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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.




CHAPTER II

IN RELATION TO HEALTH


There is nothing so multiple in its composition, and yet nothing so
seemingly simple, so unit-like a unity, as normal personality—a normal
character englobed by a normal body. Normality is the product of a
two-fold force, the true interrelation between the organs of the body
and a similar interrelation between the inner faculties, culminating
in a rhythmic interaction between the two. The normal man acts in the
completeness of his manhood in all that he does, never adopting the
rôle of either mere machine or mere ghost. In so far as the inside and
the outside of man work as a unity, the dignity of human personality
manifests itself; any departure from harmony approaches that dangerous
borderland beyond which lies disintegration and disorder. Disease is a
lack of rhythm, a note in the scale out of tune. Health is harmony.

Up to the time that consciousness of existence awakens, the processes of
life operate under the stimulus and protection of the human and physical
environment which surround the infant. With the immediate effect of
suitable shelter and wholesome nourishment we are fairly conversant. As
to just what direct or indirect influence psychic surroundings have upon
the subconscious life of a baby, we are not in a position to dogmatize,
though we can arrive inferentially at certain rational probabilities.

Apparently the infant, and certainly the child, is extraordinarily
sensitive to subtle forces. Acting upon this supposition the Christian
Church from the beginning, by a symbolic and sacramental act, has aimed
to thrust children deep into the bosom of God by the rite of baptism, and
claimed for them not only a place but a place of chief importance in the
spiritual society. Instinctively the mother, with exquisite solicitude,
whispers her ideals for the future of her offspring into the ears of
the babe at her breast, talking as though to one whose consciousness
were awake. In this way Samuels have been raised to Israel. At the close
of each day the mother bids her child sleep by singing lullabies and
hanging mystic poppies over wide-awake eyes. She speaks in the highest
type of language, in poetry adorned with song, to this little unconscious
scrap of humanity. In other words her mystic sense is pressing upon the
mystic sense of her child as naturally and fittingly as her arms fold the
infant body and her lips touch its cheek.

Unless positive proof to the contrary is adduced, it is safe to believe
that it makes a great difference to the child’s after life of what sort
its psychic environment is during its first years on earth, whether the
minds about it are healthy, expressing themselves healthily, whether the
tone of family life is hopeful and spiritual. Though it cannot finally
determine the course that the child’s life will take, at any rate it
affords the best opportunity for making it a worthy course. My conviction
is, that the difference between good and bad psychic environment for
a baby is the same as that between healthy and unhealthy vegetable
environment for a young plant. An infant abandoned by its mother to the
care of nurses and servants, be the provision for its animal comfort and
safety what it may, begins life with a minimum of opportunity. Man is not
born mere animal but man from the first breath. Therefore from the first
breath he needs man’s surroundings. In order that his latent character
may have its best chance, he ought to be given the most congenial human
environment available. If there is no conscious self, at any rate there
is a subconscious self, struggling at a very early moment by baby smiles
and frets, gropings and babblings to utter itself. Psychology seems to
have reached at least this conclusion—that the subconscious is, that it
is the fundamental part of man, that it is his most sensitive self, never
relinquishing that which it grasps and grasping everything that touches
it.

Psychic forces may influence mightily the subconscious life of an infant
and promote healthy character, but have they any effect on physical
well-being? The reply would seem to be that, if at any time in the span
of a lifetime they work beneficently in this direction, it is probable
that they do so from the outset. It would be sheer waste of time to
adduce arguments to prove that healthy minds conduce directly to healthy
physique. The difficulty is to find the limit of such influence, so vast
is it. Physical well-being, however, is not an end in itself, and it is
a subversion of the human order to aim at health of mind or character
in order that our physique may be improved. So nicely is human nature
proportioned and adjusted that it is doubtful whether a person could
achieve physical health by becoming good with that sole end in view.
Physical health is not essential to a high degree of human efficiency,
though health of character is and therefore must be sought first because
of its priceless value. But it is our just assumption that a child
with a healthy body is more likely to have a normal inner personality
than if it had a sickly body. Outer and inner health act and react and
interact so that it is equally true to say that, given a healthy mind
and disposition, other things being equal, the body will have the best
opportunity of being normal and, whatever its condition, of being used to
the best advantage. There can be no consideration of higher importance
than to make a child sensitive as soon after birth as possible, to his
psychic, moral, and mystical environment. It will conduce to loftiness
of character and, for aught we know, to useful longevity and vigor of
physique.

Only soulless animals can be satisfied with physical splendor or count
muscle sufficient in itself. Man by virtue of his manhood can never
live according to merely animal laws. His animal nature itself is
ultimately weakened if he does. In proportion as he has fine physique
he must develop a fine mind and character. If not, unrestrained passion
and ruin stare him in the face. The body finds its full meaning and so
its possibilities, only when the soul has discovered itself and claimed
its liberty. It is then alone that a whole army of anxieties and fears
is scattered, leaving the body free and joyously adventurous, ready
to identify its movements with those of the soul. Consequently it is
not illogical or untrue to say that the first requisite for physical
efficiency of a child is to insure that whatever its subconscious life
is able to drink in should be sweet, wholesome, and strong. The tone of
domestic life, the character of the child’s attendants, the whole expanse
of human bosom on which it lies and from which it receives nourishment,
ought to be as near what one would wish it to be if from the first the
little babe had a conscious as well as a subconscious self, and were
a morally responsible and not a mere non-moral agent. There can be a
healthy domestic environment for the keen-eyed, deep-seeing child only
when it has been preceded by a similar environment for the baby. What
the tone was for the purely subconscious, it will be for the conscious
life when it awakes. Therefore even though parents are skeptical of
their influence upon infant subconsciousness, they cannot dispense with
attention to its character if they hope to bring beneficial pressure to
bear on the child’s conscious life. From the first they must learn to
deal with a baby as a moral being, impressionable beyond observation.

When we turn to man’s conscious life and the relation between health of
body and a healthy consciousness we are on more demonstrable ground.
Experience has proved that our external and internal faculties work
in sympathy with one another. If the body is distressed, the inner
consciousness droops; if the inner consciousness becomes morbid or out
of sorts, the body, though not always actually falling ill, loses in
efficiency. Yet, let it be added, the body is less able to bear psychic
illness than the inner self to bear physical illness. The body can never
turn psychic suffering into nerve and muscle, but the psychic nature can
weave malady into genius through the powerful operation of the Mystic
Sense.

