Note 392 — LECTURE VI. THE TWO RELIGIONS IN HISTORY.

Correctly so, if we are to judge of Mysticism even from its purest phases and its best representatives, e.g. the Quietism of Madame Guyon, the Spiritualism of Swedenborg, the Romanticism of F. von Hardenberg, better known as Novalis. Even on its speculative or philosophical side, it would not be difficult to cull from the writings of the Cambridge Platonists, and the Idealists of Europe and America, extracts equivalent to the aphorisms of Novalis, that “action is morbid,” “to dream is to overcome,” that “the soul must abandon the actual world if it would discover in the recesses of the mystic night the Queen of Heaven, Eternal Beauty.”—Hymns to Night, Schriften, vol. ii. p. 158.