THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE 
 
 Ex Libris 
 ISAAC FOOT
 
 on the Margins 
 
 *Being Suggestions of Thought 
 and Snquiry 
 
 Five Sssays by 
 
 CLIFFORD HARRISON 
 
 London: Qeorge c {ed'way 
 1897
 
 AC? 
 H3?
 
 PREFACE 
 
 I HAVE attempted no particular sequence in these 
 papers. They are placed very much as they were 
 written, and they were written as the subjects sug- 
 gested themselves, or were suggested to me. The 
 subjects themselves would seem to have but little in 
 common. Yet in their treatment they have a com- 
 mon point of view from which they gain a certain 
 aspect of unity ; and in their aim and drift they 
 consciously tend to a common issue, which, I think, 
 gives to them, if not a harmony, at least an undis- 
 cordant cadence of thought. 
 
 Many of us in these days are deeply interested 
 alike in philosophy, in science, and in theology ; but 
 it may be our interest centres not so much in the 
 scholastic and separate walks of each, technically 
 considered, as in that less trodden line of mystic 
 thought which, whilst it claims to include all, is in 
 itself expressed by none. 
 
 It is unnecessary for me to put in a word of apo- 
 logy for my venturesomeness, or to present a petition 
 for merciful judgment to the Powers that be in all 
 the great schools I have named, or to those professed 
 mystic thinkers who rule the line of thought on
 
 vi PREFACE 
 
 which these essays are drawn; for I am entirely 
 conscious that the honour of counting them amongst 
 my readers is not likely to fall to my portion. Nor, 
 indeed, do I in one sense desire such honour, inas- 
 much as the essays were written with very different 
 purpose. It is rather to the many who form the 
 laity to these august orders I would desire to speak, 
 as it is of their kindly consideration I am solicitous. 
 We laity it is who form the audiences, the congrega- 
 tions, and the readers in lecture-room, church, and 
 study. We it is who so often come away with much 
 additional information and scant additional satisfac- 
 tion. To quote Omar Khayaam's words with present 
 and personal application, we 
 
 "... do eagerly frequent 
 Doctor and saint, and hear great argument 
 
 About it and about : and evermore 
 Come out by the same door where in we went." 
 
 Sometimes we like to speak to one another when 
 we have closed our book, or come out from lecture 
 or from service speak to one another in spoken 
 word, if it may be : if not, then in that printed page 
 which nowadays is almost as much a general heri- 
 tage as speech. 
 
 Such a page, however, must start with a full and 
 plain confession of how it is written and for whom. 
 I will, therefore, at once say that the following 
 essays are in nowise written for those who are 
 adepts, or even advanced students, in the subjects
 
 PREFACE vii 
 
 dealt with. Volumes which please and interest the 
 initiated in any subject are oftentimes too technical 
 for the casual reader. In all subjects of mystic 
 thought such as are herein glanced at this is 
 peculiarly true. Most books which are written for 
 mystics are scarcely to be understood by any one 
 who is not instructed in mystic thought ; and some 
 of them are even purposely unintelligible to the 
 outside reader. The aim of the following essays is 
 merely to suggest, and to point to enquiry. They 
 claim to be nothing more than Notes on the Margins 
 of the thought with which they deal.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM . . .13 
 II. THE ILLUSION OF REALISM . . . in 
 
 III. THE LINES OF COINCIDENCE . . .137 
 
 IV. ARREST OR ADVANCE ? .... 169 
 V. THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD. 221
 
 AN 
 
 ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM
 
 "Heaven and earth are united together, and the universe is 
 one." Chinese Inscription of 133 A.D., discovered in the Valley of 
 the Orkhan. 
 
 "Religion without proof and science without hope are 
 standing face to face in a defiance without hope of victory 
 for either side." KDOUAED SCHURE, Les Grands Initics. 
 
 "To me, I confess, nothing seems more delightful than to be 
 able to discover how, by an unbroken chain, our thoughts and 
 words carry us back from century to century, how the roots 
 and feeders of our minds pierce through stratum after stratum, 
 and still draw their life and nourishment from the deepest 
 foundations, from the hearts of the oldest thinkers of man- 
 kind." MAX MiJLLER, Theosophy, or Psychological Religion. 
 
 "... But, friends, 
 
 Faith is within ourselves. It takes no rise 
 From outside things, whate'er you may believe. 
 There is an inmost centre in us all, 
 Where truth abides in fulness : and around, 
 Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in, 
 This perfect clear perception which is truth : 
 A baffling and perverting carnal mesh 
 Binds it, and makes it error : and to KNOW 
 Rather consists in opening out a way 
 Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape, 
 Than in effecting entry for a light 
 Supposed to be without." 
 
 BROWNING, Paracelsus.
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 THERE is in the world around us a system of 
 thought, known in full only to those by whom it 
 is followed, and followed but by few, for which it 
 is difficult to find a name at once appropriate and 
 acceptable. Names there are, indeed, and many, for 
 the various branches and subdivisions of this wide 
 system of thought. But few of the names are 
 satisfactory for the whole system; many of them 
 would be repudiated by the students of the thought 
 so designated ; and most of them seem to be coined 
 by the outside world, and bestowed on a line of 
 thought it avowedly does not pretend to like and 
 scarcely tries to understand. The best of these 
 names, in some ways best, because when it was 
 first used it was clear in its real meaning, and 
 was made and accepted by those who followed the 
 study they thus designated is Theosophy. Yet 
 here we find a fine and noble word, of sublime
 
 14 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 origin and meaning, sadly hampered by technical 
 claims, by modern misapplication, and by much not 
 unwarrantable prejudice. 
 
 Professor Max Miiller (who must be allowed to 
 be a master of words) chooses this name, however, 
 to head his Gifford Lectures on many of the various 
 forms of religious faith which go to make up or 
 rather, are fused in the system of thought to 
 which I have alluded. "It seemed to me," he 
 writes, "that this venerable name, so well known 
 among early Christian thinkers, as expressing the 
 highest knowledge of God within the human mind, 
 has of late been so greatly misappropriated that 
 it was high time to restore it to its proper 
 function." We may note, therefore, in passing, 
 that whatever may be our private feeling or asso- 
 ciation with regard to this name as it figures in 
 the world before us to-day, the word itself originally 
 held, and still holds in the mind of the impartial 
 scholar and observer, a very high meaning a 
 meaning, indeed, nothing short of the highest any 
 word can hold when applied to the pursuit of 
 knowledge. Professor Max Miiller further defines 
 this system of thought, in so far as he deals with 
 it in these lectures, as "Psychological Religion." 1 
 
 1 He adds : " I shall not be able to avoid these names (psychic, 
 theosophic, and mystic) altogether, because the most prominent 
 representatives of Theosophy and mystic religion have prided 
 themselves on these names, and they are very appropriate, if only 
 clearly defined. Nothing, of course, is easier, and therefore in
 
 But perhaps the two Barnes by which it is best 
 known in the world at large and in the history of 
 religion or ethics are Occultism and Mysticism. 
 Of these, the latter seems to be by far the better. 
 We must own that both names come to us in " such 
 a questionable shape," that they present to the ordi- 
 nary observer a somewhat spectral appearance, not 
 wholly unassociated with midnight and a ghost. In 
 that they both alike hint at something hidden 
 a mystery they may be considered true names. 
 But in that they both seem shrouded with an un- 
 pleasant if not malefic darkness, as of some sinister 
 secret a suspicion, as it were, of enigmatical and 
 thaumaturgical hocus-pocus a shadow (shall we 
 say ?) of Black Art they are untrue and detectable 
 forgeries of the real but unknown signature. In the 
 first-named, Occultism, this unbenignant gloom seems 
 at least to the outsider painfully and perturb- 
 ingly present. The argument which would try to 
 explain this gloom away would be a sophistry and a 
 bit of special pleading. It is well, indeed, at once 
 to confess that the shadow is no adumbration of 
 prejudice and ignorance, but is a fact although 
 it may be cast by something far removed from the 
 unsubstantial bogie of popular fancy and prejudice. 
 
 certain minds more tempting, than to use the same word in its 
 opprobrious sense, and thus, by a mere name, to condemn doctrines 
 which have been held by the wisest and best of men. This kind 
 of criticism need not detain us, or keep us from adopting the 
 name of Theosophy for our own purposes."
 
 1 6 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 Nor, in confessing the presence of this shadow, is any 
 unusual feature in a great subject introduced, or 
 any condemnation of it involved, if we will only 
 impartially consider the matter. Everything in the 
 world, every thought presented to it, every force 
 known, even every "virtue" practised, has its two 
 poles, its positive and negative. To allow that there 
 is a dark, nay, a very dark side to this system of 
 thought, is but crediting it with the order which ob- 
 tains throughout the world. Our planet is the great 
 type of all we know, and all, in a sense, we are ; and 
 it has for ever a dark as well as a bright side. 
 
 We observe further that the dark side has, so to 
 speak, a more obvious result, from the earthly point 
 of view, than the sun-lighted hemisphere; for it 
 casts far into the atmosphere the double triangles of 
 the umbra and the penumbra. We do not blame 
 the light for causing the correlative shadow, nor do 
 we arraign the globe which receives the light for 
 the evil of intercepting it. That inevitable dark- 
 ness which attends a sunlit sphere is one of the 
 planetary conditions which will be found to be 
 archetypal of every condition in our life and every 
 system of our thought. Night is the corollary of 
 Day; "Evil" the correlation of "Good." When 
 Yes is spoken, No is predicated. Every virtue has 
 its inversive vice. Religion is not less honoured or 
 less blessed because it has had, and always must 
 have, a reverse side of gross superstition and black
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 17 
 
 fanaticism. That the higher the nature is, the 
 deeper may be its fall, is a proverbial truth. When 
 manifestation is once accorded, limitation is involved. 
 The Son of the Morning becomes, in other aspects, 
 the Prince of Darkness. It is unnecessary to press 
 further an analogy that is admitted by philosophy 
 and natural intelligence, or to quote the final and 
 highest exemplars conceivable to the mind and 
 within reach of the spiritual perception, to prove 
 this omnipresent Positive and Negative. 
 
 In a certain form of Occultism (and this is the 
 form generally associated with the word in the 
 popular mind), no one can deny that we meet the 
 shadowed and inversive side of the system of thought 
 of which I speak. This shadow is so terrible (to 
 no one so terrible as to the true Mystic), and, 
 from causes easy to perceive, when once we think 
 of the matter causes which every preacher admits 
 with reiteration, and every philosopher faces with 
 interrogation is likely to be so much better known 
 and understood by the world than the sun-brightened 
 surface that corresponds to it, that it is not surpris- 
 ing that many of the pious, the wise, and the pure 
 turn from the whole system which they associate 
 almost exclusively with this shadow. The ignorance 
 in the world, even in the world of thought and reli- 
 gion, about the brighter side of this system is so 
 extraordinary, that it parallels with a surprising and 
 startling exactness the innumerable passages in the
 
 1 8 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 sacred writings which proclaim and mourn over the 
 ignorance, natural and wilful, of mankind as to the 
 things that make for the higher life. The dark side 
 of the system is, then, the one that is best known 
 to very many the only one known. The depth of its 
 darkness cannot be overrated or exaggerated. No 
 one would hold that darkness so appalling as those 
 who walk in the hemisphere of light, which, as it 
 were, causes that shadow. They indeed alone know 
 to the full (if such a phrase be permissible for know- 
 ledge which at best is but infinitely small) all its 
 danger and horror. 
 
 To the outside observer, attracted by matters 
 called " occult " and " psychical," nay, even to the 
 thoughtful and cold observer, bent on examining an 
 interesting study, a strange exhibition of unknown 
 or but partially known forces of matter, of will, or 
 of credulity, the initial steps toward and into this 
 shadow are often very seductive a fascinating 
 amusement a subject for after-dinner discussion, 
 and of experiment to be undertaken lightly or scoff- 
 ingly, with a not wholly disagreeable titillation of 
 nerves brought into contact with something a little 
 uncanny. But to any one who knows where the 
 lines may lead, and what force may be unloosed by 
 thoughtless or by self-seeking curiosity, these steps 
 are dangerous to a point that can scarcely be put 
 into words without incurring the charge of extrava- 
 gant and theatrical hyperbole. Yet the words so
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 19 
 
 used might well be justified by accepted parallels 
 well known at least to the Churches. We must again 
 remember that every study or pursuit which is open 
 to man, be it for knowledge or happiness, has its 
 reverse side. Science can be as black with cruelty 
 in its ruthless search for knowledge (using in that 
 search the very dictum it so execrates in the Medi- 
 aeval Church, that the end justifies the means) and 
 can be as hard in its dogma as any superstition. It 
 is excusable on this point to repeat that the " Black 
 Art " and gross abyss to which occultism can sink, 
 and has often sunk in the past, is no individual or 
 unique danger and feature of this particular study. 
 It is but a parallel to the order of the earth and 
 man's life thereon. 
 
 If the system of thought to which I refer be 
 indeed the high one it claims to be, it should be no 
 matter of surprise that the road is one of difficulty 
 and danger. There is a Chinese phrase which warns 
 the disciple in this school of wisdom that he will 
 have "to walk the knife-edge." It is fair, there- 
 fore, to recognise the fact that the manifold dangers 
 which beset the path of such a disciple are fully 
 known and fully admitted even emphasised by 
 those who point the way. Indeed, it is probable 
 that the beginner will think the dangers are over- 
 accentuated and paraded by those who lead his steps. 
 It is not until he has progressed some distance on 
 the way that he begins to perceive that no emphasis
 
 20 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 can be too great for such grave and ever-present 
 dangers. 
 
 Yet the impartial observer can scarcely find this 
 to be a flaw on a professedly spiritual system, or 
 adduce it as a reason for condemnation and with- 
 drawal. He will recall the innumerable words in 
 which every religion and faith warns its followers of 
 the dangers to be encountered. He will recollect 
 the mysterious and lurid images of gloom and terror 
 which find their places in the Scriptures best known 
 to Western thought those terrific symbolisms of 
 Doom and Fall which perplex and affright the timid 
 and rouse the anger or scorn of the incredulous. 
 The analogies thus created will, at least, compel 
 him to admit that in this matter all the systems of 
 spiritual thought are characterised not by distinc- 
 tions but by likeness, and that all repeat in some 
 form or other the mystery of a world that gives us 
 darkness and light, and a human nature whose 
 highest blessing is found in the exaltation of a 
 natural passion, which, when turned toward degra- 
 dation, forms its deepest curse. 
 
 So much may be briefly and at once conceded to 
 the forbidding features we discern so clearly in the 
 shadowy name of Occultism. Therefore it is that 
 the word does not seem desirable, at least in the 
 world at large, as the name for the whole system. 
 It misrepresents the subject to the general enquirer. 
 
 And for the whole sphere of thought that which
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 21 
 
 is turned toward the sun as well as that which lies 
 in the shadow of itself what name shall we give to 
 it ? The passage I have quoted from Professor Max 
 Mliller's Gifford Lectures for 1892 points to the 
 misused Tkcosophy as the best word. But, whilst 
 sharing in no prejudice against it, I think it is not 
 sufficiently wide. At its best it has the limitations 
 which go with its Greek derivation. These give the 
 word historical and geographical complexion and 
 locality. Ancient Egypt, India, Persia, Assyria, 
 not to speak of civilisations which trend away into 
 the mythic dawn of our race, are unrepresented in 
 a word that savours unmistakably of Neo-Platonist 
 Alexandria and the Early Christian Church. We 
 find, after all, but one word that in any way suits 
 the need, though it in no way fills it, and that word 
 is Mysticism. Here, at least, is a word that should 
 be held to be unlocalised and of no epoch a word 
 that surely should be of limitless interpretation a 
 word, too, that is known to scholars, and stamped in 
 their vocabulary with a mysterious but yet beneficent 
 meaning. It is also more liberated from that over- 
 plentiful measure of shadow which encompasses 
 Occultism. 
 
 Many of the saints and Fathers of the Church 
 divines as well known and loved as Tauler, Eck- 
 hart, and Suso people as modern and reassuring to 
 the ear as Madame Guy on and llousseau, Leibnitz 
 and Schopenhauer, are acknowledged to be mystical
 
 22 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 in their writings. Such examples, not to mention 
 others which might instantly be quoted examples 
 honoured of all and above the suspicion of any- 
 thing dark and turgid should free the name of 
 Mystic from the disconcerting shadow with which 
 some people are minded to invest it. It is curious 
 to the open-minded enquirer to note how partial 
 and unfair the world is in its judgments on points 
 which demand that attitude of mind which the 
 Church exalts when it asks a hearing for the peti- 
 tion that our judges may "truly and indifferently 
 administer justice." The folks who plead thus 
 for a special section of the community are too apt 
 to indulge in a lavish differentiation in adminis- 
 tering their own judgments. The mystic is thus 
 often condemned for his mysticism by people who 
 complacently read works of theology, books and 
 poems, parables and passages of Scripture, which 
 are nothing if not mystical. It involves no theo- 
 logical heresy, I suppose, to assert that the only 
 possible interpretation of very many passages in 
 the Bible, and the only probable one of certain 
 whole books therein, is a mystical one. 
 
