Religion and Psychology 327 



the drug-addict, the devotee of self-hypnosis, the primitive artist 

 in man. Here is an experience of direct union on a lower plane 

 of feeling. Then thought discriminates, distinguishes subject 

 from object, objects from one another, holds the mind apart from 

 its object, and yet, in that process, links it up more and more closely 

 with its object until, when its work is done as far as it can be done, 

 again there arises a communion, a feeling that the subject-object 

 relationship is being transcended, and this is the true, the highest 

 mystical experience. It will include various types of experience. 

 We will not identify it with religious mystical experience because 

 we have already marked and separated that off from our other 

 general attitudes towards the totality of things — the intellectual, the 

 aesthetic, and the moral attitudes, and in each of these attitudes we 

 find the higher form of mysticism. There remains the mysticism 

 which may truly be called religious. But even that does not com- 

 pletely satisfy us, since we are left with four distinct things which we 

 feel must in some way be uni fied. Actually, of course, they are uni- 

 fied in an all-inclusive experience, which is the real higher mystical 

 experience, the mediation by thought of all the other attitudes, in- 

 cluding the religious, so that just as the race began life in a primitive 

 religious way, likewise at the end, after science and philosophy 

 have done all that they can, the fundamental attitude is once more 

 a religious attitude. An individual who is unable to get that 

 attitude at all is to that extent incomplete. We sometimes find 

 that such an individual is mentally sick, suffering from repressions 

 which cut him off from it. With the removal of these repressions 

 by analysis the experience may become once more possible to him. 



It is only fair to mention here that one school of thought 

 explains all these mystical experiences in terms of what is called 

 Narcissism. In such experience there is a turning inwards of the 

 mind upon itself, a drawing in of libido, a concentration of libido 

 upon the self. An increase of Narcissism under certain conditions 

 may bring with it a feeling of intense pleasure and of liberation, 

 transcending time and space, although it is really a set-back, a 

 regression, to an infantility of an extreme type. The actual 

 evidence in support of so extreme a theory is quite inadequate, 

 and against it may be set the general arguments of pp. 309, 318 

 above. But we should not overlook the role played by Narcissism 

 in some forms of teligious experience.^ 



1 See, e.g., Ernest Jones, *' The Natureof Auto-suggestion," Britishjoumal 

 of Medical Psychology, vol. iii, 1923. 