To be healthy is a commendable ambition. Being in good health, our
desire is to become as immune as may be to disease, or being ill to give
ourselves the best chance of recovery. Health is preserved by keeping
body and mind in close relation to health-giving processes. It is not
our concern to discuss in this connection questions of diet, sanitation,
hygiene, exercise and similar aids to the promotion of health. Their
value is of the first order and may not be ignored or discounted. But
just now we are concerned with another part of human nature which has
much to do in determining our condition of body—the sense which furnishes
us with ideals.

The objective of an ideal is found in the idea flowing from the mind
of God. It is as real to the Mystic Sense as a flower is to sight and
smell. An ideal is the reflection of God’s idea and is distorted or true
according as the sense which perceives ideas is healthy or diseased. The
Mystic Sense relates us to ideas, and enables us to touch, test, see
and hear them, as truly as our bodily senses enable us to touch, test,
see and hear the world of matter, form and sound. A healthy ideal is a
vitalizing force, an unhealthy ideal is an invitation to disease. Ideals
are subjectified ideas.

In the course of the development of that most experimental of all
sciences, medicine, not only has dosing been reduced to a minimum, but
also the natural recuperative powers of the patient have been discovered
and are relied upon. The physician tries to open, for the sick, doors
into nature’s healthiest rooms. The patient being placed in a vitalizing
environment is expected by the use of his will and Mystic Sense to
respond to it. The physician alone can do but half the work. The will,
and not only the willingness, to live, a mystical laying hold of the idea
of health, is in all cases a valuable, in some an indispensable, factor
in the process of recovery. The suggestion of health predisposes to
health; the suggestion of disease is provocative of disease. Medicine may
be both a material curative and a sacrament of health.

The habit of our day has been such as to create in us a marked
pathological consciousness. The very process which, by slow degrees, has
been driving disease to the wall, has produced in us a sensitiveness
to the idea of disease that is inimical to health. The discovery of the
causes of disease has peopled the imagination, even of those who have
never looked through a microscope, with an army of hostile germs to the
obscuration of those superior influences which conduce to well-being,
until we have become chronically nervous of the hidden perils which beset
our path. Insignificant pains are construed into the symptoms of the last
disease discussed in the papers or the advertisement of a proprietary
nostrum. Momentary fluctuations in health send us tripping with anxious
brow to the doctor. Dabbling in pathology is an undesirable occupation,
especially for the young. The wrappers of patent medicines, let alone the
medicines themselves, have caused more agony than peace of mind and have
been more provocative of disease than of health. Happily we are emerging
from the patent medicine stage.

A therapeutic consciousness ought to be the normal consciousness. The
forces which make for life are in excess of those which make for death.
The universe would go into steady decline were not the dominant forces
salutary, and life would flicker out like the wick of a candle guttered
in its socket. There is an inexhaustible fund of vitality open to man
and we are competent to draw upon it so that we shall receive a maximum
rather than a minimum. Part of the function of science is to put man into
such a relation to the nature outside of him as to place the wholesome
and remedial at his disposal, preventing disease by immunizing him from
it. It is the common laws of health which are the most important. With
the curious inconsistency which characterizes many human beings, we
frequently see men adhering to some vigorous regimen of secondary or
doubtful importance, while all the time they are flagrantly disobeying
some primary law of health. The unity between the outer and the inner
necessitates not only an intelligent and scientific treatment but also
that which is mystical and more or less mysterious. Prayer, which is at
once an appeal to the Source of Life to let loose saving health in our
direction and an opening up of our being for the reception of hidden and
unknown aid, is a higher form of psychic effort than either suggestion
or auto-suggestion in that it includes both, though not precluding the
concurrent use of either. Auto-suggestion looks only for self-induced
benefit to the patient by application to an impersonal ideal; prayer does
not think merely to apprehend a passive or indifferent remedy, but also
to be apprehended by healthful, forceful Personality, like but superior
to our own. A prayer to the ether would have in its reflex effect a
totally different influence on the petitioner from a prayer to what was
conceived to be a personal God. Similarly the quality of the virtue which
is the result of mere ethical culture is as different from that which is
the product of correspondence with the Christian’s God as cotton is from
linen. Nor is it that God is inactive until we pray. He is operating to
the uttermost that our listless or passive or antagonistic personality
will allow. The highest personality can do his best to the object of his
love only when the latter adopts a responsive and co-operative attitude.
The feeble spot in much, if not most, prayer, is that it asks without
importunity, or importunes without appropriating. The Mystic Sense must
reach up until it feels the hand containing the gift, and take the gift
as its own. Auto-suggestion is a lame term indicating the application of
the ideal to the defective. Suggestion is a similar application on the
part of another to a companion. With a background of prayer, the insomnia
patient can with profit watch the dream sheep go through the hedge,
or lay himself in the cradle of old nursery rhymes, or welcome to his
bedside the veiled legions of slumber as they troop forth on their silent
errand from the presence of Him who giveth His beloved sleep.

Faith, which is simply the highest operation of the mystic sense, is as
necessary to the complete work of healing as in the days when Jesus said,
“According to thy faith be it unto thee.” It appropriates to the full the
remedial contents of scientific agencies which, under its touch become
sacramental, and clothes the life in the soft robe of unanxious peace
and serene cheerfulness. It is easy enough for a well man to talk to the
sick concerning the desirability and curative value of a therapeutic
consciousness. The depressed soul resents the necessity of being called
upon to act independently of the body and in opposition to it. Most
patients, too, for the time being are inclined to count each one his own
case unique. But the Mystic Sense is wonderfully elastic. Cheerfulness
comes by being cheerful, hope by being hopeful, calmness by being calm,
healthymindedness by being healthyminded. This is the work of the Mystic
Sense living in the realm of vigor even when the body is in distress.
When the Mystic Sense goes exploring in high altitudes it never comes
back empty handed. Even when it fails to return with health of body, it
holds in its grasp health of mind. A blithe spirit in a feeble body can
accomplish more than a sluggish spirit in a robust body. There are two
kinds of healthymindedness—temperamental and acquired. The latter is the
most powerful and may be had by anyone who cultivates his Mystic Sense.

The extent to which the Mystic Sense works toward a cure cannot be
formulated. It varies with conditions. Of this we can be assured. It is
always salutary, frequently indispensable. Diseases caused or induced by
an abuse or morbid use of the imagination cannot be banished without the
aid of the Mystic Sense as the chief agent. The imagination must be cured
before the sickness can be cured, and there are instances when the cure
of the imagination is the cure of the disease. That is none the less a
disease, the seat of which is in the psychic, rather than in the physical
part of self.