 The most sacred service the Church knows is dis- 
 tinctly spoken of as a " mystery," and even as " holy 
 mysteries." Yet thousands out of the congregations 
 who fill our churches nay, may one not say thou- 
 sands of the priests who minister in the churches ? 
 are ignorant in reality of the mystical position
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 23 
 
 and interpretation of the religious symbols and 
 customs and of the Scriptures, and exclude all 
 thought of real, present, revealed but veiled, mystery 
 from the system they represent and confess, save in 
 a few verbal confessions of its existence in the cen- 
 tral thoughts of Life and Death, and in a general 
 vague sense of spiritual truth ? " The mystic philo- 
 sophers are very little read by our scholars," wrote 
 Charles Kingsley, " and read not for, but in spite of 
 their mysticism ; and our popular theology has so 
 completely rid itself of any mystic elements, that 
 our divines look with utter disfavour upon it, use 
 the word always as a term of opprobrium, and inter- 
 pret the mystic expressions in our Liturgy which 
 mostly occur in the Collects according to the 
 philosophy of Locke, really ignorant, it would seem, 
 that they were written by Platonist mystics. . . . 
 Christians here in England are more puzzled by 
 those utterances of St. John, which mystics have 
 always claimed as justifying their theories, than by 
 any part of their Bibles." l This statement in great 
 measure still holds good. There is a strange and 
 wholly unreasonable discountenance and fear of 
 mystic thought amongst many of those who cling 
 without fear to the " mysteries " of religion, and 
 who like the aspects of those mysteries which they 
 habitually encounter. Still the fact that the words 
 mystic and mystery have been so accepted by all true 
 
 1 Literary and General Essays.
 
 24 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 spiritual thought, and are beyond repudiation a part 
 of the necessary vocabulary of all true thought of 
 life, render the name of Mysticism, unhampered 
 by technical meaning, the most appropriate that can 
 be used to describe the system of thought of which 
 I write. 
 
 It is not my purpose to attempt to describe 
 Mysticism in any of its forms. To one who had 
 slight knowledge of the subject it would seem to 
 be an impossible task, and to one who had sufficient 
 knowledge to undertake it, it would assuredly be a 
 rejected one. Any one who is interested can exa- 
 mine and study mystic thought on its many lines, 
 since they are, in a sense, open to all. Prejudice 
 must be utterly put aside, and although unwavering 
 personal judgment must never be yielded up (since 
 for each there is the individual path), criticism and 
 opposition must be withheld. 
 
 In reading on this subject, it should be never for- 
 gotten that every age has its own limitations and 
 its own spirit and fault. The limitations must not 
 narrow the vision, nor the faults, even when gross 
 and glaring, alienate and repel the mind. Few 
 books and writers on these subjects will be found 
 wholly acceptable or satisfying; many will be 
 found to be puzzling and antipathetic ; but all 
 can help, and by each something may be learnt. 
 The great Lord Bacon had trodden the way, and 
 his advice on this point is wise with experimental
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 25 
 
 wisdom. He says : " Head not to contradict and 
 confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to 
 find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider." 
 If the study be not fitted to the enquirer, nor he be 
 ready for it, it will, beyond question, seem but a 
 stumbling-block and a foolishness. We do not 
 always see a thing when we look at it. Most 
 people, doubtless, have had moments of sight and 
 vision for things they had often looked at and never 
 seen before. Emerson has a fine passage about that. 
 "Our eyes are holden," he says, " that we cannot 
 see things that stare us in the face, until the hour 
 arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold 
 them, and the time when we saw them not is like a 
 dream." This is pre-eminently true of Mysticism. 
 Many people examine it, and look at it, and write 
 about it, who never have seen it, and never have 
 realised what it is. All such things, if they be 
 what they claim to be, are "spiritually discerned." 1 
 
 1 The mystic, as I understand his position, holds that all spiritual 
 matters, call them by what name we may, of any sort or kind, of 
 any age or place, are of the spirit spiritual, and cannot be seen 
 with corporeal or mental sight. Those who do not possess the 
 spiritual sight (and we have to gain it) simply do not and cannot 
 see spiritual truth. They are not so much spiritually blind as 
 eyeless. The organs of that vision are non-existent. You might 
 as well show an object to a blind man, and say, "See this," as a 
 spiritual truth to one who is only an intellectual man, however 
 grand and elevated his intelligence may be, however wide and 
 profound his information. The spirit, let it be remembered, is, 
 in this belief, not a natural part of man. The "Adam" who 
 became at last "a living soul " was the human animal Man before 
 he received the Divine Breath. This was the spirit, the inspired
 
 26 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 Without that power of vision there will be no 
 sight. 
 
 But although I would attempt neither description 
 nor criticism of so complex and profound a system 
 
 Breath. Naturally Man has no spirit. He may be " an immortal 
 soul," there being a part of him that may not die with the mortal 
 frame ; but this is not spirit. Spirit is the mysterious New Birth. 
 It will be found that this idea is in no real way at variance with 
 the accepted truths of spiritual life, however much it is with the 
 popular interpretation of them. The natural man is held to be 
 composed of Body, Mind, and Soul. The Body and Mind are 
 "mortal." The Soul reincarnates again and again. Our vague 
 thought has lost the subtle distinctions, and uses the words soul 
 and spirit as identical and interchangeable. In our translation of 
 the Hebrew and Greek writings of our Scriptures the words "soul," 
 "spirit," "breath," are vaguely employed. But in mysticism we 
 find that the spirit is held to be a New Birth for man. It is to 
 man what the origin of life is in protoplasm. The natural life of 
 man on this planet may be, as it were, the protoplasm for the New 
 Life, immortality in the flesh. This mystery, when realised, 
 makes many mysteries comprehensible, and much that is dark full 
 of meaning. This is the being " born again " spoken of by the 
 Christ of the Gospels. This is the mystic birth of the Divine 
 Child in the manger of the body, amongst the animals (the passions 
 and natural functions), the eternal Nativity that is always true. 
 This is the "soul" (the word is vaguely used, as has been said), to 
 "lose" which (i.e., not "gain") is a loss not to be compensated by 
 the "gain" of "the whole world," with all its pride of life and 
 wisdom. This it is which explains why an ignorant peasant may 
 be a child of light, and a great scholar and world-crowned man a 
 child of this world only. This it is which makes the Natural Man 
 into the Man Regenerate, the Son of Man, the Son of God. Where 
 this Second Birth is given (it cannot be achieved save by the mys- 
 tery of growth) there is the advance to higher life. Such, at 
 least as I read it, is the belief of the mystic. And it will be seen 
 that this in no way is touched by the controversial arguments 
 any more than it is seriously taken into the cognisance of the ordi- 
 nary opponent of religion or of the man of scientific acumen and 
 knowledge.
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 27 
 
 as that presented by Mysticism, a brief survey of 
 some of the outward aspects it presents to an un- 
 biassed enquirer may not be wholly uninteresting. 
 
 II 
 
 At the outset of any enquiry into this subject, we 
 cannot fail to be struck by the curious disparity of 
 statement as to the. meaning of Mysticism which 
 meets us in the writings of those who have ap- 
 proached the subject critically and from the outside. 
 The word is very casually dealt with by many 
 otherwise accurate writers. The only meaning that 
 seems by common consent placed on it is that of a 
 Mystery. Now, if the old meaning of that word be 
 remembered, a meaning enshrined in the holiest 
 office of the Clmstian Church, we shall at once 
 perceive its truest aspect. But most people are 
 very ignorant or very oblivious of this meaning, 
 and the general definition of the word would be 
 either a something of shadowy substance, phan- 
 tasmal and vague, or an insoluble enigma. 
 
 After we accept and pass beyond this popular but 
 unsatisfactory reading of the word, and enquire of 
 the more thoughtful what further signification of 
 Mysticism they can offer, we meet a strange diver- 
 sity and divergence of opinion. The statements of 
 those who examine the subject from without are 
 contradictory, whilst the explanatory testimony from
 
 28 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 within is slight. Even the writings of professed 
 mystics seldom give us more than a passing glimpse 
 into some special attitude or department of mystic 
 thought. Few men, even the greatest, rise above 
 the limitations of their age. All of which limita- 
 tions, though dear and helpful to the scholar and 
 to the world at large, as giving form and definiteness 
 to a subject where both seem often lacking, are 
 strangely out of keeping with the universality of 
 thought and outlook which should be comprehended 
 by the wider Mysticism. Thus we can, without 
 much difficulty, find learned and valuable pages 
 about the Hindoo mystics, the Vedic and Vedantic 
 philosophies, and the Gymnosophists of India ; the 
 Hierophants and adepts of the Hermetic Fraternities 
 of Egypt and the mysteries of Isis ; the Magi, the 
 Zoroastrians, and the mysticism of the Gathas and 
 the A vesta in Persia ; the Essenes and mystics of 
 Judasa ; the Sufis and the mysteries of Islam ; the 
 mysteries of Orpheus and Diouysos ; the Eleatics, 
 Pythagoreans, and Platonists of Greece; the Neo- 
 Platonists of Alexandria, and their fusion of Classic, 
 Semitic, and Christian thought ; the Kabbalists and 
 Talmudists; the Areopagite, and the Theosophists 
 and Gnostics of the early Christian era; the Albi- 
 genses and the Waldenses ; the Templars and 
 strangely mysterious societies of the Middle Ages ; 
 the Rosicrucians and Alchemists ; the Pietists and 
 Quietists, and the Mystics of the Church ; the German
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 29 
 
 Mystics ; the strong drift toward many forms of 
 Mysticism, dark as well as bright, in the seventeenth 
 and eighteenth centuries ; French Encyclopedistes 
 and Bavarian Illuminati; till we come to the sects 
 which have represented various phases of Mystic 
 thought in our own land and in the last two 
 centuries ; Swedenborgians, the Early Quakers, the 
 Cambridge Platonists all the innumerable expres- 
 sions of the spirit, ever changing in form, but 
 always one in essence, of Mysticism. 
 
 Now it is evident that such a literature as even 
 this imperfect list implies demands an area of in- 
 formation of which few scholars, even of the ripest 
 and best, could boast. Scholars there are, indeed, 
 whose studies have led them over many of the 
 sections of this area, and whose knowledge of some 
 of the sections is profound and exhaustive. We 
 have amongst us now many such scholars. Yet the 
 mind at once apprehends the important truth that 
 the central idea of Mysticism, the secret and know- 
 ledge which Mysticism at once reveals and veils, 
 is something which is not realised and understood 
 intellectually and by the brain, but experimentally 
 by an inward spirit ; and that its true history and 
 expression in the world is not to be gained by a 
 study, however laborious and exact, of its chronicles, 
 or of any special department, or even departments, 
 of mystic thought : but by a reception, intuitive 
 rather than instructed, of the whole area of thought
 
 30 
 
 that is presented to the mind in a retrospect such 
 as that I have suggested. 
 
 In a writer so brilliant and imaginative as De 
 Quincey one might reasonably expect some insight 
 into such a subject as Mysticism. In his essay on 
 " Secret Societies " he deals with many of the great 
 mystic fraternities, ancient and mediaeval. The 
 sublimity of the idea he is contemplating attracts 
 him strongly, and he confesses the curious and 
 sombre interest with which he approached the sub- 
 ject in an opening passage of remarkable power. 1 
 But it is evident from the subsequent pages of the 
 essay that, although his imagination was captivated 
 by what appeared to him the dramatic, not to say 
 melodramatic, pose of secret societies, as they are 
 pictured by the world, neither his information nor 
 his intuition had ever in any way realised the true 
 concept of these same mysterious secret societies, 
 the idea round which they moved, the quest on 
 which they were bent, or the language they adopted. 
 
 1 "Ever}' adult will and must, if at all by nature meditative, 
 regard with a feeling higher than vulgar curiosity small fraternities 
 of men forming themselves in separate and inner vortices within 
 the great vortex of society, communicating silently in broad day- 
 light by signals not even seen, or, if seen, not understood, except 
 among themselves, and connected by the link either of purposes 
 not safe to be avowed, or by the grander link of awful truths 
 which, merely to shelter themselves from the hostility of an age 
 unprepared for their reception, are forced to retire, possibly for 
 generations, behind thick curtains of secrecy. To be hidden amidst 
 crowds is sublime ; to come down hidden amongst crowds from 
 distant generations is doubly sublime."
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 31 
 
 He criticises a something he only knows by hearsay 
 and from books. The attitude of mind he adopts 
 closes the doors he thinks he is opening. He is 
 fatally intelligent. He is also depressingly arch. 
 Humour is a gift of the gods, and is welcome 
 even in the most solemn courts of spiritual teach- 
 ing; but quizzing is not humour, and the humour 
 in " Secret Societies " is of the quizzing order. The 
 distinguished writer is never for a moment willing 
 to struggle for what Mr. Benjamin Kidd delight- 
 fully calls "the subordination of his own reason." 
 The essay is to some of us, at least a strong 
 appeal, even in its condemnations, for the hidden 
 but vital meanings of the societies it makes merry 
 over. And the suspicion that the secret of these 
 secret societies has been indeed so well kept, and 
 veiled from the scrutiny of the merely intellectually 
 curious, that even a well-informed and brilliant mind 
 like De Quincey's failed to extract or read it, adds 
 perceptibly to the grandeur of a conception which 
 he himself owns at the outset is " sublime." 
 
 We may take another illustrious instance of nar- 
 row criticism on this matter. John Stuart Mill tells 
 us all about the tangled meanings of Mysticism. 
 "Mysticism," he says, "is neither more nor less 
 than ascribing objective existence to the subjective 
 creations of the mind, and believing that by watch- 
 ing and contemplating these ideas of its own making, 
 it can read what takes place in the world without."
 
 32 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 This statement begins better than it ends. The 
 opening words strike the same blow at a certain 
 spurious form of mystic thought that is dealt even 
 more effectively by John Addingtoii Symonds in 
 his "Greek Poets," when he says the Pythagoreans 
 mistook " a power of the mind for a power inherent 
 in the universe." But though there is a measure 
 of truth in this argument, pointing out as it does a 
 danger in Mystic thought, one can scarcely in reason 
 allow that a system which has attracted such great 
 and noble minds in all ages, and furthermore, which 
 is always appealing to Nature and natural laws, and 
 always finding the appeal honoured, is " neither 
 more nor less " than a very unmysterious extension 
 of personal vanity. But if the beginning of the 
 definition shows a knowledge of a low form of mystic 
 thought, the ending thereof exhibits a strange 
 misapprehension. Surely the mystic seeks to read 
 the world that is within him, rather than " what 
 takes place in the world without." One fancies 
 that the philosopher was centring his thought in 
 this matter on the one aspect that is known as 
 Spiritualism. Of a form of this strange cult John 
 Stuart Mill's sentence makes the now-accepted 
 scientific explanation. Indeed, of many pheno- 
 mena which the world has accounted " spiritual " 
 not only in the stances of modern mediums, but 
 in the " ghosts " and " spectres " of haunted houses, 
 and even in the visions and ecstasies of the mediaeval
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 33 
 
 saints the explanation he offers would be the cre- 
 dited scientific diagnosis. 
 
 But such an explanation deals only even if it be 
 accepted with the phenomenal side of Mysticism, 
 and this is but one side of the subject a side I 
 have no desire to speak about, and which may, with 
 wisdom, be entirely disregarded. The vaster part 
 of the subject remains untouched. He who, speak- 
 ing or writing of Mysticism, begins with the pheno- 
 menal side of the subject, or infers that it is the 
 principal one, reveals that he knows but little of the 
 real matter. 
 
 Far removed from the spirit of the sentence I 
 have quoted, is the testimony given directly from 
 within the pale of Mysticism by one who had the 
 right to speak Jacob Boehme, the unlearned but 
 illuminated cobbler of Alt Seidenburg. " Our 
 whole doctrine is nothing else," he says (clearly 
 foreseeing John Stuart Mill's sentence) " but an 
 instruction to show how man may create a kingdom 
 of light within himself. He in whom the spring of 
 divine power flows carries within himself the divine 
 image. . . . Not I, the I that I am, know these 
 things, but God knows them in me." 
 
 Charles Kingsley, who in all such matters knew 
 and felt (and herein feeling is a kind of knowledge) 
 more than many of his great contemporaries, says : 
 " A mystic, according to the Greek etymology, 
 should signify one who is initiated into mysteries,
 
 34 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 one whose eyes are opened to see things which other 
 people cannot see. And the true mystic, in all ages 
 and countries, has believed that this was the case 
 with him. He believes that there is an invisible 
 world as well as a visible one so do most men ; 
 but the mystic believes also that this same invisible 
 world is not merely a supernumerary, one world 
 more, over and above the earth on which he lives 
 and the stars over his head, but that it is the cause 
 of them and the ground of them; that it was the 
 cause of them at first, and is the cause of them now, 
 even to the budding of every flower and the falling 
 of every pebble to the ground ; and, therefore, that 
 having been before this visible world, it will be 
 after it, and endure, just as real, living, and eternal, 
 though matter were annihilated to-morrow." l 
 
 In the same essay the writer points out, with 
 true insight, that Mysticism is no matter of vague 
 dreams and impracticable theories. He puts it 
 thus : "It is quite a mistake to suppose that 
 Mysticism is by its very nature impracticable. . . . 
 They are terribly practical people these mystics, quiet 
 students and devotees as they may seem. They 
 go, or seem to go, down to the roots of things, 
 after a way of their own, and lay foundations on 
 which be they sound or unsound those who 
 come after them cannot choose but build as we 
 are building now. . . . The greatest and most 
 
 1 Hours with the Mystics : Literary and General Essays.
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 35 
 
 prosperous races of antiquity the Egyptians, 
 Babylonians, Hindoos, and Greeks had the mystic 
 element as strong and living in them as the Germans 
 have now. Our forefathers were mystics in the 
 forests of Germany and in the dales of Norway ; 
 they were mystics in the convents and universities 
 of the Middle Ages ; they were mystics, all the 
 deepest and noblest minds of them, during the 
 Elizabethan era." This is a very striking testimony 
 to a feature not only occasionally forgotten, but 
 absolutely reversed in the popular idea of Mysti- 
 cism. The dreariness and impracticability that is 
 often associated with the mystic in the world's 
 judgment is due partly to the fact that Mysticism 
 is generally judged by its poseurs more than by its 
 initiates (who are often unknown by such character), 
 and partly from the dark glass through which the 
 subject is viewed. Vagueness of outline is the 
 result of an imperfect medium and organ of sight 
 quite as often as of an inherent indeterminateness 
 of character in the thing under inspection. 
 
