more"; or as Luthardt says, "Nature is a world of symbolism, a rich hieroglyphic book; everything visible conceals an invisible mystery and the last mystery of all is God." As we shall see later, however, this is only a phase or form of mysticism, not its essence.

Professor Seth says that mysticism is "a phase of thought, or rather perhaps of feeling, which appears in connection with the endeavor of the human mind to grasp the divine essence or ultimate reality, and enjoy the blessedness of actual communion with the Highest."

Bigg sees mystics in all those who believe in the Unseen; Harnack declares that by mysticism there is to be understood nothing but theological piety." To Caird it is "religion in its most concentrated and exclusive form, that attitude of man in which all other relations are swallowed up in the relation of the soul to God."

The most recent and in many respects the most satisfactory definition of all is given by Inge, in his excellent book on "Christian Mysticism." "Religious mysticism may be de

fined as an attempt to realize the presence of the living God in the soul and in nature, or more generally, as the attempt to realize in thought and feeling the immanence of the temporal in the eternal, and of the eternal in the temporal; a supernatural and passive attraction of the soul towards God, proceeding from an internal illumination and ardor, which anticipates reflection, surpasses human efforts and is capable of having a reflex effect upon the body at once marvellous and irresistible."

Finally we have the definition of the Catholic historians of mysticism. Thus Görres, in his extensive treatise, applies the term to all sorts of supernatural manifestations of a spiritual commerce between the soul and the divine and demoniacal powers that rule the world. While Ribet, in his more recent work "La Mystique Divine," covering the same field as Görres, says that "mysticism designates in the first place the truths inaccessible to the created understanding of which God gives the formula by a positive revelation;" and better still, the supernatural, secret and habitual

relations invisible to consciousness itself, by which God raises the creature above its sphere, and introduces it into a superior world, the access to which is by nature prohibited to the creature. Mysticism, then, embraces all that part of sacred learning, which expounds the principles and formulates the rules of Christian perfection; that is to say, of the ascension of the soul toward God." Mysticism of this type often approaches magic and theurgy. This has always been especially true of Oriental mysticism, whether Persian Sufism, Mohammedan Yoga, or esoteric Buddhism, in which we clearly see to what extreme lengths the mystical instinct can go.

The subject of this book is not, however, mysticism, in any of the above senses, but a far broader phenomenon of human experience, which we may term here the sense of the Infinite, or the transcendental sense, and which, though largely coincident with a composite definition which might be made from the above single definitions, overlaps them all, and extends into fields that are not purely religious.

Taken in its widest significance, and especially in its saner and more rational use, transcendentalism, may be defined as that instinct or sense or feeling of the human soul by means of which it is drawn out of everyday consciousness, and brought into an elevated state of mind, by the contemplation or vision of those things which arouse within us a sense of timeless Being, of the Absolute, the Infinite, the One. It is more or less identical with the asthetic sense, with a feeling for abstract ideas, for things regarded as totality, and with what has been called the "cosmic emotion," aroused by the thought of the universe at large. In all phases of mysticism, whether Oriental or Occidental, whether overlaid with magic rites and superstitions, or sinking into a state of absolute negation of all existence, this idea of Eternity, of timeless Being, of the One, of the Infinite is never wanting.

Of course it is only figuratively that we can speak of a sense of the Infinite. Many will undoubtedly deny the existence of such a thing, and will declare that all experiences in

which it is said to exist are based on mere illusion. And yet there certainly does seem to be something in the human soul that corresponds to a sense, or at least to an intellectual conviction, which produces upon us the effect of knowing a spiritual fact with the same certainty that we know a material fact. Professor William James has, with his usual charm and interest, discussed this subject in one of the chapters of his book on the "Varieties of Religious Experience." "The whole array of our instances," he says, "leads to something like this. It is as if there were in the human consciousness, a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we call something there, more deep and general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed." And again he says: "Such is the human ontological imagination, and such is the convincingness of what it brings to birth. Unpicturable beings are realized, and realized with an intensity almost like that of an