use
and pleasure as the weaver offers his threads to the loom. Smell is that
specialization of touch, uniquely delicate, supposed by Maeterlinck to be
still in its earlier stage of development in human kind, which responds
to the stimulus of those otherwise intangible exhalations called odor.
Lastly, taste is touch specialized so as to discern the inner properties
of food stuff; taste is the testing sense. Mere touch determines the
existence, specialized touch the character and niceties of matter of the
physical universe.
As indicative of the unity of the animal senses and the coöperative
sympathy between them, it is noteworthy that when one sense is impaired
or destroyed, the others diligently endeavor to supply its absence, the
entire body playing the part as far as possible of eye or ear or both,
and each remaining sense growing extraordinarily acute so as to take on
somewhat of the character of the most nearly affiliated or the neighbor
sense. The blind man can almost see with ears and hands, the deaf can
almost hear with eyes. The senses that are left strain, not without a
measure of success, to convey to the brain impressions for which they are
not congenitally adapted.
The organic differences in the bodily senses, then, find a close unity
in functional similarity, all the sensory nerves grouping themselves
under the head of touch. The Mystic Sense, likewise, first comes to our
attention as a simple faculty of perception by which we gain cognition
of that department of reality that transcends bodily touch and its
sub-divisions, but study reveals that its unity is ordered complexity,
as in the case of all developed endowments. Broadly speaking it is the
sense which relates man to the spiritual or psychic aspect of reality. It
puts us into relation with the spiritual order of which we are a part.
It finds room for exercise, gains its freedom, and reaches its highest
development in this sphere, beginning operations at the point where the
bodily senses are compelled by inherent limitations to halt. It discerns
the innermost character, use, value of the objective, and differentiates
between the human and the animal estimate of things. Indeed it has in
it that which is not of this world or order. It soars beyond human and
mundane affairs and steeps its wings in Divine altitudes where the throne
of God is set. Not only does it perceive but it also lays hold of and
appropriates that phase of reality which lies beyond the unaided reach,
or eludes the grasp, of all the rest of our faculties in their happiest
combination, and therefore of any one of them independently. It takes the
material gathered by physical contact with the world of sight and sound,
and presents it to the mind for rationalizing operations. More than that,
it comes back freighted with wealth gathered in explorations in regions
where neither body nor reason can tread, converting life’s dull prose
into poetry and song.
The most alert and indispensable of endowments, it is at once sociable
with the remainder of man’s faculties, external and internal, and
jealously independent of them saving of human consciousness alone.
In its higher stages of development it accepts suggestions from all,
dictation from none. Its manner is courteous and its mode of approach
one of promptings and hints. The sphere of every other faculty is its
sphere where it is content to play the modest part of a handmaiden, never
usurping functions already provided for, although it has a sphere of
its own whither not even reason can follow. It is supplementary to all,
contradictory to none. Without its exercise there can be no progress or
growth. It has its origin in a groping instinct, its final development
in orderly activities capable of increasingly clear classification.
Body, intellect, character, moral and religious, are under its influence
and dependent upon its beneficent operations. It plays upon the body,
contributing to its health and efficiency; it gives wings to the
intellect, making it creative and productive, capable of formulating
hypotheses and venturing upon speculation; it converts the seemingly
impossible into the normal, bringing moral ideals within reach of the
will, without which improvement in character would be a matter of chance;
it unfolds the Divine to the human and forms a nexus between here and
beyond, now and to-morrow, finite and infinite, God and man. It looks
not only up but down, making the nature outside of us intelligible to
the nature inside of us and friendly with it. If it peoples the stars,
it also makes a universe of the atom. It is mysterious, recollective,
emotional, intuitive, speculative, imaginative, prophetic, minatory,
expectant, penetrative. As it moves up or down with equal freedom, so
it reaches backward or forward, is attached or detached at will, in its
operations.
The Sixth Sense, or, to be more accurate, the second group of senses,
has its specialized functions, difficult as it is to analyze with
accuracy this most spiritual endowment of human personality, the inner
gift of touch. It has specializations parallel to those of the bodily
senses. Sight, hearing and testing are its functions. So clear eyed is
it that it can see with the nicety of an eye aided by the microscope,
so sensitive to voices that the lowest whispers impart a message, so
critical as to test values with a precision and swiftness that surpass
the taste and smell which tell us what is sweet and what unsavory.
If it be argued that I am but dilating on certain aspects of mind, I am
not concerned to deny that all may be comprehended under that convenient
blanket-word. But they are as distinct from the rationalizing media as
from the will.
