Note 27 — Chapter III · THE ORGANIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

It is really the element of secret emotionalism that constitutes mysticism. It is again a phase of the private alternative whereby we get what we want. What is called “intellectual mysticism” is but a secondary rationalization of this emotional element. But there is need of discrimination. While it is true that conceptions arising from intuitional inference may readily be begotten of emotionalism, yet the same inferences when based upon biological analogy cease to be mystical. Nietzsche’s “primordial unity,” because biologically inferred, seems to me a quite unemotional and inclusive conception. In the biological consistency that unites the most highly differentiated species with the lowest single unicellular organism, the mind straightway finds substantiation for Nietzsche’s conception. Whereas the “metaphysical unity” of the religionists is, on the contrary, a wholly mystical conception. Through this postulate the mind is immediately involved in such vagaries as one connects with the doctrine of transubstantiation or with the flights of Annie Besant and her astral bodies!

But one can perhaps still more aptly illustrate the distinction in question by considering the totally opposed meanings—the one intellectual, the other emotional—contained in the word “vibrations” according as it is used by the scientist in regard to mathematically mensurable physical wave-lengths or as it is employed by the “hypersensitive personality” to describe certain sensations presumably recorded somewhere in the region of the epigastrium in response to subtle but invisible “psychic communications.” In defining the term mystical one must not fail to include the attitude of mind that leads one scientist, who has failed to understand the investigations of another, to refer to those investigations as mystical. I am inclined to feel somewhat strongly on this point because of the fact that my conception of the primary biological unity of the organism and its influence upon the subsequent development of the personality has tended to be regarded quite arbitrarily in the light of a mystical interpretation. (See note 1, page 10.)