 Professor Max Miiller, in the lectures of which I 
 have already spoken, quotes a passage by Dr. Tho- 
 luck, which gives an exalted idea of the character 
 and aim of the mystic, 1 but in it we note a repetition 
 
 1 "A man who, conscious of an affinity with all that exists, from 
 the Pleiades to the grain of dust, merged in the divine stream of 
 life that pours through the universe, but perceiving also that the 
 purest spring of God bursts forth in his own heart, moves onward 
 across the world which is turned toward what is limited and finite,
 
 36 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 of the thought of " self," which marks at once the 
 strength and the weakness of such statements and 
 studies. For in true Mysticism it would appear that 
 self is the factor, the suppression or rather the 
 transmutation of which is the turning-point of the 
 system and the test of its truth. Mysticism seems 
 to admit very few hard and fast lines, and but lightly 
 esteems those arbitrary divisions of thought and life 
 which the world and its schools hold so dear and 
 valuable ; but there is one line that it surely draws 
 with an unfaltering hand across the universe, and it 
 is given in the word Self. At that line the great 
 scales are poised as it were between the light and 
 the darkness, the black and the white. " Know 
 thyself " seems written on the light ; " Think of thy- 
 self," 011 the darkness transfiguration of self on 
 this side, glorification of self on the other. 
 
 Whilst on the subject of the various definitions of 
 Mysticism, it is impossible not to name, in passing, 
 a work which attracted a great deal of attention 
 by its cleverness, and not a little amusement by 
 
 turning his eye in the centre of his own soul to the mysterious 
 abyss where the infinite flows into the finite, satisfied in nameless 
 intuition of the sanctuary opened within himself, and lighted up 
 and embraced in a blissful love of the secret source of his own 
 being. ... In his moral aspect the life of such a mystic is like a 
 mirror of water, moved by an all-powerful love within, and dis- 
 quieted by desire, yet restraining the motion of its waves, in order 
 to let the face of the sun reflect itself on a motionless surface. The 
 restless conflicts of selfhood are quieted and restrained by love, so 
 that the eternal may move freely in the motionless soul, and the 
 life of the soul may be absorbed in the law of God."
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 37 
 
 its violence, " Degeneration," by Herr Max Nordau. 
 Nearly two hundred of its pages are headed Mysti- 
 cism, and these pages are divided into sections named 
 respectively The Psychology of Mysticism; The Prc- 
 Tlapliae litcs ; Symbolism; Tolstoism ; The Richard 
 Wagner Cult ; and Parodies of Mysticism. Of these 
 six sections, the only one that deals with anything 
 that can be accepted technically as Mysticism as it 
 is, and always has been accepted in the world, is the 
 last, and this touches it only on its lower plane. 
 The five former sections present to the reader one 
 long, energetic, often admirable, and occasionally 
 unfair, attack on the various signs of the times, 
 which, in the writer's judgment, exhibit the stigmata 
 of degeneration by showing a tendency toward vague 
 and formless thought, an excessive love of symbol- 
 ism, 1 and some of the more elementary ideas of 
 mystical thought. Many of these things must truly 
 be taken as significant of a widespread unconscious 
 movement toward the externals of Mysticism, but 
 they cannot themselves be classed under that name. 
 The learned doctor, however, in a fine frenzy of 
 antagonism and righteous indignation, takes the 
 word, and ties it on as a label to the whole seething 
 heterogeneous mass. He then cries, " See how vile a 
 thing is Mysticism ! Away with it to the madhouse ! " 
 
 1 The real mystic, be it observed, generally penetrates to the 
 things symbolised, and therefore requires no symbolism, signs, or 
 formulae of worship. The symbols are constructed for and given to 
 the people.
 
 3 8 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 But it is impossible to take Herr Max Nordau's 
 Mysticism seriously, and when he gravely assures 
 us that " Mysticism is the habitual condition of the 
 human race, and in no way an eccentric disposition 
 of mind," we at once perceive the mistake made. 
 The first word of the sentence and the headings of 
 the pages is a misprint. The word he wanted is 
 derived from misty not mystic. 
 
 Yet even granting that he were right in de- 
 scribing Mysticism as a "condition of the human 
 race," how different is his unimaginative and harsh 
 judgment to the calm and profound vision of 
 Schopenhauer. He, writing of mystical tenets 
 and thoughts, says: "Nothing is more astonishing 
 than the unanimity of all who profess these prin- 
 ciples, notwithstanding the greatest diversity of age, 
 country, and religion. They do not form a sect; 
 indeed, they are mostly ignorant of each other's 
 existence. The Indian, Christian, and the Moham- 
 medan mystics, quietists, and ascetics are disparate 
 in all things, only not in the inner spirit and 
 meaning of their teachings. ... So much con- 
 cord among such divergent peoples and times is a 
 practical proof that theirs is not a distorted and 
 perverted state of mind, but the expression of an 
 essential constituent of human nature, whose rarity 
 is due solely to its excellence." Here, even when 
 placing Mysticism as " an essential constituent of 
 human nature," Schopenhauer allows its "rarity."
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 39 
 
 He therefore saw in it something very different to 
 that muddle-headed mistiness to which the author 
 of " Degeneration " drags down Mysticism a chaotic 
 state which, not untruly, he pronounces " the habi- 
 tual condition of the human race." 
 
 A history of Mysticism would be, as I have said, 
 a task of the gravest difficulty, demanding profound 
 and exhaustive knowledge. It might even be said 
 to be a useless task, in that in the deepest truth 
 "every man is his own mystic." To materialise 
 Mysticism into definite expression and concise his- 
 tory might be to lose its essence. In a sense it 
 would be committing the fault pronounced by the 
 mediaeval alchemists to be the unforgivable sin, 
 and defined in their half-symbolic, half -scientific 
 phraseology as "solidifying the fluid." Mysticism 
 is a growth. The name itself is a pillar of cloud 
 and of fire. It leads and it baffles, according as we 
 ourselves are placed with regard to it. This, how- 
 ever, may be said of all spiritual thought almost 
 of all great thought. And when we remember that 
 the chosen language of Mysticism has always been 
 one of parable and symbol, we perceive what diffi- 
 culty a student, accustomed to exact and open 
 expression and statement, must find in this subject. 
 To it one may apply a sentence in Mr. Walter 
 Pater's " Essay on Lacedgemonia." l " The whole 
 life of the Lacedaemonian community," he says, 
 
 1 Plato and Platonism,
 
 40 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 "had a secluded, impenetrable, and secret character. 
 You couldn't really know it unless you were of it." 
 This seems exactly true of Mysticism. There is an 
 inscription under the statue of Phtahmer, now in 
 the museum of the Louvre, which runs thus : " There 
 was nothing veiled for him, and he covered with a 
 veil the essence of all that he had seen." It might 
 be inscribed anew under the names of all great 
 mystics. Plato, in the Symposium, talks of "words 
 which are ridiculous when yon first hear them . . . 
 (words) like the images of Silenus which open 
 ... so that an ignorant man who did not know 
 him might feel disposed to laugh at him, but he 
 who opens the mask and sees what is within will 
 find that they are the only words which have a 
 meaning in them, and also the most divine, abound- 
 ing in fair examples of virtue and of the widest 
 comprehension, or rather extending to the whole 
 duty of a good and honourable man." It would be 
 hard to meet a more perfect description than that 
 of the language of many mystical writers especi- 
 ally those of Sufism and the East. Plato, in another 
 place, tells us that he wrote enigmatically, with a 
 purpose, "that in case the tablet should have hap- 
 pened with any accident, either by land or sea, a 
 person without some previous knowledge of the 
 subject might not be able to understand its con- 
 tents." It is this use of cipher, of symbol, and of 
 allegory, that has in many minds given rise to the
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 41 
 
 charge of vague dreaming and grotesque Kabbalism 
 against the mystic. 
 
 Mysticism, it is evident, is peculiarly difficult to 
 define. In a sense it escapes and eludes all defini- 
 tion. It is, perhaps, best described by an analogy, 
 by the use of a symbol such as it loves in its own 
 use. Let us say that Mysticism is to religion what 
 Music is to languages. Music has been called " the 
 universal speech of mankind." 1 Mysticism claims 
 a like universality in the world of spiritual truth. 
 Music defies definition and explanation, since philo- 
 sophy, art, and science alike, one and all, own that 
 they are baffled by its mystery. Mysticism has 
 always crowned Music as divine has sometimes 
 associated itself with Harmony, and adopted the 
 name and language of Music. We can scarcely do 
 better than accept the analogy. Mysticism is in 
 the world of thought what Music is in the world of 
 sound. 
 
 III. 
 
 The phenomenal, miraculous, or what is called 
 " supernatural " aspect of this system of thought 
 has been admitted. But in the admission the 
 aspect was relegated to the darker and lower planes 
 to the dark and shadowed side of Mysticism. It 
 is, however, necessary for a truthful survey of the 
 subject to own that this aspect appears also in the 
 1 Weber.
 
 42 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 bright and beneficent aspect in the development 
 as well as the deterioration. Theology has pre- 
 served the same mystery in her documents and 
 beliefs. There is always a White as well as a Black 
 Magic. Many parallels in our Bible will occur to 
 the mind. There is the sorcerer, and there is the 
 adept, and both work marvels. Both have pene- 
 trated the arcana of Nature and mastered its secrets. 
 But the one works for his own purpose, his own 
 glory; the other, never to give "a sign," never for 
 himself, but always, and only, for the good of 
 others. 
 
 In Mysticism it has to be confessed, then, that 
 this truly occult phase of the mystic life, which is 
 found in dark shadow at its lowest point a feature 
 often wholly absent and in nowise necessary to the 
 earlier stages of the life reappears on its highest 
 plane. But at this height it makes its reappearance 
 in a brightness which baffles scrutiny almost more 
 effectually than that deep shadow in which we 
 discerned its inverted image. Yes, the student has 
 to face the presence of this element of miracle, 
 magic, "supernatural " power call it what we may, 
 according as we view it on the highest plane of the 
 mystic life. 
 
 It is clear that it must be so. Mysticism claims 
 to include the whole area of life and manifestation. 
 It places the universe in man, making him a micro- 
 cosm of the macrocosm. In doing this, it must
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 43 
 
 accept and repeat on the spiritual plane all that is 
 found in the material world. And surely in Life 
 and Death, in Birth and Growth, the renewal of 
 the spring, in all the unsolved riddles of exact 
 science biology, chemistry, electricity as well as 
 in those perplexing phenomena, hypnotism, clair- 
 voyance, telepathy, thought-transference, will-power, 
 faith-healing, and a hundred kindred subjects over 
 which science shakes its head, able neither to ex- 
 plain nor sweep away ; in all these rooted in that 
 inscrutable x, the origin of the force called Life 
 we have a perfect world of mystery, even of miracle. 
 All this must be represented in a system like Mys- 
 ticism if it is to include all life and be true to its 
 character. The simplest questions in science gene- 
 rally end in a cul de sac if they are pressed back far 
 enough. 1 The how and the why are generally un- 
 answerable quantities which involve as much real 
 "miracle" as is ever claimed by true Mysticism. 
 Miracles are but the supreme fulfilments of Nature, 
 never its reversals. To find cases of defiance and 
 outrage of natural laws, we must go not to Mysticism, 
 but to fables and the chronicles of priestcraft and 
 superstition. Not to have a full acceptance for 
 what we, with our imperfect knowledge, call the 
 "supernatural" would be clearly the most incon- 
 
 1 " In spite of the progress which the exact sciences have made, 
 we must not for a moment forget that the inner connection between 
 the body and the mental processes is utterly unknown to us." 
 ALBERT MOLL, Hypnotism.
 
 44 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 ceivable and unsatisfactory position for any system 
 of thought which pretends to deal with things 
 unseen, the mysteries of life and death, and the 
 nature of man. Mr. Benjamin Kidd, in his " Social 
 Evolution," argues out with great clearness the 
 position he lays down in his enunciation, that " A 
 rational religion is a scientific impossibility, repre- 
 senting, from the nature of the case, an inherent con- 
 tradiction of terms." If this be true, as we cannot 
 seriously doubt, of religion, it must be d fortiori true 
 of a religion that accepts the name of Mysticism. 
 
 The vain and the curious may, and doubtless often 
 do, attack Mysticism from the lower plane, simply 
 in order to gain hidden knowledge, as they think, 
 and obtain power over phenomena. But this is a 
 vastly different and a vastly inferior thing to com- 
 manding the forces of Nature from a higher plane, 
 and gaining knowledge and power by authority and 
 not by solicitude ; gaining them as an effect of a 
 given cause the natural sequence of a patient, un- 
 self-seeking, spiritual quest. Thus gained, the power 
 is simply natural, and is no more "miraculous" 
 than birth and growth. Kingsley saw in all " the 
 theurgic department of Mysticism " what he defined 
 as "the despairing return to that ceremonialism 
 which it had begun by shaking off, when it was dis- 
 appointed in reaching its high aim by the proper 
 method." But this, although a tolerably exact 
 description of an aspect of thaumaturgy or Black
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 45 
 
 Art, implies an ignorance or an ignoring of the 
 thought that there is a path, the highest of all, open 
 to man, wherein he gains what is called supernatural 
 power. A religion whose Scriptures are broadcast 
 with miracle can scarcely deny this. And it is 
 curious how a mind so wide and full of true vision 
 as that of Charles Kingsley could fail to see that 
 it is unreasonable to put aside all biblical cases of 
 supernatural power and experience as not to be 
 referred to or applied in any and every other argu- 
 ment for magic power on the higher planes. The 
 extraordinary doctrine that such power once existed 
 in that vague era that is called " biblical times," and 
 has long since passed away, destroys all sense of 
 continuity, and thus opens a very disastrous argu- 
 ment for religion in these days when Evolution is 
 becoming an accepted law for all life. Those who 
 argue that the supernatural power once existed but 
 has passed away somewhere, somehow lay them- 
 selves open to the inference, hard to rebut, that it 
 can, therefore, never have existed ; and such a doubt 
 sadly weakens their position. But Mysticism seems 
 to have the courage of its opinions, and asserts that 
 it has never been lost. On the other hand, its 
 record of the examples of magic power would pre- 
 sumably be open to the interpretation of spiritual 
 meaning, and lack that element of the statistical 
 and marvellous that is prized by a world that always 
 clamours to be given " a sign."
 
 46 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 And if large sections of the thoughtful and 
 scientific world to-day pooh-pooh the idea of any 
 "supernatural" power being attainable under any 
 conceivable form, it is irresistible to point to the 
 fact that the very sciences they quote to prove the 
 reason of their unbelief in " magic " have come down 
 to us from men who were its scholars and adepts ; 
 that the achievements of practical science now are as 
 truly miraculous as any real magic ever claimed to 
 be ; and that the greatest masters of science are the 
 most careful not to pronounce anything impossible. 
 As has been pointed out several times by liberal- 
 minded investigators of the subjects that seem to 
 border on the region of the supernatural, we must 
 be careful not to claim supernatural power for our- 
 selves in denying its existence ; to pronounce clair- 
 voyance, for example, an imposture (at least without 
 the gravest study and the most exhaustive and im- 
 partial experiment), is to claim it for one's self. 
 
 It is significant of a rise in the level of spiritual 
 thought amongst us that there is a serious and 
 growing interest in psychical questions an interest 
 not of a morbid kind, but attentive and liberal. 
 Since Braid began his magnetic experiments in 
 1841, the questions of animal magnetism, hypnotism, 
 electro-biology, and all kindred subjects, have re- 
 ceived growing study and fair-dealing even in Eng- 
 land. In other countries the studies have developed 
 into still larger proportions, and with greater results.
 
 47 
 
 In France, in Germany, and in America they have 
 risen into important systems. The name of Dr. 
 Charcot has become of world-wide authority as 
 leader of one of the schools in France, whilst the 
 school of Nancy has Liebault and Professor Bern- 
 heim. Through Switzerland investigations passed 
 into Germany, and there they have been carried on 
 systematically. 
 
 These scientific researches put to flight, it is true, 
 many tales and examples hitherto gravely believed 
 and accepted of spiritual and supernatural power ; 
 and much which has been thought to be spiritual is 
 proved to be but physical experience transceuden- 
 talised. But we cannot regret that mistake and 
 delusion, however fair and impressive they may have 
 seemed, should be swept away. The mystic fears 
 no such losses, and shirks no revelations of science, 
 knowing that the truly " magical " and " miracu- 
 lous " elements do not lie in these unnatural and 
 fabulous things. When exact science has probed 
 all that it can touch, and brought its ruthless but 
 beautiful search-light on every shadowed corner that 
 it can reach, there will still be enough and to spare 
 of miracle and magic left to justify and infinitely 
 exceed all the most mysterious utterances that true 
 Mysticism has ever made, all the wonder it pro- 
 claims, and all the world super the world of Nature 
 which it reveals, and links with this world in a 
 harmonious unity.
 
