1896,] Psychology. 603 
Augustine, the great stay ad of Hippo may be taken asa type of the 
‘mens sana in corpore sano.’ He was a man who drank deeply of all 
joys, both of the body and the mind, which the cup of life could offer. 
Yet his great powers and commanding intellect did not prevent his 
hearing a “ divine voice ” which then and there influenced him to take 
up the religious life. It is true that the mind of Augustine had been 
deeply exercised by the search for truth, which ever seemed to elude 
his grasp. Plato and St. Paul opened the way for higher thoughts, and 
words of the latter were driven home with irresistible force to his con- 
science, as with his friend Alypias he was studying the Pauline epistles. 
The thought of divine purity fought in his heart, with the love of the 
world and of the flesh which were sore temptations to a man so admir- 
ably fitted to enjoy both. He burst into a flood of tears, and going out 
into the garden flung himself under a fig tree that he might give his 
tears full vent, and pour out his heart to God. Suddenly he heard a 
voice calling him to consult the scriptures. * Take up and read, take 
up and read.” He left off weeping, rose up and returning to his house 
took up the volume from Alypius, and read in silence the words to be 
found in Romans XIII, 13th and 14th verses. Augustine adds “I had 
neither desire nor need to read further. As I finished the sentence the 
light of peace had poured into my heart and all the shadows of doubt 
dispersed. Thus hast Thou converted me to Thee . . . standing 
fast in that rule of faith which Thou so many years before had revealed 
to my mother.” (Confessions, VIII, 30). This appears to have been 
the only occasion when a hallucinatory (?) voice was heard by Augus- 
tine, but its influence lasted for his whole life. 
For that experience which points to the state commonly known as 
ecstacy, I shall take the experience, not of a saint, nor of a prophet, 
but of a plain American citizen of our own day, a locomotive engineer 
who worked chiefly in Ohio and Indiana. 
| eoplatonism was a philosophical religion, in no way founded on any revela- 
tion real or imagined. Its great expounder Plotinus says simply of his own ex- 
perience of “ecstacy ” [that is of the sense of absorption into the Divine Beings] _ 
“ I myself have experienced it but three times.” But his pupil and disciple Por- 
hyry says that on four occasions eaen six years of their intercourse Plotinus 
attained to the ecstatic union with God 
It is surely contrary to the t tific spirit to i this strong, overmaster- 
ing instinct of the human mind towards union with some “Power, brh itself, 
which makes for righteousness,” and which appears in equal strength in the 
Hindoo, the Mahometan, the mediæval saints, the taion mystics; and in the 
Neoplatonists—who had no “religious superstition” to influence them, and no 
hell to terrify them, but who were possessed only with the sense of an overwhelm- 
ing need for union with the Divine. 
