CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM. 



83 



becomes possible. I should define the Mystical state as a looking 

 inwards instead of outwards ; it is the realization of the Immanence of 

 God, that we are indeed one with the All-loving, and that the Spiritual 

 is nearer to us and has much more to do with us than the physical 

 has, if we could only see the truth and recognize its presence. 



The Intellect is necessarily governed by the Objective owing to 

 the conditions of our earthly life. We are living in a world of 

 continuous and multitudinous changes ; in fact without those changes 

 we could have no cognizance of our surroundings, we should have no 

 consciousness of living. All our sense organs require movement or 

 change for their excitation, because they can only act under the 

 modes or limitations of time and space : these necessitate motion as 

 the very basis of apprehension, because motion is the product of 

 those two modes, namely, the time that an object takes to traverse 

 a certain space ; and as our conceptional knowledge is based upon 

 our perceptional knowledge, our very conceptions are limited by 

 time and space, and are therefore governed by the objective. On 

 the other hand, the Mystical or Spiritual outlook is unlimited, every- 

 thing that is objective to the finite is subjective to the Spiritual. 

 For example, the whole of Creation may be looked upon as the 

 materialization, in time and space, of the " Thought " or Will of the 

 Absolute ; the Intellectual outlook can, as it were, only look on the 

 outside, the forms or phenomena, of that materialization, whereas 

 the Mystical inlook enables us to understand the noumena or mean- 

 ing of that thought. 



Intellectualism, or what I will call Intellection, can only look upon 

 that great " Thought " as a long line of events, in sequence, stretching 

 from past to future eternity ; it is obliged by its limitations to look 

 lengthwise at time, as though it were similar to our dimension in 

 space, and has no knowledge of it in any other direction, but the 

 Spiritual outlook, being independent of time-limitation, can realize 

 that " Thought " as being, what in our finite expression we should 

 call, instantaneous, and the whole of creation from beginning to the 

 end of time would be lying open to view. This may be clearer if 

 we take as illustration our mode of gaining knowledge by reading a 

 book. Intellection insists that one word comes in front of, and is 

 followed by, another word : it can only think in finite sequences ; the 

 Contents of that book can only be examined as though it were a long 

 line of words, a succession of thoughts, but, if pressed. Intellection 



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