The nearest approach to a satisfactory substitute for the term “mystic
sense” in terms of the reason is “conceptual reason.” It furnishes
us with the thought of a faculty which has procreative or generative
properties capable of being fertilized by intercourse with that which
is separate from and higher than itself. Its first activity is to lay
itself over against that which, though partaking of its own nature, is
not itself. It is not self-fertilizing and can conceive or beget only
after having perceived and apprehended.[1] It has constant regard for an
objective and communication with it.
The operation of the Mystic Sense is summed up in the single word faith,
which is described as the giving substance to that which is hoped for,
the testing of things not seen.[2] There is no objection to letting the
world faith cover the whole working of the Mystic Sense, provided it is
not restricted to a severely religious meaning. It is thus that it is
commonly understood, or at any rate when applied in other connections it
is assumed to be the working of a different faculty from that exercised
in the sphere of religion. In its distinctively religious meaning, faith
is the operation of the Mystic Sense in its highest employment. There is
no one faculty that is reserved exclusively for religious employment. The
fact is that religious faith is no more separate from the processes of
the Mystic Sense which appropriate health for the body, hypotheses for
the mind, working principles for the man of action, and ideals for the
character, or independent of them, than the act of physical perception,
which enables us to touch the stars, is separate from that use of the
sensory nerves which relates us to the book we handle, or independent of
it. They are both the result of a single faculty, or group of faculties,
operating in different altitudes. Faith will be accepted in these pages
as a philosophic term. Thus we speak of scientific faith, moral faith,
and religious faith with equal appropriateness, meaning the Mystic Sense
operating respectively in the interests of the scientific, of the moral,
and of the religious.
The Mystic Sense has for its workshop the uplands of life in the rarefied
atmosphere of ideas and ideals. It is at once a super-sense giving us a
bird’s-eye view of the universe which is not permitted at close quarters,
and a sub-sense bringing before our attention the contents hidden beneath
the surface of things. There are not two worlds, objective and subjective
respectively, but two aspects of one world—things as they are in their
absolute and ultimate being, and things as they are relatively or as
apprehended by our cognitive powers. Our conception of the truth is a
distortion or falls short of the truth, and it is our aspiration to bring
about such a coincidence as will make the relation of subject to object
perfect. We draw the thing as we see it for the God of things as they are
now, not to-morrow only, the sole difference being that to-morrow our
painting will be truer to the original and consequently more artistic
than now. All objective is immediately reduced by man, by subconscious
or conscious process, into subjective, so that we may for the sake of
convenience talk of subjective and objective phases of reality, the
subjective being human, partial, progressive, the objective being divine,
absolute, and final.
There is an objective physical world and an objective psychic or
spiritual world, the latter being immanent in the former, though not
limited by it, so that every material object has spiritual contents. The
spiritual is no more an inside without an outside than the physical is
an outside without an inside. Each has its phase of reality, though in
the ultimate analysis the physical is dependent for its value upon its
spiritual capacity. The physical has a non-sensible inside which to be
discerned calls for distinctively human as distinguished from mere animal
powers of perception. Dimly in animal life there is a recognition of
inner character in objects—hostility, affinity, nourishment and the like
are instinctively sensed; but here deep perception stops except where, by
reason of what is called domestication or association with man, certain
human characteristics are faintly imaged in dog or horse.
There is no antagonism between the physical and the spiritual. The
physical world is to man a medium through which phases of the spiritual
are reached. The only antagonism there can be is that which arises by
an attempt to use the material without regard for its full spiritual
contents or inside. Were not the physical universe a sacrament it would
be a phantasm. If man divorces the inside from the outside with a view
to gratifying his physical senses he abdicates his character as a man
to become an animal; if to feed anything less than his entire selfhood,
he presents the spectacle of arrested development. The bodily senses
alone can get at the full content, the deep inside of nothing, no matter
how pronounced its objectivity, “The truly real is a thing that has an
inside.”[3] The more pronounced or attractive the external substance
and form of a material object and the closer we are to it, the greater
the difficulty for the average character to gain cognition of its
spiritual essence. “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into
the Kingdom of God.”[4] Even those who place an undue valuation upon the
material, whether possessed of wealth or not, have a like difficulty in
penetrating into the internal realm which lies beneath and around as
well as above and within the external.[5] It is absurd for men to expect
to sense the spiritual except with spiritual faculties. The physical
world is perceived by a sensory apparatus of the same substance as that
of the physical world; the spiritual world is perceived by a sensory
apparatus of the same substance as that of the spiritual world. There
must be an inherent affinity between the thing apprehended and the organ
apprehending. Now the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit
of God; for they are foolishness unto him; and he cannot know them
because they are spiritually proved.[6]
Reality is a term too often confined to that which can be expressed
in terms of bodily senses; whereas it is that which has existence in
heaven above, in the earth beneath, and in the waters under the earth,
and which, apart from human perception, though in a minimum degree or
passively, plays upon and affects man and his universe, but which reaches
its highest potentiality manward when, by the volitional operation of
human faculties it is subjectively apprehended and finds permanent
place in his consciousness. Reality is that which supports and feeds
the subconscious life by the pressure of its mere existence or laws of
being, but which is capable of bestowing larger gifts in proportion to
the degree in which it receives conscious admission into the activities
of personal experience. It is a law of spiritual or psychic, as well as
of physical, existence that every part is related to every other part
and influenced by it through either attraction or energy. In the case
of inanimate matter mere spacial propinquity or distance determines the
measure of attraction or energy of object upon object, but where sentient
beings are concerned the reaction of conscious volition on environment
is the determining factor regulating the degree of influence released.
