I. The most obvious and most generally accepted ex-

planation of the world is of course that of MWaturalism or Realism: the point of view at once of the plain man and of physical science. Naturalism states simply that we see the real world, though we may not see it very well. What seems to normal healthy people to be there, is approximately there. It congratulates itself on resting in the concrete; it accepts material things as real. In other words, our corrected and correlated sense impressions, raised to their highest point of efficiency, form for it the only valid material of knowledge: knowledge itself being the classified results of exact observation.
Now such an attitude as this may be a counsel of prudence, in view of our ignorance of all that lies beyond: but it can never satisfy our hunger for reality. It says in effect, “ The room in which we find ourselves is fairly com- fortable. Draw the curtains, for the night is dark: and let us devote ourselves to describing the furniture.’ Unfors tunately, however, even the furniture refuses to accommo- date itself to the naturalistic view of things. Once we begin to examine it attentively, we find that it abounds in hints of wonder and mystery: declares aloud that even chairs and tables are not what they seem.
We have seen that the most elementary criticism, applied to any ordinary object of perception, tends to invalidate the simple and comfortable creed of “common sense”; that not merely faith, but gross credulity, is needed by the mind which would accept the apparent as the real. I say, for instance, that I “see” a house. I can only mean by this that the part of my receiving instrument which undertakes the duty called vision is affected in a certain way, and arouses in my mind the idea “house.” The idea “house” is now treated by me as a real house, and my further observations will be an unfolding enriching, and defining of this image. But what the external reality zs which evoked the image that I call “house,” I do not know and never can know. It is as mysterious, as far beyond my apprehension, as the constitution of the angelic choirs. Consciousness shrinks in terror from contact with the mighty verb “to be.” I may of course call in one sense to “corroborate,” as we trustfully say, the evidence of the other; may approach the house, and touch it. Then the nerves of
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 11
my hand will be affected by a sensation which I translate as hardness and solidity; the eye by a peculiar and wholly incomprehensible sensation called redness; and from these purely personal changes my mind constructs and externalizes an idea which it calls red bricks. Science herself, however, if she be asked to verify the reality of these perceptions, at once declares that though the material world be real, the ideas of solidity and colour are but hallucination. They belong to the human animal, not to the physical universe : pertain to accident not substance, as scholastic philosophy would say.
“The red brick,” says Science, “is a mere convention. In reality that bit, like all other bits of the universe, consists, so far as I know at present, of innumerable atoms whirling and dancing one about the other. It is no more solid than a snowstorm. Were you to eat of Alice-in-Wonderland’s mushroom and shrink to the dimensions of the infra-world, each atom might seem to you a planet and the red brick itself auniverse. More- over, these atoms themselves elude me as I try to grasp them. They are only manifestations of something else. Could I track matter to its lair, 1 might conceivably discover that it has no extension, and become an idealist in spite of myself. As for redness, as you call it, that is a question of the relation between your optic nerve and the light waves which it is unable to absorb. This evening, when the sun slopes, your brick will probably be purple; a very little deviation from normal vision on your part would make it green. Even the sense that the object of perception is outside yourself may be fancy ; since you as easily attribute this external quality to images seen in dreams, and to waking hallucinations, as you do to those objects which, as you absurdly say, are “ really there.”
