RELIGION AND SCIENCE 293 



On the other hand, the emotionally-minded who are 

 gifted besides with organizing and intuitive power, 

 the mystics — they build up their own souls into a 

 desired and lovely edifice, in which too they have 

 constructed a spiritual machinery capable of viewing 

 external realities on a new plane, under a more highly 

 synthesized aspect ; but they neglect the precise 

 analysis of that outer reality, and so can only speak in 

 the barest symbols and metaphors, and cannot put 

 their hard-won knowledge into a form available for 

 others. They have that non-communicable skill 

 which is that of the craftsman alone as opposed to 

 the craftsman who is also in some degree a scientist. 

 We know good mysticism from bad, as we know good 

 art from bad — ^as definitely and as personally. And 

 we are sure that good mysticism, like good art, is 

 somehow of supreme, transcendent importance ; but 

 almost always it has remained like a purely symbolic 

 art, not having for others the value which it should 

 have or did have for the mystic himself, because not 

 properly enchained, as the French say, with stern 

 and immutable fact. And of the theologian we feel 

 that he gives us the grammar, not the spirit, that he 

 does not help us toward the supremely important 

 act of experiencing, but only to understanding ex- 

 perience if we chance to have had it. 



One word on the problem of transcendence. The 

 mystics will tell us that transcendence is a hall-mark 

 of religion at its highest. His mode of experience 