The search for the real in internal processes cannot ignore the external.
Conversely the activities of the workaday world cannot summarily dismiss
the internal.[7] The physical senses have a modest but indispensable
part to play under the primacy of the Mystic Sense. The normal use of
the Mystic Sense does not make a mystic. The healthily developed man is
mystical though not a mystic. His dominating sense is that of the spirit,
not that of the flesh. A mystic, technically defined, is a specialist
in the subjective or internal, just as a collector is a specialist in
the objective or external. There is no danger in either extreme except
so far as its votary adopts an exclusive attitude toward its seeming
opposite (which really is its complement), or toward the balance of human
thought and life. A deliberate and persistent use of the Mystic Sense
without respect for the objective would be subversive of all progress
and a reversion to chaos. “The progress of thought consists in gradually
separating the series of objective and universally valid, from that of
subjective experiences. In the measure that their confusion prevails, man
is, to all intents and purposes, mad; and it is this note of insanity
that characterizes medicine and religion in their early stages. Dreams
and reality are mixed up; subjective connections are objectified.”[8]
If the objective and the subjective may not be divorced and set at odds
against one another, neither may they be confused. Both errors would
result in disorder and hopeless perplexity.
The serious crux is how, in the realm of the spiritual and the physically
intangible, to distinguish between the real and the seeming, the true and
the false. This it is the function of the Mystic Sense to do aided by the
full complement of inner faculties. In a measure the Mystic Sense, like
the bodily senses, acts automatically, but like them it needs special
training in order to separate phantasm from reality, to determine values,
and to grade and classify ideals until they reveal themselves to be
ordered unity, not less but more mysterious because more intelligible or
apprehensible by the whole man. The first principle to lay down is that
no man can treat himself as a unit or credit the findings of his Mystic
Sense with absolute or final authority until he has tried them by some
valid corporate test. Neither sight, nor hearing, nor touch, used without
regard to the experience of others and respect for it, can fail to lead
us astray. The conclusions of the wisest and the competent register
themselves from age to age, coming to us in the shape of beneficent
authority to prevent a man from repeating work that has already been done
and well done. Verification is not contemptuous of authority, though he
flouts authority, indeed, who ignores it in a process of individualistic
experiments. Pure individualism at best can apprehend but a fragment of
reality and at worst declines into eccentricity or even insanity. Those
who are really educated recognize their relation to a social whole and
bring the results of their sense perceptions, before accepting their
verdict, to be tested by the age-long, man-wide experiences of humanity
as formulated in the accepted conclusions of their generation and
found in its institutions and customs. Universal experience is never
wholly but only approximately infallible, yet accurate enough to be
authoritative for corrective purposes. By respectful attention to it,
individual judgment is checked in possible error and at the same time
is given opportunity to offer its own contribution to the totality of
knowledge, a contribution which may endorse, modify, or enlarge that
already reached. In this way only is society preserved from becoming a
mob of eccentrics and fanatics, each whirling in his own little circle.
Commerce, art, science, letters, government, religion—in short every
department of life you can think of requires such a mode of procedure
for the protection of reality in its varied manifestations and for the
protection of the individual against himself. But in no conditions is a
social checking off of findings more essential than in the psychic or
spiritual realm. Mystical experience organizes itself or is consciously
organized in a sufficient degree to give men that high kind of freedom
which comes to us when we act with constant reference to the fact that we
are members one of another, so that the experience of the human race is
ours wherewith to enrich ourselves. A mystic of the type of St. Theresa,
who could hardly see the objective in her rush past form to reach idea,
could not be distinguished from the inmate of a madhouse who insists that
his tinsel crown is the diadem of a Napoleon, unless she interpreted
her personal experience in relation to the spiritual consciousness of
Christendom. “Once,” writes this saint, “when I was holding in my hand
the cross of my rosary, He took it from me into His own hand. He returned
it; but it was then four large stones incomparably more precious than
diamonds: the five wounds were delineated on them with the most admirable
art. He said to me that for the future that cross would appear so to me
always, and so it did. The precious stones were seen, however, only by
myself.”[9] A madman would have omitted the last sentence. Her mystical
experience was individual though it preserved for its foundation a
background of universal experience. It united her to her fellows, instead
of separating her from them.
