NOTE TO CHAPTER I.

Von Hügel in his study of the Mystical Element of Religion concludes that there is “no distinct faculty of mystical apprehension.” In a passage following this contention (vol. ii, pp. 283, 284), he so states his position as to make it possible for me to start from a contradictory assertion and reach his conclusion. We agree that mysticism is “not everything in any one soul, but something in every soul of man.”

The entire passage reads as follows:

“Is there, then, strictly speaking, such a thing as a specifically distinct, self-sufficing, purely Mystical mode of apprehending Reality? I take it, distinctly not; and that all the errors of the Exclusive Mystic proceed precisely from the contention that Mysticism does constitute such an entirely separate, completely self-supported kind of human experience. This denial does not, of course, mean that soul does not differ quite indefinitely from soul, in the amount and kind of the recollective, intuitive, deeply emotive element possessed and exercised by it concurrently or alternately with other elements,—the sense of the Infinite within and without the Finite springing up in the soul on occasion of its contact with the Contingent; nor, again, that these more or less congenital differences and vocations amongst souls cannot be and are not still further developed by grace and heroism into types of religious apprehension and life, so strikingly divergent, as, at first sight, to seem hardly even supplementary the one to the other. But it means that, in even the most purely contingent-seeming soul, and in its apparently but Institutional and Historical assents and acts, there ever is, there can never fail to be, some, however, implicit, however slight, however intermittent, sense and experience of the Infinite, evidenced by at least some dissatisfaction with the Finite, except as this Finitude is an occasion for growth in, and a part-expression of, that Infinite, our true home. And, again, it means, that even the most exclusively mystical-seeming soul ever depends, for the fulness and healthiness of even the most purely mystical of its acts and states, as really upon its past and present contacts with the Contingent, Temporal, and Spacial, and with social facts and elements, as upon its movement of concentration, and the sense and experience, evoked on occasion of those contacts or of their memories, of the Infinite within and around those finitudes and itself.

“Only thus does Mysticism attain to its true, full dignity, which consists precisely in being, not everything in any one soul, but something in every soul of man; and in presenting at its fullest, the amplest development, among certain special natures with the help of certain special graces and heroisms, or what, in some degree, and form, is present in every truly human soul, and in such a soul’s every, at all genuine and complete, grace-stimulated religious act and state. And only thus does it, as Partial Mysticism, retain all the strength and escape the weaknesses and dangers of would-be Pure Mysticism, as regards the mode and character or Religious Experience, Knowledge, and Life.”

If my interpretation of this writer be correct, he terms that a “recollective, intuitive, deeply emotive element” which I conceive to be a mystic faculty or sense. The fact that it pervades every part of human personality does not disqualify it from claiming the dignity of a distinctive faculty. It bears a similar relation to the higher endowments of personality which the ether bears to light and to the call of world to world. The Mystic Sense is the enabling faculty, which makes man human. Its pervasiveness does not detract from, rather does it enhance, its distinctness. To call it an element seems to clothe it in a vagueness which its character does not merit. If man were merely a phase of matter, we could employ the term element with propriety. That which can be only an element in a universe, at any rate may be a faculty or sense in man.