Two things remain to be said. First, our day is laying a dangerous accent
on the value of mere physical life in man. It tends to foster physical
self-consciousness and is an aspect of degrading materialism. All the
efforts being put forth in the direction of making it possible for the
physically feeble to survive, are dangerous, unless followed up by
commensurate efforts to make them lit as characters. Mere existence and
mere longevity are false gods.

It is haply justifiable for men of low breed, who honestly think this
life the only one, to grasp at all its available gifts, and struggle to
retain it on any terms for as long a period as may be. But not so among
those who have risen to a knowledge of the meaning of immortality, even
in its lesser aspects, of the perpetuation of the nation and the race,
and the persistence of a man’s work and influence among men after he
himself has vanished. For such there is a higher food than mere life,
beside which mere survival looks cheap and worthless.

    “A man must live, we justify
    Low shift and trick to treason high,
      A little vote for a little gold
      To a whole senate bought and sold,
    By that self-evident reply.

    But is it so? Pray tell me why
    Life at such cost you have to buy?
      In what religion were you told
        A man must live?

    There are times when a man must die,
    Imagine, for a battle-cry,
      From soldiers, with a sword to hold,—
      From soldiers, with the flag unrolled,—
    This coward’s whine, this liar’s lie,—
        A man must live!”[10]

There is, however, a type of heroism which is not as uncommon as it seems
to be for it is hidden—the type to which Kipling refers when he says:

    “If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
      To serve your turn long after they are gone,
      And so hold on, when there is nothing in you
      Except the will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’”—

and once more we quote from another writer:

    “Let us, for one thing, never forget that physical health
    is not the true end of human life, but only one of its most
    important means and conditions.... Death may and should be
    risked, the slow but certain undermining of the physical health
    may be laudably embarked on, if only the mind and character
    are not damaged, and if the end to be attained is found to
    be necessary or seriously helpful, and unattainable by other
    means.”[11]

Secondly, special and mystical means of promoting or regaining health
must have as a background the accumulated knowledge and scientific skill
of the day. If there are individual exceptions here and there, they go to
prove the rule. We can no more ignore the history of medical and chemical
science, the findings of the microscope and laboratory, without disaster,
than we can cut our country off from the traditions, laws and customs
of yesterday without similar results. On the other hand, it is at least
equal folly to flout or discredit the mystical experience of the ages.
Human life, individually and corporately, is a unit, and due recognition
must be given to all that goes to make it up.




CHAPTER III

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.




CHAPTER IV

IN RELATION TO CHARACTER


Good character is the reaction upon the whole self caused by the Mystic
Sense as a habit visioning, and the will claiming, the excellent. It is
the result on personality of a sustained effort to transcend the existing
relation to life and its conditions, a state of chronic dissatisfaction
with the progress and achievement of the moment, which makes the good
mediocre by contrasting it with the superior and coveting the best
conceivable as man’s right and heritage.

The Mystic Sense is always finding a more excellent way. Excepting
when taught to play casuistical tricks, it does not look for the
conventionally proper, or rest comfortably in it.[19] It launches out
into that noble freedom which, from a group of probabilities, selects
that which is farthest removed from suspicion of selfish considerations
and promises ultimately the best social results. On the other hand it is
not disregardful of the accepted code of morals. This it takes as its
foundation, individualizing it for personal use, and boldly submitting
propositions for improvement to the social conscience for approval,
modification, or rejection. Such approval, modification, or rejection is
never a purely formal matter registered in the dictum of a tribunal but
rather the culmination of a process akin, in the moral sphere, to that
which is termed “natural selection” in the physical sphere.

Character and morality are not synonymous. Strong character may be good
or bad, the latter being the result of the active exercise of the will in
a conflict with goodness; it is the transformation of evil from a mere
negation into a positive, personal force by conscious volition. But our
study is of good character and its cultivation, so that when the word
“character” is used the determinative “good” is understood.

Character is the result of the correspondence of personality with the
best that it knows. It is measured by the faithfulness with which
it responds to opportunity. A man with small opportunity, who is
scrupulously conscientious in availing himself of all the privilege
afforded him, becomes a stronger character than another, who, with his
great opportunity, is less loyal in his use of it. Of course the greatest
character is that which knows ideal virtue and consistently aims to
bring up life to its level. Character is determined by reaction upon
environment, external and internal. There are many suitable environments
possible for every character, more than there are unsuitable ones, as the
vicissitudes of most lives testify. Character is thus bound up closely
with individual personality and is never abstract, as morality is in the
science of ethics. Character is created and disclosed by that phase of
experience in which the Mystic Sense is busied in photographing ideals on
the film monopolized by the actual to the discomfiture and obliteration
of the latter. Better to-morrows are obtruded on poor to-days, partly by
virtue of the fact that the Mystic Sense is naturally in constant contact
with the ideally best, sensing and appropriating it just as the body,
without conscious effort on our part, senses and appropriates light and
air, and partly because, either feebly or vigorously, most men claim for
themselves by deliberate volition a larger life than that which is.

The possession of character is the sole justification of self-respect.
Self-respect ensues upon the growth of character, and is to character
what perfume is to the flower. It is due to the consciousness of having
within ourselves that which is worthy—not mere moral acquiescence but
something we have made peculiarly our own by active effort. It is a
high form of the consciousness which inspires an inventor when he has
constructed a piece of mechanism. Self-respect is a witness to our
having been individualized and is indifferent to external possessions or
aught that is our own by virtue of favor and chance rather than by merit.
Self-respect runs into self-conceit and stagnation when it rests content
with that which is. It never dawdles in its movements nor loafs on the
street corners. Self-respect becomes self-contempt and self-abasement
when our attention is turned from our cherished ideals and actual
progress, and fixed upon our defects and failures. Penitence is not a bar
but a necessity to character and its fragrant effluence, self-respect.

Character calls for and expects communal respect in the same degree
that it receives self-respect. Reputation should be commensurate with
character. It is possible for men to have the unmerited respect of
their fellows without having self-respect. This is due to the practice
of deceit, conscious or unconscious, which enables them to simulate
character and have appearance without corresponding reality. To the
man of character, it is as truly a pain to be overestimated as to
be underestimated. He can afford to lose his reputation, though he
can never be exempt from the keen pain involved. In the process of
achieving character, the great frequently, if not always, have to endure
the withholding of respect on the part of the community. Seldom does
a man make a contribution to progress without being temporarily at
least discredited by those whom most of all he is aiming to benefit.
Self-respect towers at such moments. A man of character will trust
himself when all men doubt him but make allowance for their doubting,
too; he will wait and not be tired by waiting, or being lied about, won’t
deal in lies, or being hated won’t give way to hating.[20]

Ideals become tasks and tasks become character in social experience. “A
talent,” says Goethe, “shapes itself in stillness, but a character in
the tumult of the world.” “That which would have remained only a quality
in (our Lord), if He had stayed in the desert, becomes a life when He
goes forth into the world.” The ultimate test of a man’s worth is his
character and not his degree of morality—his power of volitional reaction
upon environment, objective and subjective.