Further, there is no trustworthy standard by which we can separate the “real” from the “unreal” aspects of phenomena. Such standards as exist are conventional: and correspond to con- venience, not to truth. It is no argument to say that most men see the world in much the same way, and that this “way” is the true standard of reality: though for practical purposes we have agreed that sanity consists in sharing the hallucinations of our neighbours. Those who are honest with themselves know that this “sharing” is at best incomplete. By the voluntary adop-
12 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
tion of a new conception of the universe, the fitting of a new alphabet to the old Morse code—a proceeding which we call the acquirement of knowledge—we can and do change to a marked extent our way of seeing things: building up new worlds from old sense impressions, and transmuting objects more easily and thoroughly than any magician. “ Eyes and ears,” said Hera- cleitus, “are bad witnesses to those who have barbarian souls” : and even those whose souls are civilized tend to see and hear all things through a temperament. In one and the same sky the poet may discover the veritable habitation of angels, whilst the sailor sees only a promise of dirty weather ahead. Hence, artist and surgeon, Christian and rationalist, pessimist and optimist, do actually and truly live in different and mutually exclusive worlds, not only of thought but also of perception. Each, in Professor James’s phrase, literally “dichotomizes the Kosmos in a different place.” Only the happy circumstance that our ordinary speech is conventional, not realistic, permits us to conceal from{one another the unique and lonely world in which each lives. \'Now and then an artist is .born, terribly articulate, foolishly truthful, who insists on “Speaking as he saw.” Then other men, lapped warmly in their artificial universe, agree that he is mad: or, at the very best, an “ extra- ordinarily imaginative fellow.” ,
Moreover, even this uniqué world of the individual is not permanent. Each of us, as we grow and change, works inces- santly and involuntarily at the re-making of our sensual universe. We behold at any specific moment not “that which is,’ but “that which we are”; and personality undergoes many readjustments in the course of its passage from birth through maturity to death. The mind which seeks the Real, then, in this shifting and subjective “natural” world is of necessity thrown back on itself: on images and concepts which owe more to the “seer” than to the “seen.” But Reality must be real for all, once they have found it: must exist “in itself” upon a plane of being unconditioned by the perceiving mind. Only thus can it satisfy that mind’s most vital instinct, most sacred passion— its “instinct for the Absolute,” its passion for truth.
You are not asked, as a result of these antique and elemen- tary propositions, to wipe clean the slate of normal human experience, and cast in your lot with intellectual nihilism. You
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 13
are only asked to acknowledge that it is but a slate, and that the white scratches upon it which the ordinary man calls facts, and the Scientific Realist calls knowledge, are at best relative and conventionalized symbols of that aspect of the unknowable reality at which they hint. This being so, whilst we must all draw a picture of some kind on our slate and act in relation therewith, we cannot deny the validity—though we may deny the usefulness—of the pictures which others produce, however abnormal and impossible they may seem; since these are sketching an aspect of reality which has not come within our sensual field, and so does not and cannot form part of our world. Yet, as the theologian claims that the doctrine of the Trinity veils and reveals not Three but One, so the varied aspects under which the universe appears to the perceiving consciousness hint at a final reality, or in Kantian language a Transcendental Object, which shall be, not any one, yet all of its manifestations ; transcending yet including the innumerable fragmentary worlds of individual conception. We begin, then, to ask what can be the nature of this One ; and whence comes the persistent instinct which—receiving no encouragement from sense experience— apprehends and desires this unknown unity, this all-inclusive Absolute, as the only possible satisfaction of its thirst for truth.
2. The second great conception of Being—/dealtsm—has arrived by a process of elimination at a tentative answer to this question. It whisks us far from the material universe, with its interesting array of “things,” its machinery, its law, into the pure, if thin, air of a metaphysical world. Whilst the naturalist’s
SAE
world is constructed from _an observation of the. evidence offered
by the
observation of the | "processes _ of thought. There are but two
ei
things; he Says in effect, about which we are sure: the ©
existence of a thinking subject, a conscious Self, and of an object, an Idea, with which that subject deals. We know, that is to say, both Mind and Thought. What we call the universe is really a collection of such thoughts; and these, we agree, have been more or less distorted by the subject, the individual thinker, in the process of assimilation. Obviously, we do not think all that there is to be thought, conceive all that there is to be conceived: neither do we necessarily combine in right order and proportion those ideas which we are capable of grasping.
14 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
Reality, says Objective Idealism, is the complete, undistorted Object, the big thought, of which we pick up these fragmentary hints: the world of phenomena which we treat as real being merely its shadow show or “ manifestation in space and time.”
According to the form of Objective Idealism here chosen from amongst many as typical—for almost every Idealist has his own scheme of metaphysical salvationt—we live in a universe which is, in popular language, the Idea, or Dream of its Creator. We, as Tweedledum explained to Alice in the most philosophic of all fairy tales, are “just part of the dream.” All life, all phenomena, are the endless modifications and expres- sions of the one transcendent Object, the mighty and dynamic Thought of one Absolute Thinker in which we are bathed. This Object, or certain aspects of it—and the place of each individual consciousness within the Cosmic Thought, or, as we say, our position in life, must largely determine which these aspects shall be—is interpreted by the senses and conceived by the mind, under limitations which we are accustomed to call © matter, space, and time. But we have no reason to suppose that matter, space, and time are necessarily parts of reality; of the ultimate Idea. Probability points rather to their being the pencil and paper with which we sketch it. As our vision, our idea of things, tends to approximate more and more to that of | the Eternal Idea, so we get nearer and nearer to reality: for the idealist’s reality is simply the Idea, or Thought of God. Tas, he says, is the supreme unity at which all the illusory appear- ances that make up the widely differing worlds of “common sense,” of science, of metaphysics, and of art dimly hint. This is the sense in which it can truly be said that only the supernatural ' possesses reality; for that world of appearance which we call © - natural is certainly largely made up of preconception and illusion, of the hints offered by the eternal real world of Idea outside our gates, and the quaint concepts which we at our receiving instruments manufacture from them.
