IN RELATION TO THOUGHT
The mind includes the Mystic Sense in somewhat a similar way to the
manner in which the body includes the physical senses. But the Mystic
Sense can be, indeed must be, considered as a distinct faculty having a
peculiar function in the formation of that product of the mind called
thought, which is “the effort to win over facts to ideas, or to adjust
ideas to facts.”[12] The Mystic Sense can and does operate when the
rationalizing faculty is reverently silent, and by its operation prepares
new material for pure reason to consider.
There is no specifically intellectual organ. It is the whole man which
apprehends knowledge just as it is the whole man and not an exclusively
religious part of him, which apprehends and is apprehended by eternities
and infinities. It is popularly supposed that science and mathematics
call for the exercise of one set of faculties, and philosophy and
religion another. Whereas the truth is that the same faculties are used
for all alike in pretty much the same relation to one another. The Mystic
Sense is as indispensable to science as it is to piety. Its method of
operation is precisely the same in the one sphere as in the other.
We can best appreciate the important part the Mystic Sense plays in
science by a survey of the foundations of accepted scientific fact.
The whole body of our knowledge concerning the material universe is
constructed upon a few ultimates, chief among them being the ether and
the atom. The physical senses, so busy in that workshop of science, the
laboratory, cease to be important when we deal with these fundamentals.
The discoverer of ether never perceived it by touch, taste, smell, sight
or hearing. Newton postulated it because he said it was a necessity,
exactly as we postulate the existence of God. How could there be
attraction across the measureless spaces which separate worlds if there
were not some intangible substance? The ether was therefore discovered to
order by the Mystic Sense and accepted because it proved a good working
hypothesis. We are solemnly told by physicists that it is an “elastic
solid,” a “pervasive fluid,” a “tenuous substance.” And yet when we
chase this elusive something into a corner we find it to be “that which
undulates,” a form of motion—well, so is a field mouse!
Again the atomic theory, first conceived by the Greeks, was restated by
Dalton more than 2,000 years later, who brought it down “from the clouds
to the laboratory and factory.” But neither Dalton nor anyone else ever
touched an atom, saw an atom, heard an atom, smelt an atom, or tasted
an atom, ultimate of matter that it is. The physicist claims, however,
“that though he cannot handle or see them, the atoms and molecules are as
real as the ice-crystals in the cirrhus clouds that he cannot reach—as
real as the unseen members of a meteoric swarm whose death glow is lost
in the sunshine, or which sweep past us unentangled in the night”—that
the atoms are in fact “not merely helps to puzzled mathematicians, but
physical realities.”[13] All this may be so. Nevertheless both the ether
and the atom are so little material as to escape physical perception
as completely as a ghost, and so nearly spiritual as to be perceived by
the Mystic Sense with sufficient clearness to enable the scientist to
use them as his fundamental hypothesis. If this reasoning be true, the
ultimate of matter is spiritual and not material!
As with the ether so with the atom, it was a scientific necessity.
The Mystic Sense contributed it to the laboratory, where it has been
contentedly accepted as the ultimate of matter, until the other day, when
someone opened the window of the atom to discover that it was a huge
universe, of which a β corpuscle or electron was the least particle,
related to the atom as a mote dancing in the sunbeam is to the room where
it is. No sense but the Mystic Sense has yet sensed the electron. Not
only, then, has science accepted the findings of the Mystic Sense, but,
having accepted them, it has in the main not had reason to distrust them
and continues confidently to base its research upon the foundation thus
laid.
The freshest of more recent scientific discoveries, evolution, is as
much the child of the Mystic Sense as of inductive reasoning. It was
the Mystic Sense of ancient philosophers, exploring the unseen, which
first descried it on the horizon as the sailor at the masthead spies the
distant land. Darwin was the helmsman who steered the ship to port. He
rationalized it and applied it as a working hypothesis. It is instructive
to note that Darwin began his career with a rather acute sense of the
mystical. He had a keen appetite for poetry, and pictures, and the music
in King’s College Chapel “gave him intense pleasure, so that his backbone
would sometimes shiver.”[14] He even began preparation for Holy Orders.
In later life the interests that meant so much to him in youth died.
“My mind,” he says, “seems to have become a kind of machine for finding
general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should
have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the
higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly
organized or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have
thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a
rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week;
for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been
kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness,
and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the
moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.” It
would be more accurate, perhaps, to explain this loss, not by atrophy but
by too narrow specialization. His Mystic Sense and powerful imagination
were not dead. They were centred on a single object. Having developed his
Mystic Sense in one or all the ways open to him, a man may abandon its
use in every direction but one. Christian worship, poetry, music prepare
the Mystic Sense for that daring creation of hypotheses characteristic of
Darwin. Without his power of hypothesis he could never have become more
than a mere collector of the jackdaw order. He is his own best witness to
the truth of this assertion. He says, “I have steadily endeavored to keep
my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I
cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as facts are shown
to be opposite to it,” adding that he could not remember “a single first
formed hypothesis which had not after a time to be given up or modified.”