Every man at some time during his career,—most men for a considerable
portion of it, and many from beginning to end,—covets character. Those
who fail to claim it for themselves seldom fail to admire it in others.
Frequently they put as much effort into pretending they have it as would
win for them the real thing. They pay the price of gold for tinsel.
Character has commercial value and sometimes men are honest according
to law solely because it is politic, or polite according to social
requirement because it pays. But the honesty and courtesy of such men
are not virtues. They are handmaidens of covetousness. They contribute
nothing to self-respect. They have no moral content, and serve only to
aid in bolstering up a vicious characteristic. However, it is a tribute
to the kingliness of character that, either for its market value or
because of its inherent worth, men clothe themselves in its appearance
when they do not seek the substance.

The substance may be had by every man. Man not only is, but also
acknowledges himself to be, responsible for what he is. He makes the
confession when he keeps his worst self from the public gaze even though
it promises him no special gain. The extreme to which the sense of
personal responsibility and accountability goes is evidenced by the fact
that, though _for others_ we find it difficult to believe in the closing
of the possibility of self-improvement and ultimate loss fixed and final,
many, perhaps most of us, think and act _in our own case_ as though _we
at least_ shall be held strictly accountable for our character and reap
as we live. If we had no responsibility for what we were and did, there
would be no room for shame, were we to be publicly known to be exactly
what we are. Rob Henley’s poem of its defiant note and we are in the
presence of sober fact:

    “It matters not how strait the gate,
    How charged with punishments the scroll—
    I am the Master of my fate—
    I am the Captain of my soul.”

Character, like fruit, gets rich flavor through living in a climate of
extremes which give robustness by threatening very existence. The story
of the transgression of Adam and his consort is illustrative rather
than singular. The temptation set was the very stiffest to which human
life, being what it is, could be subjected—a demand for self-discipline
and obedience to mysterious law. It is interesting that the first
recorded strain put upon the human will was not to do rather than to
do. Seemingly it was the limitation of freedom, the restriction of
choice, the narrowing of experience. In no other conditions could man
have had a chance to gain character. Had our first human ancestors won
their day without lapse, every succeeding generation would have had to
do the same. You cannot inherit character. You must win it. Temptation
is never eliminated from human life, as we know it. Its conquest in one
form opens the door to its appearance in another form. Our earliest
human ancestors having known the higher chose the lower. But this did
not, either in their own case or in that of their offspring through a
thousand generations, close the door to the attainment of character.
Human life begins in conditions which threaten character and therefore
becomes eligible for character. The complaint that there are those in the
world who, because of hopeless environment, never have an opportunity,
finds sympathetic echo in every heart, but it does not absolve us from
responsibility to our own opportunity.

Much is made of heredity by those who know little or nothing of the
controversies which gather about the study of its operation. The popular
interpretation presses hard upon its thorns and forgets even the
existence of its blossoms. “The sins of the fathers are visited upon
the children unto the third and fourth generation,” is the dominating
thought which, by exclusive consideration, diseases the mind of many a
man until his whole imaginative nature is employed in the service of some
congenital, or supposed congenital, weakness to make him its victim. In
this way fatalism is induced. Fatalism is a disease of the Mystic Sense
which substitutes acquiescence for reaction. It is the straw committing
itself to the river, not the oarsman using the current to his own
advantage. Acquiescence is too tame a virtue for man, if indeed it be a
virtue at all.

Whatever credit we give to heredity for endowing us with the tendencies
of our evil forbears, we must give it equal credit for endowing us with
those of our good forbears. If you are determined to be fatalistic, be so
fairly, recognizing the possible transmission of every kind of tendency.
Conscious acceptance of gifts of strength from the past is a powerful
counter-irritant to defend us against a real or imagined inheritance of
weakness.

The problem of heredity is obscured by the fog of controversy which just
now envelopes it. We must remember that the main questions in doubt are
its method, and extent, and our ability to intervene so as to modify
or improve its operations. Science very cautiously says that “heredity
suggests, though it would be rash to say it is proved, that man is almost
entirely the product of inborn factors which are hardly affected by
[physical] environment.”[21] “Given parents of certain constitution, it
can be said with confidence that _on the average_ a certain proportion
of their offspring will have such and such characters.” “Both [the
Biometrician and Mendelian] agree that what is present in the germ-cell
will be present in the individual, and that external conditions as a
rule play but a small part in determining its appearance.” “Almost
entirely,” “hardly affected,” “on the average,” “a certain proportion,”
“as a rule,” form a relatively large group of qualifying clauses in
three short sentences. When we know more certainly the mechanism by which
heredity operates we shall be better able by eugenics and physiological
or mechanical processes to combat its evils and foster its benefits. In
the meantime there is no call for us to stand idle. If man were mere
animal it would be another matter, but he is not. His Mystic Sense, which
links him to a superior order, has steadily differentiated him from all
below him. It has enabled him to transcend environment. By means of it
he can acquire character even if the laws of transmission should forbid
him to pass it on to his offspring by congenital endowment. It is a
finer and stronger thing to improve steadily the tradition of family or
race by a series of successive personal conquests and achievements than
to gain exemption from evil tendencies by the more or less mechanical
process of procreation. Release from temptation is not necessarily a
benefit, and is never as productive of character as the gift of ability
to defeat it. Frequently all that is needed is inspiration, mystical and
human, to enable a man to rise above his evil inheritance and habit.
Evil tradition is as real and destructive a phase of heredity as inborn
weakness, whereas on the other hand _noblesse oblige_. It is rather
the tradition of the family trait of intemperance than a transmitted
physical peculiarity that keeps the line of drunkards unbroken. Children
must not be allowed to suppose that they can be excused from struggle.
Being prepared for all temptations as a normal part of experience they
are least likely to become victims of any: being made expectant of all
virtues, they may perchance glean some.