There is this to be said for the argument of Idealism: that in the last resort, the destinies of mankind are invariably guided, not by the concrete “facts” of the sense world, but by concepts
* There are four main groups of such schemes: (1) Subjective ; (2) Objective ; (3) Transcendental (Kantian) ; (4) Absolute (Hegelian). To these must perhaps be added the Immanental Idealism of Professor Eucken.
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 15
which are acknowledged by every one to exist only on the mental plane. In the great moments of existence, when he rises to spiritual freedom, these are the things which every man feels to be real, It is by these and for these that he is found willing to live, work, suffer, and die. Love, empire, religion, altruism, fame, all belong to the transcendental world. Hence, they partake more of the nature of reality than any “ fact” could do; and man, dimly recognizing this, has ever bowed to them as to immortal centres of energy. Religions as a rule are steeped in idealism : Christianity in particular is a trumpet call to an idealistic conception of life, Buddhism is little less. Over and over again, their Scriptures tell us that only materialists will be damned.
In Idealism we have perhaps the most sublime theory of Being which has ever been constructed by the human intellec; a theory so sublime, in fact, that it can hardly have been p duced by the exercise of “pure reason” alone, but must looked upon as a manifestation of that natural mysticism, t instinct for the Absolute, which is latent in man. But, whe ask the idealist how we are to attain communion with the re which he describes to us as “certainly there,” his system denly breaks down; and discloses itself as a diagram heavens, not a ladder to the stars. This failure of Idea find in practice the reality of which it thinks so much in the opinion of the mystics, to a cause which finds matic expression in the celebrated phrase by which St marked the distinction between religion and philosophy. located the soul of man in the head ; Christ located i heart.” That is to say, Idealism, though just in its p and often daring and honest in their application, is stulti the exclusive intellectualism of its own methods: by its trust in the squirrel-work of the industrious brain instead o piercing vision of the desirous heart. It interests man, but not involve him in its processes: does not catch him up to t new and more real life which it describes. Hence the thing that mattered, the living thing, has somehow escaped it; and its observations bear the same Relation to reality as the art of the anatomist does to the mystery of birth. ® 7, . aves: i
3. But ‘there is yet another Theory of Bang ‘to be con- J erty sidered: that which may be loosely defined as Philosophi¢ lo
K
16 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
Scepticism. This is the attitude of those selves who refuse to accept either the realistic or the idealistic answer to the eternal question: and, confronted in their turn with the riddle of reality, reply that there is no riddle to solve. We of course assume for the ordinary purposes of life that for every sequence a:b: present in our consciousness there exists a mental or material A:B: in the external universe; and that the first is a strictly relevant, though probably wholly inadequate, ex- pression of the second. The bundle of visual and auditory sensations, for instance, whose sum total I am accustomed to call Mrs. Smith, corresponds with something that exists in the actual as well as in my phenomenal world. Behind my Mrs. Smith, behind the very different Mrs. Smith which the X rays would exhibit, there is, contends the Objective Idealist, a trans- ndental, or in the Platonic sense an ideal Mrs. Smith, at ose qualities I cannot even guess; but whose existence quite independent of my apprehension of it. But though do and must act on this hypothesis, it remains only a othesis; and it is one which philosophic scepticism will let pass, he external world, say the sceptical schools, is—so far as w it—a concept present in my mind. If my mind ceased st,so far as I know the concept which I call the world cease to exist too. The one thing which for me in-- ly zs, is the selfs experience, its whole consciousness. this circle of consciousness I have no authority to in guesses as to what may or may not Be. Hence, for Absolute is a meaningless diagram, a superfluous com- n of thought: since the mind, wholly cut off from t with external reality, has no reason to suppose that a reality exists except in its own ideas. Every effort e by philosophy to go forth in search of it is merely the Ftaphysical squirrel running round the conceptual cage. In e completion and perfect unfolding of the set of ideas with which our consciousness is furnished, lies the only reality which we can ever hope to know. Far better to stay here and make ourselves at home: only this, for us, truly is.