The law of use is as applicable to the Mystic Sense as to the rest of the
gifts and endowments which make up the completeness of human personality.
Its exercise enlarges its capacity and quickens its general efficiency;
if used through the whole range of its opportunities, it becomes a hardy
faculty, trustworthy in every sphere where its responsibility lies;
specialization of operation in one direction, to the partial neglect of
other departments open to it, produces acuteness in one direction and
dulness in other directions which is characteristic of specialists in
science; if the specialization is so exclusive as to shut off observation
and consideration of every interest but one, there must ensue lop-sided
growth and maimed personality.
It is the purpose of this book to trace the operation of the Mystic Sense
in normal manhood through the major departments of human experience
in order to encourage greater confidence in this wonderful gift, to
appeal for a more comprehensive use of it, and to indicate how it may be
cultivated.
NOTE TO CHAPTER I.
Von Hügel in his study of the _Mystical Element of Religion_ concludes
that there is “no distinct faculty of mystical apprehension.” In a
passage following this contention (vol. ii, pp. 283, 284), he so states
his position as to make it possible for me to start from a contradictory
assertion and reach his conclusion. We agree that mysticism is “not
everything in any one soul, but something in every soul of man.”
The entire passage reads as follows:
“Is there, then, strictly speaking, such a thing as a
specifically distinct, self-sufficing, purely Mystical mode
of apprehending Reality? I take it, distinctly not; and that
all the errors of the Exclusive Mystic proceed precisely
from the contention that Mysticism does constitute such an
entirely separate, completely self-supported kind of human
experience. This denial does not, of course, mean that soul
does not differ quite indefinitely from soul, in the amount and
kind of the recollective, intuitive, deeply emotive element
possessed and exercised by it concurrently or alternately
with other elements,—the sense of the Infinite within and
without the Finite springing up in the soul on occasion of
its contact with the Contingent; nor, again, that these more
or less congenital differences and vocations amongst souls
cannot be and are not still further developed by grace and
heroism into types of religious apprehension and life, so
strikingly divergent, as, at first sight, to seem hardly even
supplementary the one to the other. But it means that, in even
the most purely contingent-seeming soul, and in its apparently
but Institutional and Historical assents and acts, there ever
is, there can never fail to be, some, however, implicit,
however slight, however intermittent, sense and experience
of the Infinite, evidenced by at least some dissatisfaction
with the Finite, except as this Finitude is an occasion for
growth in, and a part-expression of, that Infinite, our true
home. And, again, it means, that even the most exclusively
mystical-seeming soul ever depends, for the fulness and
healthiness of even the most purely mystical of its acts and
states, as really upon its past and present contacts with
the Contingent, Temporal, and Spacial, and with social facts
and elements, as upon its movement of concentration, and the
sense and experience, evoked on occasion of those contacts or
of their memories, of the Infinite within and around those
finitudes and itself.
“Only thus does Mysticism attain to its true, full dignity,
which consists precisely in being, not everything in any one
soul, but something in every soul of man; and in presenting at
its fullest, the amplest development, among certain special
natures with the help of certain special graces and heroisms,
or what, in some degree, and form, is present in every truly
human soul, and in such a soul’s every, at all genuine and
complete, grace-stimulated religious act and state. And only
thus does it, as Partial Mysticism, retain all the strength and
escape the weaknesses and dangers of would-be Pure Mysticism,
as regards the mode and character or Religious Experience,
Knowledge, and Life.”
If my interpretation of this writer be correct, he terms that a
“recollective, intuitive, deeply emotive element” which I conceive to
be a mystic faculty or sense. The fact that it pervades every part of
human personality does not disqualify it from claiming the dignity of a
distinctive faculty. It bears a similar relation to the higher endowments
of personality which the ether bears to light and to the call of world to
world. The Mystic Sense is the enabling faculty, which makes man human.
Its pervasiveness does not detract from, rather does it enhance, its
distinctness. To call it an element seems to clothe it in a vagueness
which its character does not merit. If man were merely a phase of matter,
we could employ the term element with propriety. That which _can_ be only
an element in a universe, at any rate _may_ be a faculty or sense in man.