CHAPTER IV

WHERE SCIENCE PAUSES

"To expect that by any multiplication of our faculties we may be enabled to know a spirit as we do a triangle, seems as absurd as if we should hope to see a sound."-BISHOP BERKELEY.

Probably no one has ever traversed the allotted span of a lifetime without sooner or later finding himself baffled by a mystery; without facing an immutable, impenetrable wall for which experience has no parallel, nor science an explanation. Practical business men and hard-headed scientists alike make constant demand upon unknown powers of intuition and upon unconscious forces of which they can give no adequate account-nameless faculties deprived through constant usage of their quality of the marvelous. Any attempt to classify these forces as mythical or even as spiritual evokes denial or ridicule from the person employing them. The reason for this intolerance in an age that glories in its breadth of thought, being the unceasing endeavor to measure spiritual matters with the plummet of materialism.

The word mystic is derived from the Greek verb signifying "to shut," thus implying that a mystic was originally a person who kept shut within himself the mysteries into which he had been initiated. Certain psychic attributes have been accredited to the mystics and these gifts which they undoubtedly possess have in a measure served to belittle their examples and their teachings. Thought, feeling, philosophy and religion combine to form modern mysticism. Philosophically it is an attempt to apprehend ultimate realities by direct intuition. Pietistically it is a striving to grasp the Divine Essence and to approach direct communion with God.

Mysticism perceives with the inner eye of faith and comprehension, materialism with the outer eye of meticulous reason. Consequently mystics find difficulty in conveying their meaning to materialists whose thought is in a different language. Symbolism is their most available mode of expression; it is also the language of the dream, of the subconsciousness and of the soul.

At one time dreamers and mystics were classified as madmen; after medical investigation established the fact that lunatics rarely dream, visionaries and dreamers were termed neurotics.

Physiology yclept "commonsense" by its devotees, accords the word psychic no place in its lexicon, and the votaries of modern psychology, a science that has unquestionably achieved marvels, are distinctly at variance with mystics and mysticism, or psychism. This attitude is due to the recent attempt at developing psychology into an objective science, thus doing away with the possibility of acknowledging the subjective and unseen forces of the soul. This process renders the very term psychology misleading, for except as a study of self and the application of theories of self-development, psychology is useless. In other words psychological knowledge is limited to each individual consciousness and is limited to that consciousness in exact proportion to the degree of the development.

On the other hand, the psychic or mystic's faculty is above and beyond psychological development. Its possession is not necessarily concomitant with development of any sort, and contrary to the egoistic quality of psychology and the development of the study of self, true mysticism and true psychism are selfless. In fact the mystics and other psychically gifted persons know that when they attempt to apply their powers of clairvoyance and of penetration to themselves or for personal ends, these powers become void. It is, therefore, from the psychic faculty as opposed to the psychological and the physical that the quality of mysticism is derived.

Man's history is marked by the fact that remote from the

world and unknown and unintelligible to the mass of mankind, a few master minds have lived and thought. thoughts of these great souls have extended first among the higher intellectual orders, then into the ordinary literature and into the schools, then into the common thinking of the homes and the speech of the streets, until finally the fundamentals of character and thought are felt and obeyed by the most ignorant members of the social organization. These master minds have been earth's mystics. Plato, Pythagoras, St. Paul, St. John, the mediæval mystics and teachers, and lastly the few, the very few of modern times. That the mystics have invariably been dreamers goes without saying, for we have their dreams as proof.