 48 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 We cannot but observe with satisfaction that the 
 unphilosophic and unscientific way in which the 
 savants of a few years ago approached all such 
 questions, even to the broad thesis of Religion 
 itself, is more and more disappearing year by year. 
 Every age has its own peculiar virtues and its pecu- 
 liar weaknesses also. If the spirit of our day has 
 been one of daring enquiry, its weakness seems to 
 have been a sceptical materialism. It has been 
 perfectly superstitious in its dislike of mystery. It 
 has exhibited the antipathy to the occult which we 
 usually associate with doubt not unaccompanied 
 with fear. It has alternately quizzed and lost its 
 temper over the mystic in all his aspects and ques- 
 tions ; and both these attitudes seem a sad waste of 
 time, since neither affords any valuable or even intel- 
 ligent answer to the points at issue. Yet for ages 
 may we not say, indeed, throughout the known 
 history of the world ? Science has till the last cen- 
 tury walked hand in hand with Mysticism. 
 
 The rays of scientific truth which come down to 
 us from the remote past are shed from the central 
 sources of mystic truth. Pythagoras, Heraclitus, 
 Thales, Anaximander, Plato, Aristotle, were the 
 great mystics of Greece and the lights of science in 
 their eras. The mystical philosophers of Egypt and 
 of later Alexandria passed scientific knowledge on 
 to the time when both Science and Mysticism, and 
 all thought save that of dogma, were arrested for
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 49 
 
 centuries to revive with the renascence of Scholas- 
 ticism and Learning. Servetus, Giordano Bruno, and 
 Vanini were martyrs alike in the causes of Science 
 and of Mysticism. Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton 
 did not reject the ancient wisdoms. Roger Bacon 
 was a pioneer of science and a master of mystic lore. 
 The science and learning that come to us from the 
 Mohammedan universities of Cordova and Granada 
 nay, all Arab learning, to which Europe owed so 
 much in the Dark Ages, with the great names of 
 Avicenna and Averroes all are obviously deeply 
 tinged with Eastern and Classic Mysticism. Modern 
 chemistry sprang from the crucibles and retorts of 
 Rosicrucian alchemists. Astronomy can scarcely, 
 without breaking the excellent fifth commandment, 
 laugh at Astrology. Mysticism has, indeed, been 
 often unassociated with Science ; but Science, until 
 quite recent times, has always been associated with 
 Mysticism. 
 
 There is every good reason to suppose that the 
 founder of Inductive Philosophy was a Rosicrucian. 
 It has been stated that Isaac Newton was originally 
 led to his discoveries by a study of the Kabbala ; 
 and illustrious names in science and scientific 
 thought, ever since the modern age began its reign, 
 have been found, if not on the actual and confessed 
 circle of Mysticism, at least in that circle which 
 revolves around it, with the gravitation of a com- 
 pelling interest and attraction. The point seems
 
 50 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 already in sight when the psychical and ethical can 
 no longer be excluded from the physical and material. 
 The hard lines are disappearing. The arid rule of 
 the last generation of savants is drawing to a close. 
 It is even being confessed that it is unscientific to 
 be merely scientific. Carlyle's words are being 
 accepted "This world, after all our science and 
 sciences, is still a miracle, inscrutable, magical, and 
 more, to whosoever will think of it." Mr. Ben- 
 jamin Kidd from one side, Professor Drummond 
 from another, have within the last few years struck 
 this note with courageous hands. "Are we quite 
 sure," asks the latter writer, "that what we call a 
 physical world is, after all, a physical world ? The 
 preponderating view of science at the present is that 
 it is not. The very term 'natural world,' we are 
 told, is a misnomer: that the world is a spiritual 
 world, merely employing ' matter ' for its manifesta- 
 tion." From an entirely opposite point of view, 
 and one the more valuable because somewhat on the 
 naturalistic side of things, Mr. Herbert Spencer 
 argues in much the same strain, or at least to much 
 the same issue. 1 
 
 1 "Men who have not risen above that vulgar conception which 
 unites with Matter the contemptuous epithets ' gross ' and ' brute,' 
 may naturally feel dismay at the proposal to reduce the phenomena 
 of Life, of Mind, and of Society, to a level of existence which they 
 think so degraded. But whoever remembers that the forms of 
 existence which the uncultivated speak of with so much scorn, are 
 shown by the man of science to be the more marvellous in their 
 attributes, the more they are investigated, and are also proved to
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 51 
 
 Then, too, we are now told that atoms are not 
 subdivisions of matter, but centres of force a very 
 upheaval of all the cherished ground of the materi- 
 alist, since it would seem to prove that matter is " a 
 condition of force, instead of force being a condition 
 of matter " a difference even more vital than that 
 between the Ptolemaic and Copernicaii theories of 
 the solar system. For what, we may ask, is 
 " force " ? The question is one that seems to sug- 
 gest an answer of momentous issue and import. 
 Haekel, in his "Evolution of Man," touches the 
 point in saying, " Spirit exists everywhere in 
 Nature." If the scientist has to own that atoms 
 are centres of force an x as mysterious as the 
 First Cause or any concept of Deity it would seem 
 that Materialism is undermined in its very citadel. 
 The confessions which carry on these mining opera- 
 tions grow stronger every day. "It is conceivable 
 matter may react on mind in a way we can at 
 present only dimly imagine, and the barrier be- 
 tween the two may gradually melt away, as many 
 others have done." 1 " It is impossible to resist 
 the conclusion that all Nature is living thought." 2 
 Such words as these give us hope that science and 
 
 be in their ultimate natures absolutely incomprehensible as abso- 
 lutely incomprehensible as sensation, or the conscious something 
 which perceives it ; whoever recognises this truth will see that the 
 course proposed does not imply a degradation of the so-called higher, 
 but an elevation of the so-called lower." First Principles. 
 1 Dr. Oliver Lodge, F.R.S. 2 Professor Fitzgerald, F.R.S.
 
 52 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 the world at large may before long grant the 
 mystic's first and last position, that there is no such 
 thing as matter apart from spirit, matter being but 
 the last and densest expression of spirit. 
 
 Yes, strange as it may sound to some, and open 
 as the statement may be to fierce attack and denial, 
 I think it must be granted by any one who is fur- 
 nished with equal knowledge of both sides of the 
 question, that Mysticism is in essence and at 
 foundation a scientific faith. It has doubtless been 
 open to the limiting spirit of the ages it has passed 
 through, and has been tinged with their errors. 
 But this is equally true of science. The central 
 ideas of Mysticism are cosmic, and its miracles and 
 magic are never contra, though confessedly they are 
 super Nature. It is difficult to believe that Agnos- 
 ticism and Naturalism, that Disbelief and Materi- 
 alism call the negative philosophies by what name 
 we may would be so widespread and current in 
 the modern world as they are if Mysticism were 
 really known and understood. 
 
 And this having briefly stated the supernatural 
 side of Mysticism leads us to observe two character- 
 istics which must be owned to be well worthy of 
 notice in this matter. The first is the extraordinary 
 Ignorance which prevails in the world on this sub- 
 ject the silence and rejection which surrounds it 
 to this day ; and the second is its Indestructibility.
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 53 
 
 IV 
 
 We will take the first point the Ignorance and 
 silence. 
 
 I have already touched, in passing, on the vague 
 and various uses of the word Mysticism, and the 
 frequent misunderstanding of its meaning. Pro- 
 fessor Jowett, speaking of the Neo-Platonists, says, 
 " Mysticism is not criticism." The sentence is one 
 which reads just as well if it is turned right round. 
 For, in truth, much of the criticism given to this 
 subject by scholars argues small perception, and 
 no reception, of its meaning. I have read far 
 enough into some of the questions to perceive 
 that many of the learned and scholarly com- 
 mentators on mystical thought revolve laboriously 
 and patiently in an orbit for ever outside the 
 subject. This sounds an over-bold statement, and 
 I am conscious of its heroic outlines. But it is 
 no question of scholarship or information, however 
 exact and exhaustive. The perception and under- 
 standing of Mysticism is, I am convinced, an attitude 
 of mind or rather, let me say, an inward state, 
 inborn or innate. In most great subjects under- 
 standing is coupled with sympathy, perhaps even 
 forerun by it. Of Mysticism it may be truly said 
 that there is only one side from which it may be 
 truly viewed, and that is the inside. Euskin, 
 speaking of certain aspects and beauties of nature,
 
 54 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 tells us that they "must be sought ere they are 
 seen, and loved ere they are understood." Such 
 conditions are possibly ever truer of spiritual than 
 of material beauty. Mysticism is, in its very nature, 
 of the Spirit. To approach it from the point of the 
 Letter, and to rest there, gives no reason for suppos- 
 ing that the Spirit is even surmised. We have, in fact, 
 good authority for saying that in all such subjects 
 a mere knowledge of the Letter " kills " and that 
 is a startling expression, worthy of grave attention. 
 That the Letter might give but an outward pre- 
 sentment of the truth would seem natural, but 
 few thinkers would dare to attribute to its know- 
 ledge the quality of Death. Little as I know of 
 the subtle intricacies of Eastern thought, I know 
 or apprehend enough to sit silent and amazed 
 at many of the dissertations written in opposition 
 to it (or, even worse, in explanation) by men 
 before whose profound learning, from another point 
 of view, I am equally willing to sit in the silence 
 of admiration. That exhaustive technical planetary 
 learning will sometimes bring about an ana3tnic 
 condition in the inner structure of the man, is in 
 itself a fine study in mystic thought. But we can 
 scarcely doubt that such is sometimes the case. 
 We shall remember that a poet of deep intuitions 
 puts into his Litany a clause praying that we may 
 be delivered from " the knowledge that is darkness." 
 But the ignorance of the inner meaning of Mys-
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 55 
 
 ticism is not, on the whole, surprising. It is the 
 utter ignorance of its very being and presence in 
 the general world which is so inexplicable. A 
 great silence encompasses it. The secrecy which 
 is sometimes emphasised by students of Mysticism 
 as a necessary condition of the quest, may, in some 
 measure, account for this ignorance. Many per- 
 sons might be content with such an explanation, 
 but it is not in reality sufficient to explain the 
 matter. The secrecy observed by so many mystics 
 is possibly the lingering shadow of the Initiations, 
 wherein silence was made (wisely enough at the 
 time) a matter of life and death, a shadow and 
 necessity which the religious persecutions of the 
 Middle Ages did not tend to dissipate. It also 
 seems to spring from the conviction that there is 
 an actual strength and power of growth in silence. 
 One must, however, in justice own that the ignor- 
 ance in the world about Mysticism is due less to a 
 screen of concealment raised from within than to a 
 wall of dislike, indifference, and misconception which 
 is built up round the subject by those without. A 
 system that is constructed on the known great 
 Scriptures and philosophies of the world is clearly 
 open to the world. " Angels," when they visit man, 
 do not appear to hide or disguise themselves. They 
 are simply unrecognised, and "entertained unawares." 
 There is no such secret as that of a great truth. 
 Solomon seems at least to have thought so. He
 
 56 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 makes " Wisdom" in nowise lead a secluded kermitic 
 life, or sequester herself from the haunts of men. 
 Her habitual resorts, on the contrary, are asserted 
 to be " in the openings of the gates," " in the street," 
 in "the chief place of the concourse," on "the top 
 of high places," and " at the entry of the city." Yet 
 "no man regarded." Wisdom was still seen but by 
 the few her voice was absolutely unrecognised 
 her message, in any truth, a secret one. The secrecy 
 of Mysticism is hers, an open secret. It is the 
 greatest and best-preserved secret of all. 
 
 No less a writer of our day than Count Tolstoi, in 
 his work, " The Kingdom of Heaven is within you," 
 comments on the extraordinary silence which inva- 
 riably gathers round any thought of the kind. It 
 is true that he names it in connection with social 
 and national questions, but the title of the book is 
 sufficient to hint that the line of its thought is on a 
 foundation of mystic truth. The following passage, 
 then, witnesses to this strange silence. He is speak- 
 ing of Garrison's and Ballon's daring and heroic, if 
 unwise and premature, protests against the un- 
 Christlike attitude of Christendom, and he says : " I 
 mention this in order to call attention to the deep 
 interest which works of this class ought to excite in 
 men who profess Christianity, and it would seem 
 therefore that Ballon's zeal should have been recog- 
 nised, and the ideas he expressed either accepted or 
 disproved. But such was not the case. . . . The
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 57 
 
 fate of Garrison, and particularly that of Ballon, 
 almost unknown, notwithstanding fifty years of 
 active and persistent work in one direction, has con- 
 firmed me in the belief that there exists a certain 
 unexpressed but firm determination to oppose all such 
 attempts ly a wall of silence," This passage holds a 
 wide truth. The opponents of Mysticism would per- 
 haps explain this silence which surrounds the system 
 very plausibly as being the judgment of the world 
 and the ages on the whole matter, a judgment more 
 eloquent than any denunciation. 
 
 But this argument, which at first commends itself 
 to the intelligence, does not bear scrutiny and pres- 
 sure. .It would (from its own point of view) be 
 crediting the world at large with true spiritual dis- 
 cernment, and with a persistent calm wisdom ; and 
 neither philosophy nor history gives any authority 
 for such a position. For the average sanity, and for 
 the average well-being physical and social of the 
 masses, the worldly wisdom of the world has shrewd 
 justice and distinct value. In these matters, as in 
 all planetary questions, even including the high 
 matters of art and learning, the children of this 
 world are generally wiser than the children of light 
 wiser in the worldly sense, because they move in 
 the strict limitations of this world. They can, there- 
 fore, perfect their systems, which the children of light 
 neither can nor care to do. There is, moreover, in all 
 religious and spiritual systems (and Mysticism is no
 
 58 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 exception) a plane which is admittedly fitted to this 
 world at large, and for which the world in answer has 
 marked approval and willing acceptance. But for the 
 higher planes those "kingdoms" which fearlessly 
 proclaim that they are not for or of this world the 
 world has always had but one answer rejection and 
 misunderstanding : a rejection and misunderstanding 
 so complete that they practically issue into a great 
 silence. 
 
 Mysticism has always had (as was pointed out at 
 the beginning of this essay) an eminently practical 
 side, when it turns itself to practical matters and the 
 world of " life " ; but the highest road is, and for 
 ever must be, antagonistic to the planetary view of 
 life and the dominion of the mind. Surely a hundred 
 texts from our own Scriptures, and a hundred testi- 
 monies from the Scriptures and philosophies of other 
 lands and ages, could be quoted to prove that silence, 
 misunderstanding, rejection, and even hatred, are the 
 signs and badges in this world, not of the lower, but 
 of the higher life. To be " despised and rejected of 
 men " has two interpretations. It is the doom of the 
 criminal and the fate of " the Son of God." We must 
 be careful in judgment. In judging Mysticism we 
 cannot fail to observe that it is despised and rejected 
 of men. We may take it as a sign that it has been 
 weighed in the balance by the ages, and found want- 
 ing, proven dangerous and malefic ; or we may take 
 it as the credentials of its high fellowship.
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 59 
 
 The second sign which arrests observation is its 
 Indestructibility. This system of thought claims 
 not without proof of verity to be the secret which 
 is hinted at as being veiled and exoterically ex- 
 pressed in every creed the world has known. It 
 is beyond question that there has always been an 
 esoteric meaning in all rituals and statements of wor- 
 ship. In none is it more expressly stated that there 
 is such veiled and spiritual meaning than in the 
 faiths of the Jew and of the Christian. Whether 
 we take the words of the great leader of the 
 enslaved Israelites from Egypt, of whom it is writ- 
 ten that his face was covered with a veil, and that 
 he orally explained to chosen elders the inner and 
 unwritten meaning of the written law ; or the 
 words of Him of whom it is written, that " with- 
 out a parable spake He not unto the people," we 
 find alike, in all the sacred books of Jew and 
 Gentile, the hint, frequent and unmistakable, 
 of a Spirit which is veiled by the Letter. In all 
 the great religions of the East and of the ancient 
 world, we find, more and more, as we study them, 
 and leani to decipher their signs and hieroglyphics, 
 the distinct trace of inner meanings known to the 
 initiated, but veiled from the vulgar and profane 
 under a revelation suited to their needs, and not 
 too vast and vague for their capacity. I believe 
 I am right in affirming that the Eoman Church 
 claims a written and a traditional revelation. It
 
 60 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 is this mystery which has been kept secret since 
 the foundation of the world which Mysticism pro- 
 fesses to teach and to guard. Doubtless, many 
 people would assert this profession to be a vain 
 and empty boast. They would argue that the 
 high-sounding name of Mysticism is given to what 
 is in reality simply an instinct of the human mind, 
 a natural tendency in certain people in every age 
 toward the mystical element of thought ; just as 
 the religious instinct altogether may be pronounced 
 to be simply the working on an inherent factor in 
 human nature which works out its own evolution, 
 even as civilisation and nationality work theirs. 
 But this theory, upheld as it is by masterly proof 
 and often well-nigh unanswerable arguments, cannot 
 be held to explain the whole system of Mysticism. 
 It can scarcely explain the fact that when we take 
 any of the great tenets of Mysticism and follow 
 them back and back, tracing them into the remotest 
 known past, we find the essential and underlying 
 truth is always one and the same, and is as pure 
 and "spiritual" at the farthest known point as in 
 its latest development; nor why many of these 
 same truths do not run parallel with natural human 
 instincts, nor connect themselves with simple, abori- 
 ginal observation of Nature, but, on the contrary, 
 often reverse and deny both just as the facts of 
 science often run counter to and reverse the witness 
 of the senses. Eeligion in all ages has of course
 
 6i 
 
 always taken and used the forms and symbols 
 it found, as best suited to the age and its intelli- 
 gence. But an explanation, however complete and 
 satisfying, of the origin of the forms and symbols 
 leaves the vivifying spirit still of inexplicable origin. 
 The philosophic method of proving spiritual truths 
 to be mere expansions of solar or arboreal myths, 
 has been beneficently carried by the spirit of 
 humour to its rcdicctio ad absurdum. 
 