It is one of the chief functions of the Mystic Sense to present
hypotheses. Without hypothesis the reason is a shorn Samson. A goal must
be postulated, otherwise the wood could not be seen for the trees, and
the intellect would be hopelessly lost in a tangle of underbrush and
smothered by the weight of its own learning. “While theory is aimless
and impotent without experimental check, experiment is dead without some
theory passing beyond the limits of ascertained knowledge to control it.
Here, as in all parts of natural knowledge, the immediate presumption
is strongly in favor of the simplest hypothesis; the main support, the
unfailing clue, of physical science is the principle that, nature being a
rational _cosmos_, phenomena are related on the whole in the manner that
conceptual reason would anticipate.”[15] Generalization of a tentative
character precedes and gives a starting point for induction. Hypothesis
is more often the child of intuitive processes which capture thought
by quick assault than of slower and more analyzable forces. First comes
hypothesis, then the accumulation of data, finally, when all available
evidence is in, rejection and the adoption of fresh hypothesis, or
modification, or verification. “A bundle of disconnected facts is only
the raw material for an investigation: their mere collection is the very
earliest stage in the process; and even while collecting them there is
nearly always some system, some place, some idea under trial.”[16] The
spiritual contents of the physical universe are, in part, evolution,
the ether, the atom and such like. They bear material names, but they
are ideas, out of reach of our sensory nerves, and capable of being
perceived, first dimly and then clearly, only through the Mystic Sense.
They form the allegorical department of scientific thought, and are to
the reality as the Apocalypse is to the Kingdom of Heaven.
It would be without special gain, however easy, to multiply illustrations
of the princely place which the Mystic Sense holds in scientific
research. Let us, therefore, turn for a moment to mathematics with its
array of imperturbable digits and prosaic facts. No sooner does the
mathematician begin to move, than he finds it necessary to call to his
aid the self-same faculty, which furnishes the physicist with his ether
and atoms, and enables the worshipper to pray. Else how could he explore
the fifth dimension, and define a line as having length without breadth,
or a plane superficies as having only length and breadth, or a point as
having no parts? It is not astonishing that the mathematician, “Lewis
Carroll,” was the author of those most delicious imaginative works of
immortal fame, “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass.” His
vocation prepared and trained him for his avocation, and his avocation
gave him new efficiency in his vocation. That which made him able to
write the story of dreamland equipped him as an able scholar—the use in
proper relation to his other mental gifts of the Mystic Sense. Similarly
it is not surprising, but to be expected that Bacon, Pasteur, and Kelvin
were, each in his own degree, religious men. They are the normal men of
science, La Place, Huxley, and Haeckel being eccentrics and developed in
a lop-sided way.
Invention, to turn to the department of practical science, relates the
same story. Long before men saw, they dreamed. The locomotive was a
vision before it was a fact; the aeroplane began as an idea, stinging
men into adventurous experiment, before it spread its wings above the
earth; men talked across vast spaces in thought before the earliest cable
ticked its message, or the wireless system enthralled us by its wizardry.
The Mystic Sense is prophetic and sees to-morrow as though it were
to-day, dimly first and then with increasing clearness. “Without much dim
apprehension, no dear perception; nothing is more certain than this.”[17]
Still once more, when we turn to literature the Mystic Sense is a
pole-star. History is a museum of the curios of yesterday, a pile of
bones, a series of occurrences, a collection of bald facts as cold and
bare as a heap of pebbles, until the Mystic Sense enters the sterile
valley and brings with it the breath of life. An idiot with a memory
can collect past facts as easily as a wee toddler can collect shells on
the sea shore and to as good purpose. But it needs a man who, however
vast his stock of information, possesses a developed Mystic Sense to
classify facts and reveal their insides. Facts never tell the truth to
an unimaginative mind. There is a higher form of accuracy and a deeper
presentation of reality than a bare statement. Figures and prose, taken
alone, are blind guides.
In normal childhood the Mystic Sense gets admirable training through
the poetry and imaginative literature that belongs to the nursery in
every nation. It is justly considered improper to confine a child’s
education to the multiplication table, scientific statement, religious
dogma, and the memorizing of historic fact. The kindergarten, be its
merits or defects what they may, is an endeavor to rouse the young mind
to accurate observation and calculation through the imaginative faculty.
Allegory, fable, and multiplied illustration form the natural vehicle
for imparting knowledge to the young. The abstract is unintelligible, the
bald is uninteresting; vivid description, poetical and highly colored,
is the main road to knowledge. Care is taken to introduce fact in its
best and prettiest clothing. Human life has a craving for the beautiful
which is a phase of strength and an aspect of the real. Literature is the
recorded expression of human life and thought, colored by the character
of its various authors.[18] Art is literature on canvas, in vibrant
sounds, and in stone.
