hallucination. They determine our vital attitude as decisively as the vital attitude of lovers is determined by the habitual sense by which each is haunted of the other's being in the world." Professor James in the above-mentioned work gives examples of such a sense of the Unseen, as he terms it, many of which, however, unfortunately occur in the case of unknown or anonymous individuals. This takes away something of their value as witnesses, for as Dante says, those who illustrate their teachings by human examples should do come vento Che le più alte cime più percuote.1 Yet there are many witnesses whose distinguished position and sound and sane character lend force to their testimony. "In us all," declares Schelling, "there dwells a secret, wonderful power, by means of which we may 1 As the wind Which strikes most the highest summits. Par. XVII. 133. retire from the changes of time, into our inner self, stripped of all that which came to it from outward things, and there under the form of unchangeableness, gaze upon the Eternal. This vision is the innermost and most genuine experience from which alone depends all that we know or believe of the supernatural world." This power of the soul he terms "intellectual intuition." So Schleiermacher, in his "Reden über die Religion" declares the essence of all his teaching to consist in the importance of the individual, the place of intuition, everything a revelation of the universe, the universe itself one glorious, eternally active whole. By going back in thought, he tells us, we reach a mystical point beyond which we cannot go, but which is the source of all our knowledge. This is the touch of our spirit with the universe, whereby "like the touch of lips that love, there are large mutual understandings." And again, in language which suggests much of the socalled New Thought of to-day, he declares that "this waking of the sense for the universe is the larger life. Fear unmixed it cannot be, but may be fear feebly changing to love, and everything from fear to the perfect love which makes us feel that we are one with the universe, without a doubting or jarring note." In describing this union of the soul with the universe, Schleiermacher rises to almost lyrical rhapsodies:-" This intuition is fleeting and transparent as the vapor which the dew breathes on blossom and fruit, it is bashful and tender as a maiden's kiss, it is holy and fruitful as a bridal embrace. Nor is it merely like, it is all this. It is the first contact of the universal life with an individual. It is the holy wedlock of the universe with the incarnated reason for a creative productive embrace. It is immediate, raised above all error and misunderstanding; you lie directly on the bosom of the Infinite world. In that moment you are its soul. Through one part of your nature you feel, as your own, all its powers and its endless life." In our own times Max Müller makes religion consist alone in the sense of the Infinite, -"Religion," he says, "is a mental faculty, which independent of, nay, in spite of sense and reason, enables man to apprehend the Infinite under different names and under varying disguises. Without that faculty, no religion would be possible; and if we will but listen we can hear in all religions a groaning of the spirit, a struggle to conceive the inconceivable, to utter the unutterable; a longing after the Infinite is a love of God." These definitions by recent individuals, however, only reproduce the testimony of countless persons in the past. From the earliest times there has existed the belief that a man has two eyes, the eye of the body, and the eye of the soul; and just as the eye of the body is formed to see the outer show of things, so the eye of the soul is formed to see the spiritual world. Plato who stands at the beginning of all philosophy of the spiritual world, speaks of the eye of the soul in many places; and in our own age no one has better expressed this thought than Goethe, Wär'nicht das Auge sonnenhaft Wie könnten wir zur Sonne blicken? 1 Most people of a prosaic or unsentimental turn of mind, are apt to look on all mystically inclined persons as unbalanced. Not every one is so broad as Professor William James, who although he confesses that he himself is not naturally in sympathy with mysticism, gives it its true significance. Yet in spite of the vast amount of rubbish heaped upon transcendentalism, it forms to-day, and always has formed, an integral part of the life of the human soul. All men have had a touch, however fleeting, of this experience. Some are naturally inclined to it, others are not. In the same individual it may manifest itself at different periods of his life. In the young, it is often produced by romantic love; in the old by a deepening sense of religion. Even men 1 Were not our eyes in nature like the sun How could we to the sun look up? Were not within us the very power of God himself, |