 Further, it can scarcely be explained away how 
 it is that arguments, which beyond question logi- 
 cally sap the foundations of religion as generally 
 received and understood, are accepted at once by 
 Mysticism, and, being accepted, leave it untouched 
 and unshaken. It is a curious and startling fact 
 that of all the great modern writers, scientific and 
 philosophic, who have attacked the position of dog- 
 matic theology and received religion, or of those 
 whose works, if not antagonistic to religion, have 
 certainly exhibited a tendency toward Free Thought, 
 not one has actually and systematically attacked the 
 principles of Mysticism. Nay, it is even true to 
 say that most of them show a marked sympathy 
 with the line of thought. Amongst such may be 
 named Spinosa, Lessing, Strauss, Kant, Fichte, 
 Hegel, Schelling, Leibnitz, Schopenhauer, Carlyle, 
 Emerson, and Thoreau. It must be owned to be a 
 very striking fact that many of these great writers 
 actually quote and constantly refer to the great
 
 62 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 centres of Eastern and of Classic mystic thought, 
 and that all exhibit such sympathy (conscious and 
 unconscious) with Mysticism, that their writings can 
 be read with almost perfect acceptance and cer- 
 tainly with perfect pleasure by all mystics. 
 
 And if modern philosophy cannot peqolex or 
 weaken Mysticism, neither can the discoveries of 
 modern science affright it ; since it believes that it 
 holds truths which will bear the test of all such 
 scrutiny and rise above it. The facts and discoveries 
 before which the "faith" of so many "believers" 
 has disintegrated, have not, so far, touched, save 
 with added certainty, the central thoughts of Mys- 
 ticism. The vast cycles of time, the inconceivable 
 depths of the stellar spaces, with which the geologist 
 and astronomer deal, in nowise stretch the borders 
 of its universe. The recent discoveries in Egyptian 
 epigraphy, the profound researches now made into 
 Eastern literature, and the revivification of the hiero- 
 glyphic utterances of civilisations which have been 
 dumb for centuries, bring neither confusion to the 
 mystic, nor force him to readjust the articles of his 
 faith. He rejoices when "the stone speaks and the 
 wall utters its cry." The perplexing aspects and 
 threatened social upheavals of modern life, which 
 disturb the minds of so many people and the codes 
 of conventional morals, are to him but expected 
 signs. He finds nothing at the end of this event- 
 ful century which cannot find acceptance in this
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 63 
 
 system of thought, or has been able to take any- 
 thing from it. 
 
 Corruption and degradation almost inevitably fol- 
 low the materialisation and dogmatic formularisa- 
 tion of any faith. It has been the history of every 
 creed : but the life within reasserts itself in new 
 forms, and is indestructible. It inspires and out- 
 lives a hundred incarnations. It is strange, and 
 yet natural, that each form as it crystallises and 
 materialises becomes oftentimes the bitterest foe 
 and opponent of the spirit which it originally 
 expressed. For centuries the Catholic Church sup- 
 pressed with strong, and often cruel, hands all ex- 
 pressions of Mysticism, save those great truths she 
 enshrined and had pronounced canonical. Within 
 her own pale she regarded any distinct utterance of 
 the mystic life with suspicion and displeasure (as 
 in the case of Molinos), whilst in the outside world 
 rack and flame were the instruments of her anger. 
 Modern science and philosophy might seem harder 
 opponents than the Inquisition and the Papal See, 
 and yet we find a positive revival of some phases of 
 Mysticism in the present day, and to the new order 
 as to the old it still shows the feature of indestruc- 
 tibility. 
 
 Canon Liddon has a fine passage in one of his 
 sermons x about the triumph of Christianity over the 
 manifold dangers that have beset and attacked it. 
 
 1 Easter Sermons.
 
 64 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 He traces its victories, not only over crushing forces 
 and dynasties which have tried to break or corrupt 
 it, but also over forces and dynasties that it, in turn, 
 has attacked with the beneficent and unseen force of 
 a new life. But whilst Mysticism would rejoice in 
 this mighty and marvellous revelation, it would point 
 to it but as the latest instance of a victory that 
 is eternal a victory consummated not in one era 
 and revelation only, but in all time, in the universal 
 history of mankind, and in the silent evolution of a 
 universal and indestructible mystic truth. 
 
 As long ago as 1886 an article appeared in Fraser's 
 Magazine from the pen of Charles Kingsley, in which 
 he hints at the probability of "an outburst of Mysti- 
 cism, as great in some respects, as fantastic in others, 
 as that of the thirteenth or seventeenth centuries," 
 in "sober England, during the next half-century." 1 
 The words seem almost prophetic. For it must be 
 confessed there is a growing interest around us in 
 this subject. It may, indeed, be too much to say 
 that there is anything that can be literally termed 
 "an outburst of Mysticism" in England; but the 
 matter might, perhaps, be judged as something 
 deeper. Outbursts are, in the very nature of things, 
 transitory. They are generally less worthy of regard 
 than steady growth. The interest in Mysticism that 
 
 1 Literary and General Essays.
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 65 
 
 is observable around us to-day seems to partake less 
 of the character of an outburst than of growth. This 
 interest has been observable for the last fifteen years 
 or so. Some writers on Occultism go so far as to 
 give the date of the rise of this wave of interest, and 
 to place it in the December of 1880. The year 1881 
 was, at the time, as many will remember, much 
 written about as a year of portent. 
 
 And indeed apart from the many fanciful, and 
 the not few rather foolish, statements and prophetic 
 utterances that were then enunciated as to the 
 meaning of the year and its numerical sign (state- 
 ments in which I think the Great Pyramid played 
 a conspicuous but unresponding part) there were, 
 I believe, some good reasons in occult science for 
 supposing the point of time was, planetarily, one 
 of grave crisis and issue, and was marked for a 
 rise of mystic thought. Certain it is that about 
 that time there was a sensible movement of thought 
 toward the revived or, as some may think, moribund 
 Mysticism of the East and of ages past. This wave 
 of thought has been followed by others. Signs are 
 not wanting to prove that the movement has reached 
 and is swaying people who are unconscious of its 
 drift and vibration, and who would probably smile 
 or frown at the name of Mysticism. Yet, just as it 
 has been stated that the movement in the Anglican 
 Church that was labelled " Ritualism " by those 
 who were satisfied with the quota of ritualism they
 
 66 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 already possessed and liked, was in reality only an 
 ecclesiastical expression of a very widespread im- 
 pulse an impulse which, on similar or associated 
 lines, was felt by all religious denominations, and 
 on different lines affected Art, and even touched our 
 houses and daily life so it may be noted that this 
 interest in mystic and psychic subjects is but an 
 articulate expression of a marked impulse which 
 touches, in some form or other, nearly every de- 
 partment of thought in the world around us to-day. 
 The mystic would discern in this general movement 
 a deep vibration, as it were, of spiritual thought in 
 the world in the direction of My&ticism, though he 
 would not class all the surface and area stirred by 
 the vibration as, in itself, mystical. 
 
 In some cases, however, the drift is almost more 
 than an impetus, and exhibits absolute signs of 
 mystic character. It is evidenced strongly in the 
 religious thought of the day. A noted preacher, 
 who often gives his congregations in his own 
 sermons a line of distinctly mystical thought of a 
 beautiful kind, thinks it necessary to warn his lis- 
 teners and readers of " the dangers of a spurious 
 form of Quietism that is rife among us, which lacks 
 the exquisite piety of Molinos, and exaggerates his 
 tendencies." l The titles of religious books in these 
 days are often most mystical and symbolic. Mystic 
 symbolism and meaning is quite curiously popular in 
 1 Canon Eyton, " The Lord's Prayer."
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 67 
 
 our pictures and illustrated books and magazines, 
 side by side with daring " realism " and the crudity 
 of archaic draughtsmanship. A knowledge of mys- 
 tical lore is constantly to be read between the 
 lines of our novels, in spite of the realistic and 
 modern methods. During the last year or so the 
 magazines which perform the ever-popular office 
 of story-tellers have given us story after story of 
 some phase of Occultism as it is popularly under- 
 stood magic, mysteries of the far East and sorceries 
 of the Black Continent, re-incarnation, curious sug- 
 gestions of psychic possibilities and experiences, 
 ghost stories galore, science carried to the point of 
 Black Art tales that deal in some form or other 
 with what is thought to be occult. All this, of 
 course, is on the shadowy side of Mysticism (the 
 only side cared about), but such a copious supply 
 must be the result of a large demand. That a 
 tendency toward mystical thought of a purer kind 
 should appear in our poetry is but natural, for the 
 poet must, in his very nature, be always something 
 of a mystic. But in some of our modern poets we 
 perceive something more than the expression of a 
 feeling natural and inborn. It is the deliberate and 
 conscious enunciation of an instructed Mysticism. 
 Thus, and surely thus alone, can there be any intel- 
 ligent and wholly satisfying explanation of numbers 
 of Browning's poems. It is the fashion of all parties 
 and schools of thought to claim Browning. Good
 
 68 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 Churchmen have written to prove him a champion 
 of the orthodox faith. He is delightfully wise and 
 ambiguous, and his vision and utterance are wide 
 and impersonal, as a rule. But I have read no 
 satisfying explanation of his truly mystical poems, 
 and I think there is but one. His known attitude 
 towards " Spiritualism," and the presence on his 
 pages of " Mr. Sludge, the Medium," are arguments 
 for, rather than against the idea of his Mysticism, 
 for reasons I have briefly hinted in the earlier 
 part of this Essay. And surely the deep and 
 true Mysticism parabled and particularised in 
 "Paracelsus," "Abt Vogler," "Saul," "A Death in 
 the Desert," "Evelyn Hope," "Rabbi Ben Ezra," 
 "An Epistle," and in a hundred pages in "The Ring 
 and the Book " and "Parley ings with Certain People," 
 even to the final triumph that rings in his " Epilogue," 
 is no mere phrasing of poetic thought and drama, 
 but an integral and inherent part, and a carefully- 
 chosen utterance of a deep inward faith and deeper 
 inward intuition. In some of Rossetti's choicest 
 poems the spirit, and even the expression, of Mys- 
 ticism is discernible, although in him (even in 
 " The Blessed Damozel," of which it forms the only 
 worthy interpretation) it never rises to the sublime 
 and ordered thought and expression of Browning. 
 Surely, too, without such an interpretation, many 
 of Walt Whitman's finest pages become his most 
 unintelligible utterances. Finally, the vibration of
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 69 
 
 Mysticism, and the responding chord to it, ring out 
 in all our modern music. Music is our nineteenth- 
 century magic. Harmony has always been accepted 
 by Mysticism as its expression. Poets and seers 
 have proclaimed it ; but nowadays every one is be- 
 ginning to feel its magical power. 
 
 Even some of the present-day antagonisms to 
 technical Mysticism are in reality but an inverted 
 expression of its unsuspected but accepted influence. 
 Paradoxical as it sounds, I think that both the 
 Realistic spirit of our day, and its irrepressible 
 spirit of inquiry and research, are in reality but 
 signs of the same widespread movement alert and 
 awakened thought acting on the mental plane. 
 And, by an irony and natural humour on which it 
 is pleasant to note one may always safely depend, 
 even in the gravest and most solemn subjects, the 
 undulations of these vibrating waves of mystic 
 thought are nowhere more discernible than in the 
 writings of some of the strenuous opponents of 
 Mysticism. Let it be granted that the propagan- 
 dists of Occultism and various kindred subjects, 
 lay themselves open to attack from any and every 
 quarter in an almost naive way. But it is also 
 amusing to observe that those who lead the attack 
 often exhibit, in a way no less naive, either the char- 
 acteristics which Mysticism has predicated for this 
 age, or an unconscious tendency toward the very 
 lines they denounce. For example, no more occult
 
 70 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 book, in a certain sense of that ill-nsed word, has ap- 
 peared since Swedenborg's "Celestial Arcana," than 
 " Earth's Earliest Ages," in which Mr. Pember falls, 
 with a great onslaught, and a veritable " vade retro 
 me," on "The Perfect Way," and all books of that 
 ilk ; and no work has been written which so aggres- 
 sively exhibits the stigmata which Mysticism has 
 prognosticated for the age, as " Degeneration," in 
 which the deepest dungeon under the moat of Herr 
 Max Nordau's madhouse-prison-castle is reserved 
 for " mystics." There is a refreshing bit of occult 
 humour in the situation. 
 
 These signs of a widespread movement are of 
 little importance in individual instances, but they gain 
 weight and value when regarded as indications that 
 such a movement is astir. Unfortunately at all such 
 times the least exalted and unworthiest examples of 
 the movement are often the ones that are most con- 
 spicuous. In the popular mind the idea of Mysticism 
 seems still inalienably mixed up with a hankering 
 after the phenomenal and the wonder-working. 
 
 Yet it is patent to any one who is unprejudiced 
 that the subject is a very remarkable one, and pos- 
 sesses features which should claim the attentive 
 notice both of the thoughtful and the scientific. 
 There are strange and pregnant truths to be found 
 in Mysticism, even by the passing enquirer, if he be 
 in earnest ; truths which, though they be reviewed 
 but mentally, are very well worth deep considera-
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 71 
 
 tion. These truths, coming down to us from remote 
 times, and from faiths and wisdoms that have passed 
 into other forms, arrest the attention by their present 
 vitality and force. Two points will be found to be 
 very striking. First, that some of the oldest theories 
 and axioms of the mystic science which traces its 
 genealogy back to the earliest known ages, have, 
 during our own time, received substantial verifica- 
 tion from modern science and modern discovery. 
 Second, that some of these occult and mystic 
 theories, when taken in connection with certain 
 passages in the older scriptures of our Bible, bring 
 those passages (in a way no other interpretation can 
 achieve) into possible relation with the latest results 
 of scientific research, or at least protect them from 
 indignity by removing them into a field wherein they 
 take a new meaning. Let us examine, very briefly, 
 a few instances. 
 
 VI 
 
 i. We will begin with an axiom which is con- 
 stantly used in mystic and occult thought. "As Above, 
 so Below; as on the Earth, so in the Sky." The origin 
 of the phrase seems open to question. It forms the 
 premise of the argument of the alchemistic trans- 
 mutation of metals, as defined in the Tabula Smarag- 
 dina. It is written in many forms. Some writers 
 credit the axiom to Thoth, the Egyptian Adept, 
 known to Alexandrian Neo-Platonists as Hermes
 
 72 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 Trismegistus. Whatever origin may be assigned to 
 the formula, it may be said to be one of the laws of 
 occult science. It is the refrain, as it were, of its 
 Song Celestial, as well as its test for the truth of a 
 thought, scientific or spiritual. 
 
 F The first thing we note in the formula is that, 
 whilst the latter half of the axiom implies the 
 method of working from the known to the unknown, 
 the first portion suggests what might be called 
 Revelation. It is, in fact, the Descent and Ascent 
 which is mystically described in the Seer's Dream in 
 the Desert in Gen. xxviii. Therein the man rests 
 his brain (the highest point of matter on the planet) 
 on the stone (the lowest), and the " angels " descend 
 and ascend descend to the stone and ascend through 
 it and the man back to the starting-point, in one 
 great cycle of spirit in manifestation Evolution 
 and Involution. This, I believe, is the mystic inter- 
 pretation of Jacob's Dream. The same idea is beau- 
 tifully symbolised in the interlaced triangles known 
 as " Solomon's Seal." l And when we turn to modern 
 
 1 We find it also as the underlying truth under another form in 
 the great triple head sculptured in the caves of Elephanta. Here 
 we get Brahm in the centre (the source of Life) ; Siva on one side 
 (the expiration of the Divine Breath in the cosmos Evolution) ; 
 Vishnu on the other side (the indrawing of the Breath back into 
 its origin Involution). In the mystic idea of Human and Spiritual 
 Life the same thought appears worked out in Man as the micro- 
 cosm of the macrocosm. Natural Birth represents Evolution, 
 humanity that has adapted itself to its outward condition. Spiritual 
 Birth (Regeneration) represents Involution, the commencement of 
 humanity to adapt itself to its new inward conditions.
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 73 
 
 thought and science, we find that the initial steps 
 are taken which might lead to a confession, on 
 other ground and in other terms, of the truth in- 
 volved in the ancient adage. For if there is not in 
 the ranks of science anything at present like a 
 direct confession of any special spiritual element 
 discernible in the constitution of man, or to be pre- 
 dicated for his possible attainment, there is a growing 
 confession (already named) that he is in his essence 
 and material a spiritual being, since Matter itself 
 is more and more held to be but a manifestation of 
 an unknown x called Force, whilst the last word of 
 science as to the cosmos is Movement : both of which 
 confessions approximate a living Thought. Those 
 who see in man only a great evolution from Matter, 
 no longer see in such a theory " a Gospel of Dirt," 
 nor allow that it is any infringement or belittling of 
 the wonder of Human Nature. 
 