This purely subjective conception of Being has found repre- sentatives in every school of thought: even including, by a curious paradox, that of mystical philosophy, its one effective
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 17
antagonist. Thus Delacroix, after an exhaustive and even sympathetic analysis of St. Teresa’s progress towards union with the Absolute, ends upon the assumption that the God with whom she was united was the content of her own sub- conscious mind.t_ Such a mysticism is that of a kitten running after its own tail: a different path indeed from that which the great seekers for reality have pursued. The reductio ad absurdum of this doctrine is found in the so-called “ philosophy” of New Thought, which begs its disciples to “try quietly to realize that ithe Infinite is really You.”? By its utter denial not merely of a knowable, but of a logically conceivable Transcendent, it drives us in the end to the conclusion of extreme pragmatism ;
that Truth, for us, is not an immutable reality, but merely that id idea whi which “happens to work : Out _as true and. useful...in. any
tnt ORGS A ene BIDEN
given yen_eXperience. _ There is. ‘no-teality.. -behind..appearance, no Iss behind the veil ; therefore all faiths, all figments with which we people that nothingness are equally true, provided they be comfortable and good to live by.
Logically carried out, this conception of Being would permit each _man.to regard other men as _non- -existent except within “his. own.consciousness : the ‘only. place where a strict scepticism “will allow that _anything | exists. Even the mind which con- céives consciousness exists for us only in our own conception of it; we no more know what we are than we know what we shall be. Man is left a conscious Something in the midst, so far as he knows, of Nothing: with no resources save the exploring of his own consciousness.
Philosophic scepticism is particularly interesting to us in our present inquiry, because it shows us the position in which “pure reason,” if left to itself, is bound to end. It is utterly logical; and though we may feel it to be absurd, we can never prove it to be so. Those persons who are temperamentally inclined to credulity may become naturalists, and persuade themselves to believe in the reality of the sense world. Those with a certain instinct for the Absolute may adopt the more reasonable faith of idealism. But the true intellectualist, who concedes nothing to instinct or emotion, is obliged in the end to adopt some form of sceptical philosophy. The horrors of
* Delacroix, ‘‘ Etudes sur le Mysticisme,” Deeds 2 E. Towne, “‘ Just how to Wake the Solar Plexus,” p. 25.
ad
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é f
F i f
18 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
nihilism, in fact, can only be escaped by the exercise of faith: by a trust in man’s innate but strictly irrational instinct for that Real “above all reason, beyond all thought” towards which at its best moments his spirit tends. If the metaphysician be true to his own postulates, he is compelled at last to acknowledge that we are forced, every one of us, to live, to think, and at last to die, in an unknown and unknowable world: fed arbitrarily and diligently, yet how we know not, by ideas and suggestions whose truth we cannot test but whose pressure we cannot resist. It is not by sight but by faith—faith in a supposed external order which we can never prove to exist, and in the approxi- mate truthfulness and constancy of the vague messages which we receive from it—that ordinary men must live and move. We must put our trust in “laws of nature” which have been devised by the human mind as a convenient epitome of its own observations of phenomena, must, for the purposes of daily life, accept these phenomena at their face value: an act of faith beside which the grossest superstitions of the Neapolitan peasant are hardly noticeable.
~ The intellectual quest of Reality, then, leads us down one of three blind alleys: (1) To an acceptance of the symbolic world of appearance as the real; (2) to the elaboration of a theory—also of necessity symbolic—which, beautiful in itself cannot help us to attain the Absolute which it describes ; (3) to
a hopeless but strictly logical scepticism.
In answer to the “Why? Why?” of the bewildered and eternal child in us, philosophy, though always ready to postulate the unknown if she can, is bound to reply only, “ WVesczo / Nescio!” In spite of all her busy map-making, she cannot reach the goal which she points out to us: cannot explain the curious conditions under which we imagine that we know; cannot even divide with a sure hand the subject and object of thought. Science, whose business is with phenomena and our knowledge of them, though she too is an idealist at heart, has been accustomed to explain that all our ideas and instincts, the pictured world that we take so seriously, the oddly limited and illusory nature of our experience, appear to minister to one great end: the preservation of life, and consequent fulfilment of that highly mystical hypothesis, the Cosmic Idea. Each per- ception, she assures us, serves a useful purpose in this evolu-
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 19
tionary scheme: a scheme, by the way, which has been invented —we know not why—by the human mind, and imposed upon an obedient universe.