Our environment is our opportunity, particularly in those spots where
it is uncongenial and threatening. To chafe and fret is to increase the
inimical possibilities of difficulty. To think of it except with the
intention of mastering it is weakening and depressing. To remove it with
our own hands rather than have another remove it, if it be moveable, or,
should it be immoveable, to weave it as material into our scheme of life,
using its rough threads to the last stand, is to achieve character. A
man must either fit his burden to his back or his back to his burden,
if he desires to remain man. They are rare exceptions in mankind who
have not capacity for so doing, if not by themselves, at any rate in
a sympathetic social setting. A burdened life by the free use of the
Mystic Sense may become a privileged life. Introduce fearlessness and
experimental curiosity into hardship, and you get romance which keeps the
wings of life moving and mounting, and makes the world of men around look
up in aspiring wonder.

    “There is no storme but this
    Of your owne Cowardise
      That braves you out;
    You are the storme that mocks
    Your selves; you are the rocks
      Of your owne doubt:
    Besides this feare of danger, ther’s no danger here;
    And he that here feares danger, does deserve his feare.”[22]

The Mystic Sense has an inner ear. Through it conscience delivers its
message by means of which we come to know and understand the meaning of
ought and ought not. Ready response to conscience is to be coveted above
all things, especially where conscience has been trained and illumined.
A friend once wrote me, a few days before his death, that he had come to
see that what pretended to be education was no education at all unless
it included the development of conscience. But mere knowledge of right
and wrong, ought and ought not, does not impart goodness. To be aware
that vice injures and virtue blesses is desirable but insufficient. There
is not less vice among those who know than there is among those who do
not know ethics, other things being equal, excepting where education is
conceived to be something more than the imparting of information.

Sometimes nations and individuals covet character without being ready
to pay the whole price for it. They give admirable facilities for the
development of certain phases of training essential to character, but
exclude that deciding factor which determines whether or not they may
be woven into character. Influences from other sources may come in to
repair wilful neglect, but, if not, the training goes for nothing so far
as character is concerned. Public schools can never give character its
best opportunity without a practical recognition of religion. Purely
secular education, the imparting of learning including the science of
ethics, without religion in church and home to supplement it, is a
doubtful blessing at best. The current idea of secular education is not
new. During the French Revolution its leaders mapped out what appeared
to be a satisfactory programme of instruction. It was desired to have
moral training, first without religion or with the “Worship of Reason,”
then with a minimum of religion. The priests were suffered to continue
as being at any rate moral policemen, but Danton planned to supplant
them by _officiers de morale_. All experiments were of no avail. “_La
morale populaire ... cherche encore_,” it was pathetically complained,
“_un point d’appui solide_.” Then came freedom to worship, and later the
Concordat reintroduced the old religious order, partially, it is true,
because the people could or would not live without it, but largely for
the sake of morals.

If religion without morality becomes superstitious sentiment, morality
without religion becomes for the average man inoperative ethics and
ultimately a pitiless judge. There is no more oppressive tyrant than
a high ethical code with a will, untrained, uninspired, and helpless
to respond. It becomes a mocking and cruel Nemesis viewing with
indifference its writhing victims. The Chinese Classics are preserved by
the wonderful nation who produced them, as a literary treasure instead of
as a practical code of conduct—the sure fate of the Bible apart from the
Christian Church.

It is too late in the day to pretend that morality and religion are
synonymous, however intimate their relationship, or that the end of
religion is to make men good. Righteousness, which is the Christian term
for morality, is to be had only in part by the practice of embracing the
excellent and bathing our mystic self in the fountain of ideals. The type
of righteousness thus created can never be aught than self-conscious,
like an overdressed woman, or a gaudy painting. The Mystic Sense must
occupy itself in still higher altitudes. Having come from God and being
partaker of His nature, it must aspire to Him. The end of life is
religion, and the end of religion is to know God. The purest type of
righteousness, experienced or conceivable, is created by our having as
our dominant ambition to know the only God and Jesus Christ whom He hath
sent. The net result is Christian Character.




CHAPTER V

IN RELATION TO RELIGION


The operation of the Mystic Sense in relation to religion is commonly
called faith. Conversely, faith under another name is that operation
of the Mystic Sense which promotes health of body, which affords a
starting point for all intellectual, scientific, and other productive
pursuits, which leads character from strength to strength. The subjective
conditions under which, and the spheres in which, the Mystic Sense is
employed, differ. But the faculty itself and its _modus operandi_ are
always the same. Just as the sense of bodily sight which views the dirt
beneath our feet is the same sense which contemplates the blue sky, so
the inner sense of sight which perceives an electron, an ideal, or a
hypothesis is the same sense which sees God. It is as possible to see God
as to see a hypothesis, and as possible (not more and probably less), to
see a hypothesis as to see God.[23]

It is fitting that the most exalted operation of the Mystic Sense should
be dignified by a distinctive term, provided that in so doing no room is
given for the implication that there is a faculty, or set of faculties,
used in religion alone. A man has religious capacity because he is man,
and not because he is a specially favored individual of his kind. Man,
unless he abdicates his manhood, a task so difficult as to verge on the
impossible, must live by his Mystic Sense; he must keep touch with the
unseen, or cease to be a man. To be a man, rounded and proportioned,
complete and splendid, he must use his Mystic Sense not merely here and
there but everywhere. The Mystic Sense has as true an existence in the
whole personality, and relation to it, as the physical sense of touch,
and is as acutely sensitive to the stimulus of the spiritual phase of
reality as the body is to that of the material. It is analogous to all
the sub-divisions of the nervous system but chiefly to sight and hearing,
the most distinguished of the senses.[24]

To perceive an ideal is as real a sensation as to look at a flower.
An impression is left behind not unlike the photograph of the flower
retained on the retina of the eye and revived by act of memory and
will. But the visualizing has nothing to do with physical sense
perception, and the part of the personality thus impressed is spiritual.
To characterize tactual sensation of the body as real necessitates a
like characterization of the tactual sensation of the spirit. If it be
argued that in the latter relationship there is no certainty as to what
is phantasm and what reality, let it be remembered that the history of
science is largely a series of corrections of imperfect sense records.
A highly developed power of observation with ability for accurate
registration and correlation is the distinguishing feature of culture.
The Mystic Sense, like the bodily senses, is capable of increasingly
accurate perception by skilful and disciplined use. It takes its
beginnings in gropings like the awkward jerks of a baby’s limbs, and
develops into ordered and reliable movement by exercise and experiment,
which includes mistakes and the profit accruing to the experience.
Superstition bears the same relation to faith that a false scientific
hypothesis bears to ascertained fact. The Mystic Sense in its infant
working catches a distorted view of the ideal, as when Darwin propounded
his conception of heredity by pangenesis, and leads us astray in science;
in like manner in religion a glimpse, through a mist of ignorance and
moral deficiency, of the Absolute, eventuates in superstition. Both are
necessary stages in the training of the Mystic Sense. Similarly to the
way in which the theory of pangenesis stimulated discussion and research
so as to aid the Mystic Sense to a more accurate perception of the true
hypothesis of the manner of heredity, the superstitions of the nations
conceived in sincerity, crude and even repulsive though they be, have
contributed to the complete knowledge of God and His character which
forms our most valuable heritage.

