DEFENCE OF MYSTICISM 323 



of the structure of a joke, so a philosophic discussion 

 of the attributes of God (or an impersonal substitute) 

 is likely to miss the intimate response of the spirit which 

 is the central point of the religious experience. 



Defence of Mysticism. A defence of the mystic might 

 run something like this. We have acknowledged that the 

 entities of physics can from their very nature form only 

 a partial aspect of the reality. How are we to deal with 

 the other part? It cannot be said that that other part 

 concerns us less than the physical entities. Feelings, 

 purpose, values, make up our consciousness as much as 

 sense-impressions. We follow up the sense-impressions 

 and find that they lead into an external world discussed 

 by science; we follow up the other elements of our 

 being and find that they lead — not into a world of space 

 and time, but surely somewhere. If you take the view 

 that the whole of consciousness is reflected in the dance 

 of electrons in the brain, so that each emotion is a 

 separate figure of the dance, then all features of con- 

 sciousness alike lead into the external world of physics. 

 But I assume that you have followed me in rejecting 

 this view, and that you agree that consciousness as a 

 whole is greater than those quasi-metrical aspects of it 

 which are abstracted to compose the physical brain. 

 We have then to deal with those parts of our being 

 unamenable to metrical specification, that do not make 

 contact — jut out, as it were — into space and time. By 

 dealing with them I do not mean make scientific in- 

 quiry into them. The first step is to give acknowledged 

 status to the crude conceptions in which the mind invests 

 them, similar to the status of those crude conceptions 

 which constitute the familiar material world. 



Our conception of the familiar table was an illusion. 