By vision, hearing, smell, and touch, says Science, we and our way about, are warned of danger, obtain our food. The
male perceives _beauty in the female in order that ‘the species may bef propagated. It is true that this primitive
instinct has given birth to higher and purer emotions; but these too fulfil a social purpose and are not so useless as they seem. Man must eat to live, therefore many foods give us agreeable sensations. If he over eats, he dies ; therefore indi- gestion is an unpleasant pain. Certain facts of which too keen a perception would act detrimentally to the life-force are, for most men, impossible of realization: ze. the uncertainty of life, the decay of the body, the vanity of all things under the sun. When we are in good health, we all feel very real, solid, and permanent; and this is of all our illusions the most ridiculous, and also the most obviously useful from the point of view of the efficiency and preservation of the race.
But when we look a little closer, we see that this brisk generalization does not cover all the ground—not even that little tract of ground of which our senses make us free; indeed, that it is more remarkable for its omissions than for its inclusions. Récéjac has well said that “from the- moment in which man is no longer content to devise things useful for his existence under the exclusive action of the will-to-live, the principle of (physical) evolution has been violated.”! Nothing can be more certain than that man is not so content. He has been called by utilitarian philosophers a tool-making animal— the highest praise they knew how to bestow. More surely he is a vision-making animal;? a creature of perverse and unpractical
‘ideals, dominated by dreams no less than by appetites—dreams which can only be justified upon the theory that he moves ‘towards some other goal than that of physical perfection or intellectual supremacy, is controlled by some higher and more vital reality than that of the determinists. One is driven to
* * Fondements de la Connaissance Mystique,” p. 15.
? Or, as St. Thomas Aquinas suggests, a contemplative animal, since ‘‘ this act alone in man is proper to nim, and is in no way shared by any other being in this world” (** Summa Contra Gentiles,” 1. iii. cap. xxxvii., Rickaby’s translation).
20 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
the conclusion that if the theory of evolution is to include or explain the facts of artistic and spiritual experience—and it cannot be accepted by any serious thinker if these great tracts of consciousness remain outside its range—it must be rebuilt on a mental rather than a physical basis.
Even the most normal, most ordinary human life includes in its range fundamental experiences—violent and unforgettable _ sensations—forced on us as it were against our will, for which _ science finds it hard to account. These experiences and sensa- . tions, and the hours of exalted emotion which they bring with them—often recognized by us as the greatest, most significant hours of our lives—fulfil no office in relation to her pet “ func- tions of nutrition and reproduction.” It is true that they are far-reaching in their effects on character; but they do little or nothing to assist that character in its struggle for physical life. To the unprejudiced eye many of them seem hopelessly out of place in a universe constructed on strictly physico-chemical lines—look almost as though nature, left to herself, tended to contradict her own beautifully logical laws. Their presence, more, the large place which they fill in the human world of appearance, is a puzzling circumstance for deterministic philo- sophers ; who can only escape from the dilemma here presented to them by calling these things illusions, and dignifying their own more manageable illusions with the title of facts.
Amongst the more intractable of these groups of perceptions and experiences are those which we connect with religion, with pain, and with beauty. All three, for those selves which are capable of receiving their messages, possess a mysterious authority far in excess of those feelings, arguments, or appearances which they may happen to contradict. All three, were the universe of the naturalists true, would be absurd; all three have ever been treated with the reverence due to vital matters by the best minds of the race.
A. I need not point out the hopelessly irrational character of all great religions, which rest, one and all, on a primary assump- tion that can never be intellectually demonstrated, much less proved; the assumption that the supra-sensible is somehow important and real, and can be influenced by the activities of man. This fact has been incessantly dwelt upon by their critics, and has provoked many a misplaced exercise of
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 21
ingenuity on the part of their intelligent friends. Yet religion —emphasizing and pushing to extremes that general depend-— ence on faith which we saw to be an inevitable condition of our lives—is one of the most universal and ineradicable functions _of man, and this although it constantly acts detrimentally to the interests of his merely physical existence, opposes “the exclusive action of the will-to-live,” except in so far as that will aspires to eternal life. Strictly utilitarian, almost logical in the savage, religion becomes more and more transcendental with the upward progress of the race. It begins as black magic; it ends as Pure Love. Why did the Cosmic Idea elaborate this religious instinct, if the construction put upon its intentions by the determinists be true?