It is not hazardous to say that the ideals and hypotheses which are still
waiting for the cognition of the Mystic Sense transcend gloriously those
thus far apprehended. This means that science is in its infancy. It is
equally true to assert that religion, so far from having fallen into
decline, is but girding itself to scale heights impatient to feel the
tread of human feet. That which is good and true in itself must persist,
whatever its crudeness and blemishes. The Mystic Sense in relation to
religion is only at the beginning of its history. Human, that is mystic,
life began at so remote a period as to be beyond the reach of research.
The operation of the Mystic Sense through many thousands of years[25]
prior to human records led the way to that ordered approach to God which
we call religion. The possibilities of its growth for the race at large
are indicated and emphasized by individual instances taken from the
common crowd. The world is just at this moment engrossed in seeing that
every one should have an opportunity of developing fine physique and of
acquiring information. It is assumed that under proper conditions a high
average may be reached. The same is to be postulated for the development
of the Mystic Sense in relation to the highest and best in religion.
Under a sufficient stimulus the average man will be able to apprehend
what now is reached only by a minority. This, however, can not come to
pass until a whole world of men strain their inner eye and quicken their
inner ear in the same direction, each contributing of his own strength to
the rest, and all to each.

The history of Christianity and its immediate progenitor, Judaism, is
the record of the highest development of the Mystic Sense in religion.
In the course of its progress the Absolute rises from a dim shadow to
the greatest Reality. It is distinctively the religion of orderly and
rational mysticism. At first, men, feeling the working of the Mystic
Sense, used it in a childish way. What was splendid in them would be
culpable in us. Abraham could consider it a call of God to slay his son:
a man of to-day could only think of it as a monstrous crime against God
and society, revolting even to contemplate. It marked a stage in the
rationalizing of faith when at the last moment Abraham saw mystically
that it was not God’s purpose that any human being should ever do at His
bidding an inhuman deed.

The most perfect individual life of faith ever lived was that of Jesus
Christ. His Mystic Sense never erred. He was never so exclusively
Divine as not to be completely human. He was God living the life of
man. He walked by faith, not by sight. Visions and ecstasies found rare
and momentary place in His experience. He reached His goal by the use
of those gifts and endowments which we have in common with Him, and
proclaimed forever to the race of men that it is the simple, steady,
patient exercise of the Mystic Sense toward a God who is revealed
as Love, which exalts human life and puts it in the way of winning
incomparable power and beauty. His reply to the query, What shall we
do, that we might work the works of God, is, This is the work of God,
that ye _believe_—believe on Him whom He hath sent. Further, He makes
the astounding prophecy, Assuredly I announce that he that believeth
on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than
these shall he do. The early Christians were distinguished from their
fellows as men who exhibited in high degree the faculty of belief so as
to be in a unique sense “Believers,” and their religion was one in which
faith played so prominent a part as to merit the name of “The Faith.”
The whole Christian era has been an era of faith or the exercise of the
Mystic Sense. No great work can be found in it, in science, literature or
religion which has not been made possible by the stimulus given to faith
by the influence of Jesus. Miracles do not cease to be miraculous when
they cease to be mysterious, and the Christian centuries are strewn with
such miracles—many of them, works of healing and moral restoration, as
great as those of Jesus. But the greater works than His still lie before
us when we have sufficiently shed materialism and committed ourselves
more implicitly to the life of faith.[26]

The disappearance into the spirit world of Jesus has made that world
human,[27] so that the Mystic Sense can be as truly at home in it as
it is in scientific research. He prepared for His withdrawal thither
by centring the attention of His friends upon it. His manifestations
after His death on the cross were primarily to the Mystic Sense of His
followers. That is to say, those unaccustomed to use the Mystic Sense in
a religious way were incapable of seeing Him. It was impossible for Him
to show Himself to the irreligious or enemies of God. This does not mean
that it was only to the Mystic Sense of believers that He manifested
Himself, but also to their bodily senses by way of the Mystic Sense.
There is much that comes to the cognizance of the Mystic Sense through
physical perception, and unless there is a refined and cultured nervous
organism there is no mystical connotation. A Peter Bell could not find
the mystical in nature.

    “A primrose by a river’s brim
    A yellow primrose was to him,
    And it was nothing more.”

The same primrose to a Linnæus or an Asa Gray would reveal an unseen
world. Conversely, there are some things which cannot affect our physical
being except by the way of mystical experience. Striking instances of
this sort have been suitably termed by von Hügel “psycho-physical.” They
are possible only where there is extraordinary sympathy between the
mystical and physical, the latter having been made very completely the
servant of the former. Only the mystic, or the specialist in the use of
the Mystic Sense, is eligible for such experiences. The tremendously
real fellowship with the Risen Lord of the disciples was of an ecstatic
or psycho-physical order. It degrades the Resurrection manifestations
to overemphasize their physical reality as though this, rather than the
mystical, were the important feature. Their dominant note is spiritual.
The physical perception came through the mystical. The experience of the
disciples could not be reproduced in after times with other men, for the
necessary conditions were wanting. Here and there among spiritual giants
there is a well authenticated psycho-physical experience, but it is of
phenomenal rather than of spiritual or moral value. And yet it is within
our power to see the Christ as really and effectively as the Apostles
did, though not wholly after the same manner.

St. Paul did not begin his life of faith when he had his psycho-physical
experience on the road to Damascus. He reached there a turning point
in its history. He was converted, turning his mystic powers in a new
direction. Those who were with him were not sufficiently developed to
see all that he saw or hear all that he heard.[28] His vision of Jesus
was momentary but his life of faith was continuous. If faith was at its
beginning when Abraham made his venture, it reached an illustrative
and inviting climax when St. Paul made his. It was greater for St. Paul
to espouse the cause of the Christ than to have a vision of Jesus. The
phenomenal or extraordinary does not always culminate in such courage and
devotion as his. It was because he was a mystic that he had his vision,
not because he had a vision that he became a mystic. The Apostles who
knew Jesus in the flesh had a lesser opportunity for faith than St. Paul
who saw Him but once and then after psycho-physical fashion, and who
never apprehended Him with all his bodily senses like those who saw “with
their eyes” and “beheld,” and whose “hands handled” the Word of Life. It
was fitting that St. Paul should give Christianity the impetus which made
it a world religion. The highest development of faith has assigned to it
the biggest undertaking. St. Peter with undeveloped intellectual gifts
and faith based on sight could not do what St. Paul with highly developed
reason and singular faith could do. The Risen Jesus Himself declared that
faith dependent upon physical or psycho-physical experience is of a lower
order than that in which the mystic sense is independent of phenomenal
action of the bodily sense—Because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed:
blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.