 There are some who declare that such a thesis is 
 quite compatible with the principles of Christianity 
 and the doctrine of Immortality. They argue a glori- 
 fication of all life and manifestation, and trace the 
 divine element in its evolution as fully as ever 
 Theology traced it in a special creation. There is 
 an " ultimate synthesis " thus announced, " in which 
 man and nature are regarded as manifestations of 
 one spiritual principle." l The very highest possi- 
 bilities of spiritual life are by these means held to be 
 
 1 Professor E. Caird, " Essays on Literature and Philosophy."
 
 74 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 attainable ; and man man as we see him to-day 
 is considered to include not only all the ele- 
 mentary types from which he has worked his way 
 up so far, but also to hold the latent material for 
 the realisation of the perfect archetype which must 
 be his goal. In the earliest progenitors, it is argued, 
 were contained the germinal potentialities of the 
 perfect man. As has been well said : " Throughout 
 its whole extent the perfect type exists potentially 
 in all the intermediate stages by which it is more 
 and more nearly approached, and if it did not exist, 
 neither could they. There could be no development 
 of an absent life. . . . Human life as it is tran- 
 scends, though it includes, that of the lower forms 
 through which it has developed; human life as it 
 will be, must include, though it may transcend, its 
 present manifestations, otherwise it would no longer 
 be a life of evolution." l In this supposition, then, 
 of a superhuman exemplar toward which man has 
 been and is still working, involving as it does the 
 existence of a germinal superhuman prototype ; as 
 well as in the more scientific allowance of the imma- 
 terial nature and essence of matter, we find a grow- 
 ing confession that there is, as the ancient adage 
 suggests, a working from an " above " to a " below," 
 and thence from " earth " to " sky " ; and that matter 
 is but the lowest point of spirit the point of the 
 descent at which the ascent is commenced. 
 
 1 Caillard, "Progressive Revelation."
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 75 
 
 The axiom is, however, often written in the simpler 
 form of its latter order : " As below, so above ; as 
 on the earth, so in the sky," a change which can 
 be taken, according to the point of view, as show- 
 ing the loose inexactness of vague and valueless 
 thought, or as a proof of its wide truth, implying 
 that it presents a perfect circle which can be taken 
 in any segment or from any starting-point. And, 
 tested by the discoveries of modern science, the 
 application of the thought, "as below, so above ; as 
 on the earth, so in the sky," is found to be true on 
 the material plane. Mysticism always asks such 
 proof, holding a truth is always true. It does not 
 shrink from tests which dogmatic theology has often 
 resisted and refused. When we look to astronomy 
 the science the axiom naturally invites we find 
 that the investigation of that science proves that 
 to the further limit of discovered and discoverable 
 space the old law of Mysticism holds good. To 
 what has been called the pre-Copernican theory of 
 the universe, 1 the axiom has little intelligibility. 
 
 1 The expression is open to question. It is generally stated in 
 astronomical works that Copernicus was the "discoverer" of the 
 fact that the earth travels round the sun. But there are some 
 good reasons for supposing that this fact was known to Greece, 
 Egypt, and Chaldea. It is thought possible that the knowledge 
 was confined to the circle of initiation, and was forbidden to be 
 divulged. Professor Jowett credits "the Ancients" with the 
 Copernican knowledge, as will be seen in a passage from his Intro- 
 duction to the " Timceus " (quoted farther on). It is held by all 
 mystic writers that Pythagoras and some of the ancient philoso- 
 phers knew the right theory of our system. But the knowledge
 
 76 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 But when we face modern astronomy, when we hear 
 of the revelations of the telescope and the spectro- 
 scope, when the chemist and the mathematician tell 
 us that the same forces, the same elements, and the 
 same laws which vivify, form, and govern our planet, 
 are discoverable and detectable through the length 
 and breadth of that immeasurable bit of the universe 
 through which we are moving, we come to see a 
 larger application and measure of truth than was 
 first apparent in the mystic adage. 
 
 Astronomy also tells us that the conditions of 
 life which obtain on earth birth, childhood, youth, 
 maturity, old age, and death are discernible in the 
 starry heavens. "There are stars young, middle- 
 aged, old, and decrepit ; and there are stars cold aud 
 dead, radiating no energy, and whose existence can 
 be known only by their influence exerted through the 
 force of gravitation upon the proper motion of other 
 bodies." * As on the earth, so in the sky. 
 
 The latter part of the sentence just quoted suggests 
 another curious parallel. For we all recognise, and 
 are often affected by the perturbations (to employ 
 the phrase of the astronomers) of unseen forces and 
 influences. The springs of human motive and action 
 
 was lost subsequently, till 1543, when Copernicus published his 
 great " discovery." On the other hand, there is the order of the 
 planets as held by the astrologers of Rome and Mediaeval Europe, 
 and this places the sun as a wanderer round the earth between 
 Mars and Venus. It is, however, a moot-point whether the very 
 ancient philosophers did not know the Copernican theory. 
 1 Edward Clodd, "The Story of Creation."
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 77 
 
 are often hard to trace, harder to explain. Not 
 only the spectators cannot see the influence at work, 
 but the person influenced is often at a loss to account 
 for the course that is pursued. So, in like way, we 
 find astronomers tell us that certain stars are affected 
 at times, deflected from their proper course, per- 
 turbed, and occultated, by bodies that are not to be 
 seen, bodies to be felt by their influence only (as 
 stated), but which evade all search. Thus Flam- 
 marion tells us of a lost and dark planet. Thus Sir 
 Robert Ball tells us a star is sometimes eclipsed by 
 some unknown intercepting body, and further says, 
 " Besides the great bodies in the universe which attract 
 attention by their brilliancy, there are also other bodies 
 of stupendous mass which have but little brilliancy 
 probably some of them possess none at all." l 
 These suggestions of astronomy on the old Her- 
 
 1 "The Story of the Heavens." 
 
 (These unseen worlds be they what they may give some ground 
 for thinking that the old occult idea of the " Dark Satellite," and 
 the unseen abodes of "the Inversive Brethren," is not so hope- 
 lessly unscientific as some people might be minded hastily to pro- 
 nounce it. Names of such portentous and mysterious suggestion 
 as these I have quoted have fallen from the melodrama of over- 
 credulity to the burlesque of over-scepticism. Both points of view 
 seem equally mistaken. The belief in "ghosts" in the ignorant 
 mind is a foolish thing, but in the ultra-rational mind the fear of 
 believing in them or in anything ghostly is almost a more foolish 
 thing. It is a fact worthy of note, in passing, that modern science, 
 sublimely indifferent to Ancient Wisdoms, tells us of the presence 
 of unknown, unseen, and dark orbs in this mysterious universe. 
 There are, indeed, more things in the Heavens as in the Earth 
 than are dreamt of in our Philosophies or Sciences.)
 
 78 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 metic or Alchemistic formula lead us to another 
 thought of conceivable parallel. In it we find our- 
 selves regarding the central mystery of human life 
 the mystery of sex. And remembering not only the 
 law of '' as on the earth, so in the sky," but further 
 that in all Wisdom Religions of old, and the occult 
 sciences of every age, the theory of the Divine Femi- 
 nine has always been held, we look to see if science 
 has any analogy on this question, whereby the 
 greatest of all human factors on earth can be read 
 into the sky. Analogy, it would seem, there is, 
 though it may be held to be too unsubstantial for 
 any reasonable ground for thought. Two of the 
 great active forces on our planet, we are told, are 
 Nutrition and Reproduction. That the latent pos- 
 sibilities of the idea of sex exist in these factors it 
 would be difficult to deny. The earth is often called 
 the mighty mother a phrase that Science does not 
 repudiate. The sun must be said in this image to 
 represent the celestial spouse. The same imagery 
 might be used with equal truth to all planets and all 
 solar systems. Nature is also given a similar femi- 
 nine character, with equal obvious truth of illustra- 
 tion. And when we go on to think of and personify 
 Nature, not merely as our own planetary and earthly 
 mother, but as the responding power and impersona- 
 tion of cosmic life throughout the universe, such 
 thought of sex as lies in the analogy rises to sublime 
 and starry height, and writes its message "in the sky."
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 79 
 
 We are told that the universe is matter and 
 power. Power and matter are the scientific parallels 
 for the "Intelligence" and "Wisdom" of the Kab- 
 balists. In the Sephiroth of the Kabbala the 
 " Crown " is called " En Soph " the manifesta- 
 tion of Deity in creation. In it are supposed to 
 reside the life and dynamic power of the universe. 
 The first two "emanations" of the "Crown" on 
 the right hand and on the left are " Binah " and 
 " Chocmah " (Intelligence and Wisdom). These 
 are masculine and feminine. Wisdom (Chocmah 
 the "Sophia" of the Early Church) is feminine. 
 From these spring the two pillars of the Sephiroth. 
 With all this, however (deeply interesting and won- 
 derful as the study is, and full of spiritual meaning), 
 we have nothing to do in this analogy. All that is 
 attempted is to show the ancient division of the 
 Supreme Cause into two " emanations " masculine 
 and feminine. These emanations Intelligence and 
 Wisdom correspond in their primal importance with 
 the Power and Matter, the Attraction and Eepulsion 
 of the scientists. And in the four latter expressions 
 it is not hard to trace the same root-idea as that 
 which was confessed in the old Kabbalistic figure. 
 
 It may be thought by some to be somewhat of 
 a " twisting fair reasoning to a crooked end " to 
 read the thought of sex into this parallel, but yet 
 it is certain that the line of thought seems to other 
 minds straight and clear. Nor is there, it is scarcely
 
 80 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 necessary to add, any degradation or materialising 
 of spiritual and divine things in such an argument, 
 truly and fearlessly regarded. It is rather a sancti- 
 fication and trans6guration of an idea, which, if 
 once separated from the spirit, and prisoned simply 
 in its material physical expression, must sink as 
 it has sunk to endless confusion of thought, if not 
 to dishonour and degradation. Science, at least, 
 will surely not quarrel with Mysticism for con- 
 tending that the great principle of sex is discernible 
 throughout the universe, even until it is absorbed 
 in the undivided and final source of all manifes- 
 tation. And thus again the dictum of Mysticism 
 stands the test of searchiug analogy. 
 
 Of the ethical and psychical analogies and truths 
 to be drawn from the expression I do not speak. 
 In these lie its real significance. But I merely 
 attempt to suggest where the old-world wisdom is 
 sustained by the thought of the new world. 
 
 2. The mystic has always held that the Seen is 
 the Unreal, and the Unseen is the Real. He holds 
 that all the things which men call real are, in truth, 
 the very things which are phantasmal, being but 
 shadows of the corresponding unseen realities. 
 Doubtless it is greatly due to this theory and its 
 misapplication and misconstruction by the outside 
 world that a mystic is looked on as a dreamer 
 some one who lives and moves in unrealities, and 
 would try to prove realities a dream. As, however,
 
 8i 
 
 this is a subject which I approach in the Essay 
 headed "The Illusion of Realism" in this volume, 
 I must not enter into it here. Yet it may be per- 
 missible to point out briefly some of the more obvious 
 testimonies which science gives us in these days as 
 to the truth of the mystic's creed on this subject. 
 We know that everything we see or touch, or in 
 any way " sense," and every atom of our bodies, 
 and of every substance about us, is actually under 
 a process of change every second : that there is 
 no pause in life, no pause even in what we call 
 death. All life and nature is in very truth the 
 Eternal Flux of Heraclitus. 
 
 Science has taught us the hundred and one in- 
 stances in which the " seen " is in a sense " unreal." 
 It tells us that the earth, which seems stationary, 
 is in reality whirling along at the rate of eighteen 
 miles a second, and has eleven principal motions as 
 it rushes on. It tells us that the sun does not, so to 
 speak, give us light or heat, but only creates them in 
 our atmosphere, all beyond that slender wrappage 
 being cold and dark to a point we scarcely realise. It 
 tells us that the stars we see are but appearances of 
 those orbs, reaching us after years and asons of voyag- 
 ing through space. It tells us that the plant which 
 we see grow gets its substance neither from the root 
 nor from the mould, but by absorption and mutation 
 of unseen elements. It tells us that the blue of the 
 
 sky, the green of the grass, the lovely hues of dawn 
 
 F
 
 82 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 aud sunset, are all mere sensations, non-existent and 
 non-actual. 
 
 And science goes further in proving the ancient 
 belief. One might suppose it would be silent when 
 the mystic stretches boldly into the dark, as it were, 
 and says that the Unseen is the Real. But it is not so. 
 "Itmatters not," saysMr. Edward Clodd in his "Story 
 of Creation," "into how many myriad substances 
 animal, plant, or mineral an atom of oxygen may 
 have entered, nor what isolation it has undergone, 
 bond or free it retains its own qualities. It matters 
 not how many millions of years have elapsed during 
 these changes, age cannot wither or weaken it ; 
 amidst all the fierce play of the mighty agencies to 
 whom it has been subjected, it remains unbroken 
 and unworn. To it may apply the ancient words, 
 ' The things which are not seen are eternal.' " l Even 
 
 1 A passage in Dr. Draper's " Intellectual Development of Europe " 
 on this point is so beautiful that I give it as a note. "A particle 
 of water, raised from the sea, may ascend invisibly through the air ; 
 it may float above us in the cloud, it may fall in the raindrop, 
 sink into the earth, gush forth again in the fountain, enter the 
 rootlets of a plant, rise up with the sap to the leaves, be there de- 
 composed by the sunlight into its constituent elements, the oxygen 
 and hydrogen ; of these and other elements, acids and oils of 
 various organic compounds may be made ; in these, or in its un- 
 decomposed state, it may be received into the food of animals, 
 circulate in their blood, be essentially concerned in acts of intel- 
 lection executed by the brain ; it may be expired in the breath. 
 Though shed in a tear in moments of despair, it may give birth to 
 the rainbow, the emblem of hope. Whatever the course through 
 which it has passed, whatever mutations it has undergone, whatever 
 the force it has submitted to, its elementary constituents endure."
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 83 
 
 the recent startling discovery given us by chemistry, 
 that our old friend the atom is not quite the last 
 word on the material side of things, it being proved 
 to be not a rigid and indivisible particle, but a vortex- 
 ring, a little system of force in itself, a bit of living 
 energy, even this but presses the reality farther and 
 farther back into the unseen, and strengthens rather 
 than weakens the truth ; since the " unseen " grows 
 ever more " real " as it recedes from the world of 
 the "seen." The indestructibility of matter is the 
 scientific witness to the truth of the mystic belief, 
 so often spiritually expressed, that the Unseen is 
 the Real. 
 
 3. Plato, one of the high-priests of Mysticism, 
 enunciates the theory of the Reality of Ideas. This 
 principle has always been held in all schools of 
 mystic thought. It is represented in the teaching 
 of Heraclitus, and is also clearly the JVoO? of 
 Anaxagoras. It is curious to find the ancient 
 mystic thought evolved into a dogma of modern 
 science, Evolution, although only a few impartial 
 and just thinkers have pointed out the unacknow- 
 ledged but undoubted origin of the scientific " dis- 
 covery." Amongst these just and discerning thinkers 
 must be named Professor Max Miiller, Professor 
 Jowett, and Mr. Edward Clodd. The first-named 
 AY riter has a passage, too long for quotation, 1 of 
 remarkable lucidity and logic, in his Gifford Lectures 
 
 1 Theosophy and Psychological Religion, pp. 385-389.
 
 84 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 (which I have already named several times), in which 
 he argues that the theory of the Origin of Species 
 so epoch - making in the world of science is, in 
 essence, an expansion and practical illustration of 
 the Platonic theory of the Keality of Ideas. He 
 ends by saying : " One feels almost ashamed if one 
 sees how much more profound is the theory of the 
 Origin of Species as conceived by Plato than that 
 of modern naturalists." Professor Jowett traces the 
 same origin for the great scientific dictum ; and 
 that Mr. Edward Clodd credits the ancients with 
 the thought is evidenced in the title of his latest 
 work, "Pioneers of Evolution, from Thales to 
 Huxley." 
 
 The mystic world would, I think, declare the 
 thought of the reality of ideas to lie at the root 
 of many of the phenomena which the world calls 
 miracles ; for a miracle is, in its idea, but an em- 
 bodiment and materialisation of an original thought 
 as in the case of " miraculous " healings a rever- 
 sion to the original type. The thesis of Ideas, or, 
 as science calls them, Types, in a Divine Mind or 
 lieason which is projected into the evolution of 
 Matter, is very startlingly stated in the fourth and 
 fifth verses of the second chapter of Genesis words 
 that are very often read, but seldom, as it would 
 seem, marked or digested : " These are the genera- 
 tions of the heavens and of the earth, when they 
 were created, in the day that the Lord God made
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 85 
 
 the earth and heaven, and every plant of the field 
 before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field 
 before it grew." Surely this is an arresting state- 
 ment, and "gives us pause." Surely we have a 
 Reality of Ideas, an Origin of Species, here. 
 
 4. We may notice a few other instances in which 
 modern science has taken up ground originally 
 marked out (though the landmarks have been 
 forgotten or swept away by neighbourly hands) 
 by the ancient philosophers, who, let it be remem- 
 bered, were almost all of them "initiated" into the 
 " mysteries," and therefore are honestly and un- 
 questionably to be ranked as mystics. 1 The wisdom 
 of the ancient world is always confessed to be on 
 the side of Mysticism. Even writers who dislike 
 mystical thought own this fact, though they own it 
 with regret. 
 
 It is well in such a case to take the witness of 
 one who is acknowledged to be accurate and un- 
 biassed, who is a scholar beyond question, and 
 who deprecates the thought of Mysticism wherever 
 he can do so. Professor Jowett, in his preface to 
 the "TiniEeus," thus sums up the position of the 
 thought under his review in relation to science : 
 "To do justice to the subject we should consider 
 
 1 We may apply to many of the ancient philosophic theories a 
 sentence in Helmholtz's "Sensations of Tone," wherein, speaking 
 of the Pythagorean principles of music, he says : "... And if, as is 
 probable, the knowledge was partly derived from Egyptian priests, 
 it is impossible to say in what remote antiquity this law was known."
 