Poetry is a necessary and not an ornamental part of literature. It is
to a large extent the mystical embodiment of prose, or perhaps it would
be truer to say that it bears somewhat the same relation to prose that
hypothesis does to science. At any rate it is the distinctive literature
of the Mystic Sense. It is the literature of the young nation just as
much as it is of the young child. The earliest and the most permanent
literature extant is either poetry or poetical in idea. Imagination, a
child of the Mystic Sense, which runs wild unless disciplined, was born
earlier than more sober offspring of the mind. Poetry is the parent of
prose. The habit of the nursery or schoolroom is the reproduction on a
small scale of the method of history—first poetry, then prose. He rules
a nation who furnishes it with songs. There is no firmer foundation for
national life than a great legendary epic or a garland of folk songs. The
better, if not the larger, part of the Old Testament is poetic. Even the
historical books do not pretend to be history as Gibbon and Green are
history. Legend and history had not been distinguished from one another
in those days. Legend is usually elaborately colored interpretation of
fact where the actual occurrence has been lost in the interpretation,
to such an extent that it can never be recovered or can only be guessed
at. By subjective process, somewhat akin to reflection or digestion, the
objective gains a new and transfigured self apart from and independent,
it may be, of the original object. Thus legend is over-subjectified
history. The outside is ignored for the sake of the inside.
Poetry and wholesome fiction must find permanent place in the life of a
normal man. Do not delude yourself into thinking that your chief or only
guides in life are logic and sense perception. They are not. Intuition
and sentiment lead you twice for every once these others do. It is so
much more comfortable, not to say honest and reasonable, to acknowledge
frankly the primacy of your leaders, than to follow them and pretend all
the while that you are following other guides, which is a species of
disloyalty. Scientist, inventor, mathematician, man of letters, alike are
not quite true to fact when they claim that pure reason and an exclusive
process of induction control their mental operations. I would raise the
question whether there is any such thing as the exclusively inductive
method. Is it not truer to speak of the deductive-inductive than of
the inductive? The Mystic Sense, with its adventurous and sometimes
blundering progress, holds so important a place that without it logic and
induction would be as grist without a mill. To reach knowledge by “pure
reason” is as impossible as to reach the sun with a stepladder. Even
supposing it were possible to bring bare reason over against bald fact,
the result would reach only a degree beyond the achievement of a pig
that counts, or a jackdaw that gathers a store of glittering objects.
I have heard scrupulous people complain of the effect of fairy lore,
nursery fables, and imaginative traditions like that of Santa Claus,
upon child life. It may be a question to consider, but it is dealing
with a mote rather than with a beam. Cheap current literature, and
the psychologically false story, which is characteristic of many of
our magazines, are far more of an injury to heart and mind than the
imaginative excesses of the nursery. The objection to the latter is not
in the substance, but in the unnecessary attempts to deceive and to
confuse objective and subjective in the child mind. Santa Claus is a
harmless creature viewed as the Spirit of Christmas. When he is turned
into a chimney god to whom written or spoken prayers are offered, it
is another matter. Who can withstand the pathos of the little sister’s
death, resulting from her petition before the fireplace for a new toy
for her baby brother? The flames took her and turned her into a burnt
sacrifice to Santa Claus.
Supply is usually responsive to demand and the amount of imaginative
literature and versifying in the journals of the day is a fair
indication of the appetite for that which stimulates the Mystic Sense in
letters. Also its hectic character is indicative of the wild state of
the psychic life of the readers. The normal is counted uninteresting,
and the abnormal, in incident and character, is portrayed. A steady diet
of such reading leaves unhealthy blotches, indelible and disfiguring, on
human life. Even in more serious literature the story of the abnormal may
be given too great prominence. Valuable as the late Professor James’s
_Varieties of Religious Experience_ may be, it has the fault of studying
the abnormal as though it were the ordinary, leaving the great stretches
of healthy religious experience practically untouched. If a physiologist
were to give his main attention to men with one green and one brown eye,
or with the heart on the right instead of the left side, or some kindred
peculiarities, the sum total of his research would not contribute much to
our knowledge of the normal man.
To conclude: every man who respects his mind, be his vocation what it
may, has need to guard his Mystic Sense from defilement, and afford it
opportunity for development. In what is technically known as education
great stress is laid on proportion and subject matter. This is no less
a necessity in maturer life than it is in youth. The same result ensues
upon reading anything that comes to hand, that ensues upon eating
anything that comes to hand. So important a thing is it, not only that we
should be able to create hypotheses, but also that our hypotheses should
be sound, that we must furnish our Mystic Sense with the same safeguards
and stimulus that we afford our physical senses.