Ancient philosophers leaned more towards mysticism than did the theologians. In fact until some time after the birth of Christ, let us say until the Gospels and the Epistles were compiled, the schools of theology and of mysticism were distinct and separate. Plato was never a favorite with the priests, Socrates was compelled to drink hemlock and Pythagoras lost his school at Crotona. Iamblichus, Porphyry and Plotinus were the last of the older school of mysticism as apart from Christianity. Even before their time the new mysticism and faith were beginning to bear their influence upon the world. St. John, St. Paul, St. Augustine, Origen and others were making themselves felt in the thought of mankind at large. Whatever the origin and whatever the definition of mysticism, it was undoubtedly the soul of primitive Christianity, and even at the present day this faith produces its quota of mystics. A supernormal faculty continues to accompany the fervid type of mystic, a sense akin to clairvoyance, vision, and dream-consciousness. This faculty puzzles the more learned and worldly-wise, for the essentials of mysticism do not pertain to the erudite nor to the scientific but are endowments of the lowly, precisely as the Master Mystic chose to appear to the humble folk rather than to the great ones or to the mighty. Sometimes a little child will make a statement

revealing astounding knowledge of elemental forces; or again some lowly old man or woman whose eyes are unaccustomed to the beautiful things of the world and whose toil-stained hands are perpetually busied over some humble task, will manifest a deep wisdom regarding the qualities of the soul and of the unseen world that will send the listener away bewildered. In fact these untaught ones are, for the most part, the mystics of to-day, and their knowledge of spiritual truths is beyond the ken of the ordinary mortal as they prophesy of unborn kings and of unfought battles and of cosmic conditions of which they can have no ulterior knowledge. No study of books nor of the sciences could have told them-yet they know. They will answer, as their kind have ever done when asked, that they find their wisdom in dreams and in visions. And scoffers question their veracity and hold them up to contumely, or if the prophet chance to be a relative, they silence him with a guilty terror lest he be overheard saying strange things, yet there has been a time in the world's history when the forecasts of the mystics and dreamers of the past were accepted reverently, for they made all that was beautiful and everlasting in the hearts of men. To them, the untutored, we owe our legends, proverbs and traditions. Through the mysticism of the common man, not the practicality of the wise one, the kernel of Christianity was preserved throughout the dark ages. New Thought, Christianity and Christian Science are all recrudescences under new formule, and they have been expounded, not by the learned nor the worldly wise, but by the humble whose mysticism was developed ahead of the rationalistic brain.

None can deny that there is an ideal in dreams, and that these ideals alter with the changing times, although behind every dream there must be the individual who apprehends spirit in his own measure. The outward signs of dreams have changed with the courses although ontain fundamental symNols have remained the same moden damer who dissets his dream for an anasis of his own psychological proc

esses misses the mystical quality and reduces his dreams to commonplace.

In the days, however, when dreams were accorded their mete of attention, visions came more easily, not as the resultant of drugs or anodynes, nor the sequelae of outward or physical stimuli as certain schools of dream study would imply, but as manifestations of the higher powers of the spiritual world.

Unquestionably in many instances self-hypnosis, auto-suggestion and hysteria were responsible for the visions; especially might these have been the factors among the mediæval saints and the early Christian martyrs with their starved, racked bodies waiting and praying for a visible, tangible manifestation from their God. But none of these semi-physical conditions can explain the prophetic visions, nor account for the permanence of the conversions.

There is marked similarity in mystical religious experiences; the sudden vision of a great and blinding light characterizes the conversion of St. Paul, St. Augustine and St. Francis, while St. John, Anselm and Cardinal Newman knew a gradually growing state of illumination. The faculty of seeing God in all His creations is a fundamental of mystical thought that binds together the ancient and the modern followers of mysticism.

Emanuel Swedenborg, whose hold upon modern mind is exemplified in the "New Church" that he founded, was a dreamer and a seer of visions. Born in the latter part of the seventeenth century, son of a Swedish Bishop, in youth he was essentially a scientist and a man of the world. His brilliancy so impressed Charles XII of Sweden that the Bishop's son was consulted at the seige of Frederickshall, and his invention of a machine that would convey two galleys, five large boats and a sloop overland from Stromstadt to Iderfjol and thus transport heavy artillery to the very walls of Frederickshall won Swedenborg a knighthood. He was also a professor of mathematics in the University of Upsala and wrote books upon algebra and mathematics. A certain