 86 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 the physical philosophy of the ancients as a whole ; 
 we should remember (i) that the nebular theory 
 was the received belief of the early physicists ; (2) 
 that the development of animals out of frogs who 
 came to the land, and of man out of the animals, 
 was held by Anaximenes in the sixth century before 
 Christ; (3) that even by Philolaus and the early 
 Pythagoreans the earth was held to be a body like 
 the other stars, revolving in space around the sun of 
 central fire ; (4) that the beginnings of chemistry 
 are discernible in the ' similar particles ' of Anaxa- 
 goras. Also they knew or thought (5) that there 
 was a sex in plants as well as in animals ; (6) they 
 were aware that musical notes depended on the 
 relative length or tension of the strings from which 
 they were emitted, and were measured by the ratios 
 of number; (7) that mathematical laws pervaded 
 the world, and even quantitative differences were 
 supposed to have their origin in number; (8) the 
 annihilation of matter was denied by several of 
 them, and held to be a transformation only." He 
 goes on to own that " The greatest ' divination ' of 
 the ancients was the supremacy which they assigned 
 to mathematics in all the realms of nature. For in 
 all of them there is a foundation! of mathematics ; 
 even physiology partakes of figure and number ; 
 and Plato is not wrong in attributing them to the 
 human frame, but in the omission to observe how 
 little could be explained by them. Thus, we may
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 87 
 
 remark in passing that the most fanciful of ancient 
 philosophies is also the most nearly verified in fact. 
 The fortunate guess that the world is a sum of num- 
 bers and figures has been the most fruitful of anti- 
 cipations. The ' diatonic ' scale of the Pythagoreans 
 and Plato suggested to Kepler that the secret of the 
 distances of the planets from one another was to be 
 found in mathematical proportions. . . . And now 
 a favourite speculation of modern chemistry is the 
 explanation of qualitative difference by quantita- 
 tive, which is at present verified to a certain extent, 
 and may hereafter be of far more universal applica- 
 tion. What is this but the atoms of Democritus 
 and the triangles of Plato? The ancients should 
 not be wholly deprived of the credit of their guesses 
 because they were unable to prove them. May they 
 not have had, like the animals, an instinct of some- 
 thing more than they knew ? " 
 
 This passage cannot be accused of being partial 
 or over -civil to the ancients. To liken them to 
 the "animals," and write their knowledge down as 
 " guesses," is a rather deprived and arid way of 
 putting the confession. The confession itself, there- 
 fore, is the more valuable. Of confession of the 
 "fortunate guesses," however, the learned writer 
 is generous. He grants the ancients three more. 
 Plato, he thinks, touched the discoveries of the Law 
 of Gravitation and the Circulation of the Blood, and 
 he owns that " there is no single step in astronomy
 
 88 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 so great as that of the nameless Pythagorean who 
 first conceived the world to be a body moving round 
 the sun in space." Such passages form a striking 
 testimony to the truth of those ancient philosophies 
 to which all mystical writers are fond of appealing 
 as support for their belief and proof of its antiquity. 
 Similar testimonies from the works of scholarship 
 and science are not hard to find. Lange declares 
 that in the dictum ascribed to Socrates, "Nothing 
 can proceed out of nothing, and nothing can be an- 
 nihilated," are contained two of the great doctrines 
 of physics, namely, the Indestructibility of Matter 
 and the Conservation of Force. Edward Clodd, in 
 his " Pioneers of Evolution," mentions no less than 
 ten instances in which ancient " speculations " made 
 " an approach to modern theories." Professor Sayce 
 tells us, " It is to Anaxagoras, to Heraclitus, to Xeno- 
 phanes, that we owe those ideas of mind, of motion, 
 of existence, which form the groundwork of modern 
 science." Finally, remembering that motion is almost 
 the last word of modern science, 1 we regard with 
 awakened attention the saying of the old Egyptian 
 Hierophants "Action is the life of Ptah." It is 
 to be questioned whether, in not realising and re- 
 specting the meaning of ancient learning and the 
 suggestions of ancient mystic metaphors and symbols, 
 science has not lost much valuable time. It has 
 
 1 " It would seem that science reduces the universe to the intel- 
 ligible concept of motion." EDWAKD CLODD, Pioneers of Evolution,
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 89 
 
 not advanced, save in practical and experimental 
 illustration, much beyond " the Mysteries " even yet. 
 
 5. Mysticism is almost summed up in the Pytha- 
 gorean triad of statements, " The law of Life is 
 Evolution, the law of the Universe is Number, the 
 law of God is Unity." The scientific verification 
 that could at once be quoted in support of this 
 utterance is patent at a glance. In the word " evo- 
 lution " a modern note seems introduced which is 
 difficult to tune to the homophony of the Greek 
 origin of the phrase. But the translator 1 finds this 
 word the best to describe the mathematical sequence 
 implied in the whole phrase. The first two sections 
 of the sentence ring true to our modern ears, and 
 scarcely need support. Astronomy and mathematics 
 walk hand in hand, and help one another to solve 
 the mighty problems of the starry heavens. The 
 mathematician it was who put his hand, so to speak, 
 out into "the vastnesses of space" and laid it un- 
 erringly on the unseen but foreknown planet Nep- 
 tune. The mathematician it is who can trace the 
 orbits of the members of our system, the distance 
 of the sun, and of those stars which give an annual 
 parallax. The mathematician it is who can weigh 
 the worlds and foretell the comets. Armed with 
 " Number" the astronomer reads the skies. 
 
 The third section of the dictum rises into a sphere 
 which science does not pretend to enter. Yet even 
 
 1 Edouard Schiirc, Lcs Grands Indies.
 
 9 o AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 here there are words of mathematicians on the sub- 
 ject of Unity which at least suggest that the sequence 
 of thought is one which has haunted the mind of 
 thoughtful men logically as well as spiritually. 
 
 "All comes from One, God embraces all, and 
 actuates all, yet is but One," said Pythagoras. Gior- 
 dano Bruno, fallen on less happy times, almost 
 repeats his words, " Understand, then, that all things 
 are in the universe, and the universe in all things ; 
 us in that, that in us, and so all meet in one 
 perfect Unity." The great German philosophers 
 repeat the idea a hundred times. " The Absolute, 
 self-existent substance is God," writes Spinosa, 
 " everything else must be attributes and modes 
 under which that substance appears. There can be 
 no real existence outside. He is the universal All." 
 "The day of days, the great day of the feast of 
 life," says Emerson, always deeply imbued with 
 Mysticism, " is that in which the inward eye opens 
 to the unity of things." The science of our day, if 
 it ever approaches the idea of divinity, and holds its 
 hand out in love and understanding toward religion, 
 will surely do so in and through the sublime yet 
 scientific path of number and unity. If it does so, 
 it will be but treading the road Mysticism has passed 
 along ages ago, even before the time when Zoroaster 
 proclaimed " the number 3 reigns throughout the 
 universe, and the monad is its principle." 
 
 6. To come to later times, we may take some
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 91 
 
 of the despised studies of the alchemists, and the 
 ideas they are credited with entertaining, and find 
 that, after all, if we will but remember that they, of 
 necessity and by choice, spoke in parable and wrote 
 in cipher, their half-scientific, half-spiritual theories 
 were not so foolish and fantastic as people have 
 been apt to think. Stories of these strange and 
 necromantic workers in the laboratories of the 
 Middle Ages are familiar to us all. There are no 
 more picturesque figures in history or romance than 
 the alchemists. We really owe them a debt of 
 gratitude, if only for their valuable contributions to 
 the drama and picturesqueness of the world. Yet 
 it is curious how little seems known about these 
 men and their studies. The popular notion of them 
 is, of course, a gross caricature. Some of our great 
 novelists have tried to do justice to them, and have 
 wrought some of their finest scenes round these 
 characters. To the world of their own day they 
 were enigmatical. Small wonder that after- ages 
 find it hard to decipher their real features. Their 
 language is almost unintelligible to the ordinary 
 reader. Even students of their writings " quaint 
 and curious volumes of forgotten lore " often fail 
 to remember that the text is in great part a cipher 
 which can only be unlocked by the right key. Few 
 have possession, it would seem, of that key. The 
 alchemist nearly always kept dark in his sayings. 
 His phraseology was clear to his brethren, but was
 
 9 2 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 purposely and wilfully misleading to others. This 
 subterfuge was adopted, doubtless, in self-defence ; 
 for the days of the great alchemists were days when 
 it was dangerous to life and limb to speak of certain 
 things. It must not be forgotten that the alchemists 
 were men in whom, as a rule, religion and science 
 were indissolubly joined. I think it may be asserted 
 that their real quest was that of Divine Truth. It 
 must also not be forgotten that the Ages of Faith 
 in which they lived are equally well known as the 
 Dark Ages. Flame and torture were busy. It 
 was safer to talk of the transmutation of metals 
 than the regeneration of the soul and body, in days 
 when the slightest heresy meant the dungeon and 
 the stake. Salt, and sulphur, and mercury, and 
 the White Eagle and the Red Lion, were more 
 convenient expressions than their spiritual equi- 
 valents. It cannot, of course, be for a moment 
 asserted that the quest of every alchemist was after 
 Divine things. Far from that. At the outset of 
 this enquiry we faced the fact that occultism has 
 an inversive and dark side, and the temptation to 
 a "fall" is never greater than when phenomena 
 are approached, and the desires of Self self-know- 
 ledge, self-power, self-riches, self -gratification 
 are all ready to assert themselves and clamour for 
 the upper hand. Small wonder if the "Art" of 
 the alchemist was often "Black." 
 
 Browning makes his Paracelsus " fall " as well
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 93 
 
 as " aspire." The spirit of the Middle Ages must 
 be allowed to be somewhat alarming in every line 
 of life. The oubliette seems always to yawn beneath 
 the " castle bower" ; torture chambers are discovered 
 in most cathedrals and sacred edifices ; the black 
 plague had an unpleasant way of sweeping through 
 the beautiful narrow streets, so dear to the lover 
 of the picturesque. It was a gorgeous and a grue- 
 some period. The alchemists were not better than 
 their age. 
 
 We are apt to forget how much modern science 
 owes to the alchemists. People smile over tales 
 of the Bombast of Hohenheim, with his traditional 
 fiend in the pommel of his sword, but they forget 
 that he was the greatest chemist of his time, a 
 wonderful physician, and the discoverer of hydrogen. 
 Albertus Magnus, Nicholas Flamel, Van Helmont, 
 Cornelius Agrippa, Roger Bacon, all these men were 
 the leading lights of science in their days, and faith- 
 fully worked out its evolution. Against many of 
 them their bitterest foes could bring no accusation 
 of evil living. It is open to question whether 
 Paracelsus was not much maligned. For centuries 
 the history of practical scientific investigation is 
 the history of magic. Magic is no very unscientific 
 thing if the statements of Paracelsus and Van 
 Helmont were true. "Determined Will," says 
 the former, " is the beginning of all magical 
 operations." (It reads just like a description of
 
 94 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 hypnotism.) "The Will," says the latter, "is the 
 first of all the powers." Nor does it seem to be 
 an evil thing, if we may believe Cornelius Agrippa. 
 He really writes about it like a St. Paul, for he 
 asserts that "the magician who would acquire super- 
 natural powers must possess Faith, Love, and Hope." 
 The fact is, we moderns have got it fixed in our 
 minds that all beneficent supernatural power passed 
 away with the establishment of the Christian Church 
 (it is a curious belief for Christians to hold), and 
 that if it asserts itself at all in later times, it must 
 be of and for evil. I touched on this point, how- 
 ever, in the earlier part of this Essay ; and I pointed 
 out that Mysticism held other views on the matter. 
 
 Impartially looked at, some of the despised theories 
 of the alchemist are found to be worthy of notice. 
 Take the Transmutation of Metals. The deep spiri- 
 tual meanings of the phrase we need not touch on, 
 although it was in these, as I believe, the real doctrine 
 and meaning lay. But a truth on one plane was 
 held to be true on all. That, to begin with, is not 
 an unscientific theory. If (as they held) the body 
 of man could be transmuted by grace into the 
 temple of the Divine Spirit, then it was doubtless 
 possible to work out the truth on much lower planes, 
 and transmute base metals into gold, the elements of 
 both being associated if not identical. Science laughs 
 now at the gold-making dream of the Rosicruciaii 
 alchemists ; and yet this transmutation of metals,
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 95 
 
 has it not some sort of expression under another 
 name in the science of to-day ? Surely some of the 
 very passages I have already quoted in these pages 
 tell us of equally amazing transmutations which can 
 be effected. Air is now made into water ; and really, 
 to the unassisted intelligence, that looks far liker 
 to "magic" than to turn copper into gold. The 
 chemist who says a thing is impossible is a bold 
 man. If we wait awhile we may yet hear that our 
 chemists have found out that the alchemists were 
 not as wrong as has been thought, even in their 
 most fantastic ideas. 
 
 This confession has already been accorded in one 
 or two instances. One of their favourite assertions 
 is that of the existence of a materia prima a prim- 
 ordial essence, from which all things were originally 
 made. I think one of the alchemistic names for this 
 essence was Azoth. Now Professor Huxley (it is 
 always pleasant to cite the adversary) says, in refer- 
 ence to the periodicity of atoms, and the sections 
 and groups they form : "This is a conception with 
 which biologists are very familiar : animal and plant 
 groups constantly appearing as series of parallel 
 modifications of similar yet different primary forms. 
 In the living world facts of this kind are now under- 
 stood to mean evolution from a common prototype. 
 It is difficult to imagine that in the non-living world 
 they are devoid of significance. Is it not possible, 
 nay probable, that they may mean the evolution of
 
 96 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 our ' elements ' from a primary form of matter ? 
 Fifty years ago such a suggestion would have been 
 scouted as a revival of the dreams of the alchemists.' 9 
 This is hopeful to any one interested in Mysticism. 
 To begin with, it permits the entertainment of the 
 belief that the alchemists were right ; and further, it 
 implies that the time for " scouting " their theories 
 is past. Years ago, Faraday said he believed that 
 "in the end there will be found one element with 
 two polarities." Since then unsuspected elements 
 have been detected in the air, the gas called argon, 
 discovered by Lord Eayleigh, and helium, which 
 was once supposed to be a peculiar possession of the 
 solar atmosphere. We are getting on. Again we. 
 may find the alchemists were no foolish dreamers. 
 
 These illustrations have stretched themselves to 
 greater length than I anticipated, and there are 
 still many mystic theories I should like to have 
 mentioned, as verified by modern discovery. But 
 I must content myself with naming the point which 
 further proves that some of the theories of Mys- 
 ticism are in sympathy with the Biblical narrative, 
 and that the Biblical narrative, thus interpreted, is 
 more or less brought into relation with science. 
 
 The first chapter of Genesis, and its account of the 
 Creation, has probably been argued over historically, 
 scientifically, and theologically more fiercely than 
 any part of the Bible. It has been with some people 
 it still is a battlefield of hot dispute. A large number
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 97 
 
 of religious people regard it, curiously and question- 
 ingly, with a silence, or with a smile, not meant to 
 be irreverent, but only intelligent, as something of 
 considerable archaic interest a something that, 
 any and every way, in no way touches their personal 
 belief and faith. A larger number possibly still 
 accept it verbally and literally. Others examine it 
 and argue over it with ecclesiastical and theologi- 
 cal sanction and encouragement. The philosopher 
 and the agnostic, I suppose, regard it calmly as a 
 curious survival. The scientist presumably ignores 
 it, or even laughs at its to him amazing and bar- 
 barous crudities. And some (we will hope but very 
 few) would expunge it from a book which they think 
 would stand in this modern world better, and with 
 greater dignity, without such outworn and childish 
 myths. Very few, indeed, one is minded to think, 
 place a value on it, even above the more obviously 
 valuable and often-quoted portions of the Pentateuch. 
 Amongst, and foremost amongst, this small band 
 (because he can give a reason for the faith that is in 
 him) must be counted the earnest student of Mys- 
 ticism. The mystic echoes the words of St. Jerome, 
 and says with him, "The most difficult and the 
 most obscure of sacred books Genesis contains as 
 many secrets as words." It is clear that the much- 
 talked-over first chapter is either a record of extra- 
 ordinary and deep value and interest, or a curious 
 collection of primitive myths, and an explanation of
 
 98 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 the cosmography fitted to the childhood of our race. 
 And one can imagine how a mind, unable to take 
 refuge in unquestioning faith, and unwilling to find 
 it in unquestioning acceptance of dogma, keenly 
 alive to the grandeur of modern science, yet pene- 
 trated with the still greater grandeur of an out- 
 look which claims the unseen as well as the seen 
 one can imagine, I say, how such a mind may 
 have felt this first chapter of Genesis a terrible 
 stumbling-block an uncertain note struck at the 
 outset of what it would fain consider a harmony. 
 
 It seems, therefore, a strange thing that amongst 
 all the many arguments, pro and con. ranged in dis- 
 pute over what is called " the Mosaic account of the 
 Creation," l but little notice has ever been taken of 
 the theosophic theory of Cycles and Life- Waves. 
 This theory has been stated in several occult books 
 during the last few years ; but these books (as has 
 been already noted) are often surrounded by a curious 
 silence, and the theory seems to have escaped 
 general observation. It is scarcely like to gain 
 observation by one more brief and insignificant re- 
 petition, but the subject may interest the few 
 readers of these pages. 
 