B. Consider again the whole group of phenomena which are known as “the problem of suffering”: the mental anguish and physical pain which appear to be the inevitable result of the steady operation of “natural law” and its voluntary assistants, the cruelty, greed, and injustice of man. Here, it is true, the naturalist seems at first sight to make a little more headway, and is able to point to some amongst the cruder forms of suffering which are clearly useful to the race: punishing us for past follies, spurring to new efforts, warning against future infringements of “law.” But he forgets the many others which refuse to be resumed under this simple formula: forgets to explain how it is that the Cosmic Idea involves the long torments of the incurable, the tortures of the innocent, the deep anguish of the bereaved, the existence of so many gratuitously agonizing forms of death. He forgets, too, the strange fact that man’s capacity for suffering tends to , increase in depth and subtlety with the increase of culture and civilization; ignores the still more mysterious, perhaps most significant circumstance that the highest types have accepted it eagerly and willingly, have found in Pain the grave but kindly teacher of immortal secrets, the conferrer of liberty even the initiator into amazing joys.
Those who “explain” suffering as the result of nature’s immense fecundity—a by-product of that overcrowding and stress through which the fittest tend to survive—forget that even were this demonstration valid and complete it would leave the real problem untouched. The question is not, whence come
22 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
those conditions which provoke in the self the experiences called sorrow, anxiety, pain: but, why do these conditions Zurt the self? The pain is mental; a little chloroform, and though the conditions continue unabated the suffering is gone. Why does full consciousness always include the mysterious capacity for misery as well as for happiness—a capacity which seems at first sight to invalidate any conception of the Absolute as Beautiful and Good? Why does evolution, as we ascend the . ladder of life, foster instead of diminishing the capacity for useless mental anguish, for long, dull torment, bitter grief? Why, when so much lies outside our limited powers of per- ception, when so many of our own most vital functions are unperceived by consciousness, does suffering of some sort form an integral part of the experience of man? For utilitarian pur- poses acute discomfort would be quite enough; the Cosmic Idea, as the determinists explain it, did not really need an apparatus which felt all the throes of cancer, the horrors of neurasthenia, the pangs of birth. Still less did it need the torments of impotent sympathy for other people’s irremediable pain, the dreadful power of feeling the world’s woe. We are hopelessly over-sensitized for the part science calls us to play. |
Pain, however we may look at it, indicates a profound dis- harmony between the sense-world and the human self. If it is to be vanquished, either the disharmony must be resolved by a deliberate and careful adjustment of the self-to the world of sense, or, that self must turn from the sense-world to some other with which it is in tune.t Pessimist and optimist here join hands. But whilst the pessimist, resting in appearance, only sees “nature red in tooth and claw” offering him little hope of escape, the optimist thinks that pain and anguish— which may in their lower forms be life’s harsh guides on the path of physical evolution—in their higher and apparently “useless” developments are her leaders and teachers in the upper school of Supra-sensible Reality. He believes that they press the self towards another world, still “natural” for him, though “super-natural” for his antagonist, in which it will be more at home. Watching life, he sees in Pain the complement of Love: and is inclined to call these the wings on which man’s
* All the healing arts, from Asculapius and Galen to Metchnikoff and Mrs. Eddy, have virtually accepted and worked upon these two principles.
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 23
irit can best take flight towards the Absolute. Hence he an say with A Kempis, “Gloriari in tribulatione non est grave manti,” * and needs not to speak of morbid folly when he sees he Christian saints run eagerly and merrily to the Cross.?
He calls suffering the “gymnastic of eternity,” the “terrible aitiative caress of God”; recognizing in it a quality for which he disagreeable rearrangement of nerve molecules cannot .ccount. Sometimes, in the excess of his optimism, he puts 0 the test of practice this theory with all its implications. Refusing to be deluded by the pleasures of the sense world, ae accepts instead of avoiding pain, and becomes an ascetic ;
\ puzzling type for the convinced naturalist,{who, falling back’
‘ pon contempt—that favourite resource of the frustrated reason —can only regard him as diseased,
7 Pain, then, which plunges like a sword through creation, leaving on the one side cringing and degraded animals and on the other side heroes and saints, is one of those facts of universal experience which are peculiarly intractable from the point of view of a merely materialistic philosophy. _—