function of mysticism, after all, is not discovery. To say that mystics merely give back as personal experience the doctrines that they have received is surely not the whole truth, though it is a major part of it. Originality or mental invention appears in the prophets of Israel and in Gautama as surely as in Goethe, who was certain, as we have seen, of his own inspiration. Further, the characteristic mystical doctrines arose in the first place through experience, and not the experience through the doctrines. In one respect, namely, reduction of distractions and a moderate degree of muscular relaxation, mystical practices are favorable to thinking, just as quiet in an auditorium helps to make a symphony intelligible. It is rather surprising, in fact, that mysticism has not made more varied contributions to the world's thought. Still more notable is the fact that the most certainly original prophecy is that which contains the largest, not the smallest, amount of self-controlled discrimination (see p. 186); precisely as the more valuable poetic inspirations come to those who practice poetical composition with critical self-judgment. On the whole, it does not appear that mysticism has any special method of mental invention or any special tool of discovery. Its hold upon mankind lies rather in its practical efficiency in soothing troubled emotions, in steadying the will, and in conserving what has already been approved.

But it is said that the central claim of mysticism is direct acquaintance with God, and that the sort of immediacy thus claimed is involved also in all our acquaintance with one another. This identification of mystical doctrine with the doctrine of social immediacy

is possible, however, only by ignoring certain sharp differences. It is not in India but within the Christian religion, which is fundamentally social, that this defense of mysticism arises. But the argument ignores certain basal elements in the Christian attitude, such as its appreciation of personality and its ascription of immeasurable worth to the individual. The love that is the fulfilling of the law individualizes both the lover and the loved. The unity that it requires is not the extinction of differences. It is rather a determination that what is other than myself and different from me shall have permanent validity for me. If unio mystica in the classical sense should really occur, it would involve the extinction of the reciprocity—whether between man and man or between man and God-that is of the essence of any social immediacy that the Christian religion can recognize.

The practice of the via negativa by the great Christian mystics, and their doctrine of union with God, contain as a matter of fact two unreconcilable elements. In the great prophets of Israel we behold a burst of emphasis upon the individual person. Jahwe is no longer represented as dealing with Israelites en bloc, but his commands and his condemnations for sin search out men one by one. Here is a movement, not toward, but away from absorption of the individual in the general. This individualizing of values reached its climax in Jesus, who taught that the Divine Father notices the fall of a sparrow, and numbers the very hairs of our heads. Compare this with unio mystica, in which supposably nothing in particular is noticed. Great is the contrast between the happiness of trusting a Father who thus

J

values our individuality and the rapture of transcending all awareness of "I and thou."

In the Christian mystics called great the Indian denial of the value of the individual mingles inconsistently with the Christian doctrine of active love. Indian mysticism, with its doctrine of absorption, came into Christianity chiefly through neo-Platonism, and specifically through the writings of an unknown philosophical theologian of perhaps the fifth century who came to be mistakenly identified with Dionysius the Areopagite (hence the present name, Pseudo-Dionysius). These writings, translated into Latin by Johannes Scotus Erigena in the ninth century, exercised an important influence upon piety as well as upon speculation. They furnished a thread of doctrine, reaching through the generation, upon which mystical practices from both Christian and non-Christian sources could be strung. Hence the paradoxes of what is called Christian mysticism. Orthodox trinitarianism exists in the same mind side by side with a monism that is scarcely distinguishable from pantheism. Christian love is identified with an experience of "union" in which the distinction between lover and loved is supposed to be annihilated. Active regard for humanity is associated with the via negativa, which aims to get away from one's fellows into a purely individual bliss. That the practice of such mysticism did in many cases reinforce Christian love in the active, outgoing sense, is not due to the Indian element that was present, but to the persistence of standards that had come down from the prophets and from Jesus.

As far, then, as mysticism connotes the type of procedure that Christianity borrowed from India, mys

tical experience is not only not identical with social immediacy, but the two are diametrically opposed to each other. Social immediacy, the recognition of another as present, notices and fixates differences within a unity, and demands active attitudes with reference to the other. On the contrary, the negative way, at the moments when it is most completely represented, involves turning away from the neighbor whom one has seen, away from the whole sphere in which love

can act.

CHAPTER XVII

THE FUTURE LIFE AS A PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEM

Belief in life beyond death is not a single belief based upon a single set of motives and considerations, but several different sorts of belief that arise in different ways. In the first place, instinctive avoidance of things that cause death is not at all the same as desire for the continuance of personal life. In the next place, the notion that one's double lingers around the place where one's body is interred arose before there was any clear notion of personal life-long before appreciation of the worth of personal-social experience could awaken longing for its continuance. The earliest spiritism, in fact, was an expression of fear rather than of hope. The dead man's shade was an object of avoidance, even of horror. In large areas and for long periods, as in Babylonia, India, Israel, and Greece, the land of shades was regarded, not as a place of fulfilment and of joy, but of feebleness and of darkness. Up to this point the basis of the belief in survival was: (1) Mental habit or association of ideas whereby further activities were expected where so many had already occurred. To early man life, with attitudes of "for and against," is the atmosphere of thought; it required no little experience before death could be thought of in antithesis to life. (2) Occasional experience of the apparently sensible presence of the dead-the sort of eye- and ear-witness that we classify