The great multitude of mortals will always be outside of psycho-physical
experiences. There is no religious loss in the fact. Rather the
contrary. That which gives the soul its permanent hold upon moral and
spiritual realities and regard for them in mystics is not their rare
psycho-physical experiences, but the same exercise of the Mystic Sense
in the daily round of commonplace religious duty which is open to every
human being, with like wonderful results upon character. A phenomenal
spiritual occurrence in the case of one who was not living a religious
life would be a mere wonder, perhaps even productive of spiritual
harm.[29] Such experiences are never to be sought for. If they come their
peril is not less than their inspiration.

    “The trivial round, the common task,
    Will furnish all we need to ask,
    Room to deny ourselves, a road
    To bring us daily nearer God.”

It is a great barrier to religious effort among the crowd, for those
living the life of faith, to give the impression that their experience is
one of a series of ecstasies. It is no more so than is that of a student
of science or higher mathematics. It is the life of faith open to all men
which forms the religious life of the best men and the best religious
life of all men—the constant placing of God before the Mystic Sense in
a way not dissimilar from that in which the scientist approaches his
hypothesis.

    “Think not the Faith by which the just shall live
    Is a dead creed, a map correct of heaven,
    Far less a feeling fond and fugitive,
    A thoughtless gift, withdrawn as soon as given;
    It is an affirmation and an act
    That bids eternal truth be present fact.”

Though the Mystic Sense is not the sole religious faculty, it holds the
primacy here as in every distinctively human activity. Used with reason
its operation becomes reasonable or rational faith. Its opposite is not
reason but sight, that is to say, the unaided findings of the bodily
senses of which sight, being the most princely, is representative. Hence
St. Paul’s contrast—we walk by faith, not by sight. Even here it is
hardly fair to say there is antagonism. Sight is the enemy of faith only
when it refuses to be an ally. Sight sees, faith in-sees and therefore
fore-sees. Sight has boundaries which it cannot pass. Faith has horizons
which retreat as it advances.

Faith has become increasingly rational as the world has grown older and
experience has been added to experience. Its explorations in the world
of ideals have been more frequent and daring with the advance of time.
Consequently the man of to-day makes his flights thitherwards with a
fulness of assurance on rational grounds or grounds of high probability
which would have been impossible to an Abraham. If the triumphs open
to faith have multiplied, so have the deterrent forces holding it back
or set in battle array to thwart or otherwise impair it. The commonest
injury wrought upon faith is the deflecting of it from the worthy to
the unworthy or less worthy. If a man’s Mystic Sense, acute in other
directions, is dormant or sluggish in religion, the reason is usually
to be found, I think, in circumstances analogous to those which make a
student of _belles lettres_, for instance, indifferent to science, or a
philosopher careless of the exploits of commerce, cases of which are not
wanting. The mind finds higher pleasure among certain persons in being
exclusive and technical than in being catholic. So the Mystic Sense can
fall short of its highest employment simply because there is not in
its possessor the will to employ it commensurately with its capacity.
The explanation why some men are not actively religious must be sought
elsewhere than in the contention that they are short a faculty. The
Mystic Sense, which by virtue of their humanity they possess, is not
employed by them religiously from whatever reason—defective interest,
prejudice, antagonism, environment. Nevertheless the same inner sense is
pushed to its fullest activity in other directions. The faculty which by
a daring leap fixes on the evolutionary hypothesis, or with imaginative
subtlety suggests the plot of a novel, is the self-same one which enables
us to say, “Our Father, which art in heaven.” The consideration of
vicious men who are irreligious does not come within the purview of this
discussion. Religion and vice are mutually exclusive, though piety and
immorality are not, so that we have the anomaly of immoral character
revelling in pious practices.

One thing remains to be said. The use of the Mystic Sense in religion,
more perhaps than in any other sphere, cannot begin and end in
individualism. It is requisite for each to submit the results of his
mystic excursions and explorations to the conclusions of the most
advanced religion. Mystic observation and experience must have the
support and purification of universal mystic experience that will
distinguish between the false and the true, phantasm and reality, and
deliver the individual from eccentricity and extravagance. In other
words, a church is more necessary than a chamber of commerce, a national
government, or an academy of science. Mystic experience must be organized
like all other experience. As the world grows older and man wiser,
organization develops and broadens. National societies and alliances
become international and a parliament of man seems a reasonable goal
toward which to press. Human life in its individual aspect finds its
fullest freedom in organization and not apart from it. The idea of the
Catholic Church is as old as Christianity. One Body, one spirit, one
Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, said St. Paul before Christianity was fifty
years old—and the use of the Mystic Sense independently of organized
Christian experience cannot hope to reach valuable results. Reformers
of religion are eccentrics and detract from their service so far as
they ignore the religious experience of the ages by assuming exclusive
positions or lifting a doctrine out of its setting. Our Lord never
broke with the faith of His fathers. His last act was to partake of the
Passover according to the law. It was the Jews who broke with Him. He
came not to destroy but to fulfill. The only setting for any one part of
the truth is all the rest of the truth. The only relationship big enough
for any one man is all the rest of mankind. When at last the disturbed
and broken Christian Church comes to rest in the large scheme of unity
planned by its Founder, then the mystical life of man will gain a power
and splendor which now is but a vision and a hope.

       *       *       *       *       *

This concludes my endeavor to credit the Mystic Sense with that dignity
and position of importance which belongs to it by right. The attempt is
crude and the brilliant vision which I had at the beginning of my task
has become dimmer under the process of putting it into words. Whatever
has been written stands as a contribution of thought and experience which
cannot be of much value until it has been purified from the dross of
individualism through the findings of religion and science, and lost in
the great volume of truth to which I submit it with reverence and loyalty.




FOOTNOTES


[1] It is only partially true to say that concept follows upon percept.
Their action is simultaneous more nearly than consecutive. Conceptualism
as a complete system cannot perhaps stand but in its origin it was a
healthy reaction against both nominalism and realism, as well as a
mediator combining the good in both.

[2] Heb. xi:1.

[3] VON HÜGEL, _The Mystical Element of Religion_, vol. ii, p. 264.

[4] Mk. x:23.

[5] Mk. x:24, 25.

