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VERY REV. W. E. TNGE^ M.A., ON 



actually saw from the mental reconstruction of it made by his 

 mind. Memory itself is a creative activity, not the turning back 

 of pages to a previous chapter. When we study one of the 

 speculative mystics, we have before us a man who is trying to co- 

 ordinate and put in their proper places certain unusual data of 

 consciousness, of which he has the same, or a higher degree of 

 conviction than he has of the objects presented to his senses. His 

 mysticism is not merely the highest stage in a logical pyramid. 

 It is something that he has lived through, and is trying to 

 understand. Why in the world should we leave our Plotinus 

 and Eckhart, Boehme and Coleridge, and Emerson, and go to 

 some hysterical nun in the hope of getting our mysticism ''pure ?" 

 Keligion from which reason has been strained off proves on 

 inspection to be a very muddy liquid. At any rate, if we are to 

 learn from the mystics, we must not listen to them only when 

 they speak of experiences which are strictly " not transferable " ; 

 otherwise the wisest of them will tell us that they can teach us 

 nothing. " He who has seen God is silent," as one of them says. 

 We will take the mystical experience as a solid fact, guaranteed 

 by those who have had it, though they cannot pass it on to us ; 

 we will ask them how God and the world and the human soul 

 appear to those who have had this experience. That they can 

 _ explain to us, and it is that which we want to learn from them. 

 We shall find that they do not call in their mysticism at every 

 step in their philosophy. Eather that remains till the last as 

 the summit and crown of earthly and heavenly wisdom. They 

 are quite ready to meet other philosophers on their own ground. 

 But the heavenly vision shines all the time in front of them. It 

 shows them in what direction they ought to move. It inspires 

 them with something more than faith and hope — with a blessed 

 certainty that the unity and reality which they seek as philoso- 

 phers is a fact which they have seen afar off, so that they know 

 that it is there. Ethics can show us what ought to be 

 metaphysics what must be ; they engage in these quests with joy 

 and confidence, therefore they already know — though only in 

 absolutely general terms and without outKnes — what is. 



" What is reality ? " is the primary question to which we must 

 all return some answer. Is it matter' — is it the world which 

 may be resolved into particles — molecules, atoms, etc. ? Matter 

 is always on the point of vanishing away — science has sub- 

 divided the molecule till there is little left of it except some- 

 thing of the nature of electricity. If we confine ourselves, by 

 abstraction, to merely qtcantitative caitegories, as if extension were 

 the only ultimate fact, we shall be driven, if we are logical, to 