[6] Ψυχικὸς δὲ ἄνθρωπος οὐ δέχεται τὰ τοῦ Πνεύματος τοῦ Θεοῦ; μωρία γὰρ
αὐτῷ ἐστι, καὶ οὐ δύναται γνῶναι, ὅτι πνευματικῶς ἀνακρίνεται. 1 Cor. ii,
14.

[7] “True priority and superiority lies, not with one of these
constituents against the other, but with the total subjective—objective
interaction or resultant, which is superior, and indeed gives their place
and worth to, those interdependent parts.”—VON HÜGEL’S _Mystical Element
of Religion_, vol. ii, p. 114.

[8] TYRRELL’S _Christianity at the Cross Roads_, p. 240.

[9] Quoted by VON HÜGEL, vol. ii, p. 18.

[10] CHARLOTTE PERKINS STETSON’S _In this our World_.

[11] _The Mystical Element of Religion_, vol. ii, pp. 57, 58.

[12] ROYCE’S _The World and the Individual_, First Series, p. 58.

[13] See MACFIE’S _Science, Matter and Immortality_, an admirable volume
on this entire topic.

[14] DARWIN’S _Autobiography_.

[15] Sir JOSEPH LARMOR in his Wilde Lecture (1908) quoted by Sir OLIVER
LODGE in _Reason and Belief_, p. 172.

[16] _Reason and Belief_, p. 181.

[17] _The Mystical Element of Religion_, vol. ii, p. 265.

The author quotes KANT—“we can be mediately conscious of an apprehension
as to which we have no distinct consciousness.” “The field of our obscure
apprehensions,—that is, apprehensions and impressions of which we are not
directly conscious, although we can conclude without doubt that we have
them—is immeasureable, whereas clear apprehensions constitute but a very
few points within the complete extent of our mental life.”

[18] “Literature consists of those writings which interpret the meanings
of nature and life in words of charm and power, touched with the
personality of the author, in artistic forms of permanent interest.”—VAN
DYKE’S _The Spirit of America_, p. 242.

[19] “The wealthy class in Rome and all over Italy began to conform
to that conventional code of propriety by which the rich seem always
destined, in the progress of civilization, to become more and more
enslaved, till finally they lost all feeling for what is serious and
genuine in life. The new generation followed their example with alacrity,
and preached the new conventions with a passionate vehemence which must
have been highly exasperating to those of their seniors who were still
attached to the simplicity of primitive manners. Amongst those who
protested against this development there was, however, one prominent
figure of the younger age, Marcus Porcius Cato, a man of rich and noble
family, and a descendant of Cato the Censor. His puritan spirit revolted
against the tyranny of fashion to which the golden youth of Rome wished
to make him conform; he would walk in the streets without shoes or
tunic, to accustom himself, as he said, only to blush at things which
were shameful in themselves, and not merely by convention.”—FERRERO’S
_Greatness and Decline of Rome_, vol. i, pp. 135, 136.

[20] KIPLING’S _If—_.

[21] DONCASTER’S _Heredity in the Light of Recent Research_ (1910), p.
113 ff.

[22] CRASHAW.

[23] A hypothesis receives passively our quest: God moves to meet us.

[24] NEWMAN in his _Dream of Gerontius_ endows the disembodied soul with
perceptive powers analogous to those of the body, saying only the sense
of sight. Thus:

    _Soul._ “I cannot of thy music rightly say
             Whether I hear, or touch, or taste the tones.”

              ... “How comes it then
             That I am hearing still, and taste, and touch,
             Yet not a glimmer of that princely sense
             Which binds ideas in one, and makes them live?”

    _Angel._ “Nor touch nor taste, nor hearing hast thou now;
             Thou livest in a world of signs and types,
             The presentation of most holy truths,
             Living and strong, which now encompass thee.
             A disembodied soul, thou hast by right
             No converse with aught beside thyself;
             But, lest so stern a solitude should load
             And break thy being, in mercy are vouchsafed
             Some lower measures of perception,
             Which seem to thee, as though through channels brought,
             Through ear, or nerves, or palate, which are gone.
              ...
             How, even now, the consummated Saints
             See God in heaven, I may not explicate;
             Meanwhile, let it suffice thee to possess
             Such means of converse as are granted thee,
             Though, till that Beatific Vision, thou art blind.”

The idea underlying the Beatific Vision is the complete apprehension of
God by the complete man. Sight is chosen to denote this bliss because it
is a princely co-ordinating sense, and our Lord spoke of the heritage of
the pure in heart as being the vision of God, a heritage let it be noted,
however, for now and not merely for hereafter. It seems reasonable to
suppose that our powers of perception after death will be those mystic
powers which we enjoy and use now, though then they will be rapidly
developed as being our only perceptive powers.

This suggests the investigation in progress of psychic phenomena by
scientific methods. The result may lead to an increase of our knowledge
regarding the nature of such phenomena. But I do not see how, if
communication with the departed be possible at all, we can expect to
reach, and be reached by, them except through the Mystic Sense. The
invocation of Saints seems to me more in line with what is probable
than some of the experiments of the day. Disembodied spirits presumably
approximate the nature of God and can approach or be approached only
after a purely spiritual or mystical fashion, excepting in those rare
psycho-physical instances which are themselves contingent upon a highly
developed mystical character and experience.

[25] Progressive civilization may be said to have begun 8,000 B. C.

[26] Two things must be remembered in connection with the interpretation
of Jno. xiv ff. In the first place, these chapters, bursting as they are
with startling promises which the critic claims have not been made good,
were addressed to a select and specially trained group of followers. For
instance, Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, constitutes
a promise that could not have been made to a heterogeneous crowd. It
presupposes an understanding of the mind of Christ that keeps prayer
within its appointed limits. A promise of this sort made to a St. John
would be fulfilled, whereas it could not be fulfilled in the case of a
man who thought that a prayer for the success of his lottery ticket, or
the triumph of a competitive business scheme stained with dishonor, might
be offered in the name of Jesus. In the second place, these chapters
were written down and became accepted Scripture not less than three
quarters of a century after they were spoken, by one who, in common with
like-minded companions, had experienced the faithfulness of our Lord’s
promises. These men knew them to be true, not merely because our Lord had
said them, but also because Christian experience, had verified them. This
is so of the entire Gospel record. That was remembered and recorded which
_Christian_ experience had verified.

[27] Similarly His advent into our human world made it Divine.

[28] Acts ix, 7; xxii, 9.

[29] The miracles of Moses before Pharaoh are illustrative of that which
abounds in history—wonders hardening further an irreligious life.