 1 It must be remembered that the " Books of Moses " are a re- 
 collection made late in the history of the nation, at about 500 or 
 600 B.C., and that it is now thought that "Moses" himself was 
 not only "learned in all the lore of the Egyptians," but was an 
 Egyptian priest of the royal house (see note later on). If so, the 
 " Mosaic " account of the Creation is probably Egyptian in its 
 origin, and is fraught with esoteric meaning and mystery.
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 99 
 
 The Cycles and Life- Waves are said to be parts 
 of a theory which has been received, in some form 
 or other, in occult science for a very long time. It 
 is even claimed by some writers that they formed 
 part of the knowledge given in the old Initiations. 
 The matter is far too lengthy and intricate to be 
 described here, save in the most cursory way. The 
 broad outline alone can be given. 
 
 The cycles are supposed to explain the process of 
 formation or creation in the history of our planet, 
 and of all planets. And as they are said to have 
 been in ceaseless operation for countless millions of 
 years, so it is stated they are at work still, and will 
 continue to work into the dimness of an inconceiv- 
 able future, carrying out evolution to the point when 
 the laws accomplish their own doom, only to recom- 
 mence their operations again ad infinitum. The 
 cycles are dependent on Polar motion the double 
 movement of the pole of the earth and the spiral 
 that it makes in the "heavens" as the earth forges 
 ahead on its path. The figures that represent the 
 period of each " volute " of the pole, when added up, 
 always make a numeral of the number nine, gene- 
 rally eighteen (a bit of old mystic numeration at 
 which the modern thinker will smile). Briefly, for 
 those unacquainted with this system, it may be stated 
 that one revolution of the spiral made thus by the 
 earth's pole in the ethereal spaces is said to take 
 about 2,592.000 years of our "planetary time"
 
 ioo AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 which period is called one Polar Day. This, it is 
 stated, is the "Day" of the first chapter of Genesis. 
 Further, there are seven Life- Waves which perform 
 the circle of the planets in the solar system : each 
 wave occupying one Polar Day for its action on the 
 planet it touches, and then passing on to the next. 
 The theory goes on to show that the first portion of 
 the wave is the lowest point of its vitality and force. 
 And it will be remembered that the wording in the 
 Bible gives a curious and seemingly unreasonable 
 inversion of terms, and states that "the evening and 
 the morning were the First Day." Now, if we take 
 the "evening" as meaning a low point of vitality 
 (a very general belief), the order of the sentence 
 takes a new significance. 
 
 It must be owned at starting that there are many 
 points of difficulty and obscurity in the notion of 
 these Life-Waves, and many flaws seem detectable 
 at once. It is not for its unassailable application 
 that the theory is so well worth notice as for its 
 interest as an ancient idea of the cosmos, especially 
 in connection with the Hebrew scriptures. The first 
 and last of the Life- Waves seem, as far as I have 
 read, to be unnamed ; and there are, as in all old cal- 
 culations, only seven planets spoken of. However, 
 it is also observable that the unnamed Life-Waves 
 have their appointed work, which gives their char- 
 acter, and for the system of seven planets, there is 
 the theory of the Octave, well established in ancient
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 101 
 
 knowledge, wherein the eighth note echoes and in a 
 sense repeats the first. Nor, indeed, is there any- 
 thing hopelessly irreconcilable with truth in the 
 idea that when the seven waves have accomplished 
 their full cycle of work on a planet they pass away 
 from it, leaving the planet to disintegrate and return 
 to its primal condition, until the cyclic Life- Waves 
 once more come round to work its evolution anew. 
 
 The first of the Waves is said to be Spirit, 
 revealed or expressed in "Fire" and "Water"; 
 " Fire " being Spirit, and " Water " otherwise called 
 the "Astral Light." The fact that the first Life- 
 Wave is said to be "Spirit" at once points to the 
 mystical belief I have already noted that there is 
 nothing but Spirit in the universe Spirit in different 
 and innumerable grades of expression. We may 
 also observe in passing, that in this first Life-Wave 
 appears the embryo, as it were, of the great mystery 
 which rules the world the mystery of Sex. For 
 Fire and Water have always been held in mystic 
 science to be the correlative elemental expressions 
 of the masculine and feminine principles, the Spirit 
 being Fire and the soul Water. This being so, it is 
 but natural that the mystic should lay a very deep 
 and wide significance on the use of these metaphors 
 in the enunciation of the spiritual truth in the text, 
 " Except a man be born of water and the Spirit, he 
 cannot enter into the kingdom of God." In the 
 constitution of humanity the Soul is always mysti-
 
 102 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 cally spoken of as " Water " ; and as the planet is 
 held to be a complete macrocosm possessing a soul, 
 there is a peculiar significance again in the state- 
 ment that the " Spirit of God moved on the face of 
 the waters" 
 
 The second Life- Wave is the Gaseous ; the third, 
 the Mineral ; the fourth, the Vegetable ; the fifth-, 
 the Animal ; the sixth, the Human ; and the seventh 
 is figured as Divine Best. There are seven Rounds 
 of these seven Life-Waves to each complete cycle, 
 each Round having seven other subdivisions. Thus 
 the Human Life-Wave is said to have seven Root 
 Races of Humanity in its evolution; each of these 
 Root Races having further seven Families. The 
 selected or "immortal" types of each Family, and 
 finally of each Root Race, appear to outlive their 
 cycles, up and on (a survival of the fittest), reincar- 
 nating in the new and higher race, and passing on 
 to higher and higher developments until the highest 
 type of the full cycle of the Seven Cycles is gained. 
 It would then appear that the ascent into still higher 
 states, planetary, celestial, or deific, lies open. 
 
 The vastness of these cycles involves periods of 
 time (even in the one cycle of the seven revolu- 
 tions) that would surely satisfy the astronomer, aud 
 even accord the claims of the geologist, while in 
 their infinite renewal they almost may be said to 
 exceed any outlook of science. For it is stated that 
 the seven times seven " Rounds " make but forty-
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 103 
 
 nine cycles, and the fiftieth cycle is a period of rest, 
 when the sun will " rest" a solar Nirvana, so to speak 
 for a period of 127,008,000 years of our plane- 
 tary computation : the grand period of the Seven 
 Kounds of the Life- Waves themselves occupying, 
 on that calculation, 1,006,064,000 years. After the 
 " rest," the Life-Waves return to the worlds they have 
 ebbed from, and the whole cycles recommence. This, 
 as I have said, is supposed to go on ad infinitum. 
 
 Now, there is much here at which the scientist 
 and the Churchman may smile, and much that is 
 obviously crude in thought and disfigured by limi- 
 tation and error. I have stated the theory also far 
 too briefly and clumsily to represent it truly. Still, 
 even so, I cannot but think it is worth knowing. It 
 will be seen at a glance how singularly the cycles of 
 Life-Waves and the " days " of creation tally one with 
 another, and at the same time fuse into something- 
 like correspondence with the revelations of science. 
 Even the great period of rest has its echo in science, 
 for I believe I am stating a theory that is received 
 when I say that science prophesies the far-distant 
 period when the whole solar system will, by the 
 recoil of its own laws, become fixed and "at rest." 
 " Not only our earth, but the solar system as well, 
 has been what it is not at present ; had at one time 
 no existence as a system, and will one day cease to 
 exist as such." 1 And to support the further theory 
 
 1 Dr. Strauss, " Old Faiths and New."
 
 104 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 of the Life-Waves returning and reorganising the 
 whole system, Kant, in his " General History of the 
 Theory of the Heavens," says that there is no reason 
 why, if the earth could be once evolved out of chaos, 
 it should not be able to be so evolved again. He 
 calls the world " a phoenix which but consumes itself 
 in order to rise rejuvenated from its ashes." Cen- 
 turies ago Buddhism taught the universe was in 
 a perpetual revolution of birth and decay. Brah- 
 manism, with symbolisms of immemorial antiquity, 
 teaches the same idea. In the Classic theogony 
 Saturn devours his children. Leibnitz echoes the 
 thought when he spake of Deity as " the primitive 
 Monad, in a ceaseless state of expansion and con- 
 traction." 
 
 And we notice that science not only answers the 
 idea of the solar " rest," but that it also carries out 
 the belief that the planets are under various develop- 
 ments such as would be figured by the onward flow 
 of the Life- Waves. " A gradation in respect of their 
 comparative maturity," says Strauss, "is unquestion- 
 ably observable among the members of the solar 
 system ; thus even the mighty whole of the cosmos 
 resembles one of those tropical trees on which, 
 simultaneously, here a blossom bursts into flower, 
 there a ripe fruit drops from the branch." Thus 
 astronomers tell us that probably the mighty orb 
 of Jupiter is still partially incandescent, and that 
 the other giant planets beyond it are in the earlier
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 105 
 
 conditions of planetary evolution, whilst, on the 
 other hand, many reasons have been urged for the 
 supposition that Mars is in a higher state of " civi- 
 lisation " than our earth. To take the theory of the 
 cycles of the Life-Waves literally, and to suppose that 
 Mysticism claims for it any finality of truth, would 
 be, of course, to do it wrong. Such theories must 
 always be open to interpretation. They are always 
 a veil. 
 
 It is also worth noticing that the cycles of these 
 Life- Waves correspond in idea, if not in exact num- 
 ber and expression, with the Divine Years and the 
 system of cycles and numbers as held in the Yoga 
 philosophy of India. 
 
 These examples of ancient mystic thought, even 
 reviewed thus briefly and superficially, are sufficient 
 to show the points in view namely, that modern 
 thought and discovery have corroborated rather than 
 weakened them, and that Mysticism has a true wel- 
 come for the " facts " of science. 
 
 VII 
 
 The reign of bigotry and persecution is, we may 
 fairly hope, passing away for our cycle. Even 
 during the last fifty years there has been a slight 
 sensible diminution of intolerance in the centres 
 of civilisation. Fanaticism and denunciation are 
 indeed still cruel of hand and loud of voice : doubt-
 
 io6 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 less they will always be a power (in this " Round "), 
 but they no longer hold the undisputed rule they 
 once possessed. With the gradual and tardy draw- 
 ing off of the shadows of the Dark Ages shadows 
 that have lingered on late into the dawn of the 
 Modern Age may come the fulness of the new 
 day which some occultists tell us has dawned on 
 the world, bringing with it a light and a liberty in 
 which all the many lines of thought which approach 
 the veiled and central idea of Mysticism may be 
 raised out of much that has seemed to the world 
 dark and turgid, and be brought into relation with 
 lines of thought from which they now seem far 
 away. More and more the world appears to be 
 longing and looking for some line of fusion and 
 unity, wherein all the severed, and at present ap- 
 parently often antagonistic, schools of thought and 
 aspects of life may find some harmony. " We need 
 now," says Mr. Frederick Harrison in his Essay on 
 "The Connection of History," " harmony, order, union 
 . . . some common basis of belief some object for 
 the imperishable religious instincts and aspirations 
 of mankind some faith to bind the existence of 
 man to the visible universe around him. . . . We 
 need to extract the essence of all older forms of 
 civilisation, to combine them and harmonise them 
 into one." The Churches of Christendom would, no 
 doubt, advance to claim the power to do all these 
 things for the world ; but which Church would
 
 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 107 
 
 accept all its sister Churches, or be willing to offer 
 " some common basis of belief," sufficient for accept- 
 ance and love, to all other forms of creed outside 
 Christianity? A Church can scarcely expect the 
 lay world to receive the offer of its "common basis 
 of belief," when, in its own field, the unity of the 
 Churches of Christendom is still a problem that 
 gives no hope of practical solution. 
 
 Seldom in this cycle's known history, one is 
 minded to think, has there been greater need of 
 " a common basis of belief." Mysticism, mean- 
 while, stands unregarded in our midst, and speaks 
 aloud for those who have the ears to hear. Accept- 
 ing all creeds and beliefs in their places, perceiving 
 the same Revelation and Truth in each, in varying 
 degrees and modes of evolution, fitted to the time 
 and place ; welcoming all the knowledge, all the 
 daring thought, and all the patient discovery which 
 have led so many searchers after truth into agnos- 
 ticism or unbelief; extracting "the essence of all 
 older forms of civilisation " ; the Mystic is surely 
 able to perceive that possible line of " harmony, 
 order, union " in life and the world around him 
 which by their own confession neither philo- 
 sopher nor theologian nor scientist has yet been 
 able to point out. 
 
 The faith of Mysticism does indeed offer a com- 
 mon basis of belief to all creeds and peoples : it 
 enshrines, consecrates, and instructs " the imperish-
 
 io8 AN ENQUIRY INTO MYSTICISM 
 
 able religious instincts and aspirations of mankind." 
 Its sublime, and at the same time scientific, creed (if 
 that can be called a creed which is never dogmatic) 
 pre-eminently binds "the existence of man to the 
 visible universe around him." It has never burnt its 
 Brunos, nor forced its Galileos to recant their honest 
 convictions. It does not know heresy since it does 
 not possess dogma. Nor does it find evolution a 
 dangerous or questionable article of faith. There 
 is no aspect of nature, no outlook into the universe, 
 no enigma of social life and human passion, no 
 discovery of the historian or the man of science, 
 for which it has not welcome and acceptance. "I 
 am persuaded that a day will come in which the 
 physiologist, the poet, and the philosopher will 
 speak the same language and will understand one 
 another." l 
 
 The Unity to which all those who love " the 
 Kingdom of God" look with hope and a great 
 longing may be found by the world some day, 
 and at last, in the despised and rejected Faith that 
 has always literally believed that that Kingdom is 
 eternally one with Him who is "the same yester- 
 day, to-day, and for ever." 
 
 1 Claude Bernard.
 
 THE 
 ILLUSION OF REALISM
 
 " What again shall we say of the actual acquirements of 
 knowledge ? is the body, if invited to share in the enquiry, a 
 hinderer or a helper ? I mean to say, have sight and hearing 
 any truth in them ? Are they not, as the poets are always tell- 
 ing us, inaccurate witnesses ? And yet, if even they are inaccu- 
 rate and indistinct, what is to be said of the other senses ? for 
 you will allow they are the best of them. . . . Then, when does 
 the soul attain truth ? for in attempting to consider anything 
 in company with the body, she is obviously deceived. . . . Then 
 must not existence be revealed to her in thought if at all ? "- 
 PLATO, Phado. 
 
 " I do not argue against the existence of any one thing that 
 we can apprehend, either by sense or reflection. That the 
 things I see with mine eyes and touch with my hands do exist, 
 really exist, I make not the least question. The only thing 
 whose existence we deny is what philosophers call matter, or 
 corporeal substance. And in doing this, there is no damage 
 done to the rest of mankind, who, I dare say, will never miss 
 it." BERKELEY, Principles of Human Knowledge. 
 
 " They do but grope in learning's pedant round 
 Who on the phantasies of sense bestow 
 An idol substance." NEWMAN. 
 
 "We all have in us a hidden life, a secret consciousness, a 
 second sight, and, as it were, a superior soul sometimes un- 
 known to our best friends, and often misknown to ourselves ; 
 but which in reality watches over and directs our destinies. It 
 suffers, it lives, it fights, by its own innate individuality ; and 
 if it succeeds in liberating itself, it is nearly always independ- 
 ently of our exterior life, and in the face of the crushing force 
 of Realism." EDOUARD SCHDR, La Vic Mystique.
 
 II 
 
 THE ILLUSION OF REALISM 
 
 THE word Realism has been a popular and oft- 
 repeated one during the last twenty years or so. 
 For its origin doubtless we must look much farther 
 back. Probably it was used first in philosophic 
 phraseology as opposed to Nominalism. In eccle- 
 siastical history also we read of disputes between 
 the Socinians and the Realists. But in these 
 modern days it is as an artistic phrase that the 
 word is best known. It became popularised as the 
 name of a doctrine in Art by no means a new one, 
 but one that was emphasised with all the enthusiasm 
 of novelty and the attractive aspect of a revelation. 
 Annexed thus by the artistic world, it became asso- 
 ciated in most people's minds chiefly with painting 
 and literature, as representing an unshrinking facing 
 of the " facts of life," and an unswerving fidelity to 
 their outward presentment. As a phase of art it is 
 said to be already somewhat old-fashioned and " out 
 of date." Many methods have sprung up since 
 Realism was proclaimed to be the last word of the
 
 112 THE ILLUSION OF REALISM 
 
 studios. But Realism, even in the modern sense in 
 which I use the term, always in truth had a wider field 
 of operation than that of the schools of art. The pen 
 and pencil, the chisel and the brush, were some of 
 the most obvious, but not perhaps the most impor- 
 tant of its vehicles. It is probable that the move- 
 ment in art known as " Eealism " was but one 
 expression of a widespread and far-reaching impetus 
 of thought in the direction indicated by the name. 
 Certainly the realistic spirit cannot be said to be an 
 exclusive possession of any particular section of the 
 world in these days. It is broadcast, and has been 
 a marked feature in the life of our era. We may, 
 therefore, fairly take the word in its modern sense, 
 but irrespective of its artistic limitation. 
 
 In this wider interpretation the illusiveness of the 
 word itself, and the serious illusions of the attitude 
 of mind it indicates and the things it dignifies with 
 a misnomer, grow into importance and give rise to 
 many thoughts. 
 
 Words have a splendid and incorruptible way of 
 telling the truth, and so it is well to look at this 
 word Realism at the outset. The line of words of 
 the formation of real give their own meaning plainly. 
 We can instantly quote for ourselves plenty of ex- 
 amples : prim-al, physic-al, materi-al, caus-al, phan- 
 tasm-al, spiritu-al, &c., &c. The form and meaning 
 of each word is clear and simple. And so we find that 
 real deals in its root re with res the Thing, not the
 
 THE ILLUSION OF REALISM 113 
 
 material part of it, or the phantasmal or pheno- 
 menal, or any appearance of it, but the Thing itself. 
 Realism, then, should be an expression which claims 
 to give the reality, the essence, of the thing con- 
 templated. 
 
 Our estimate of the truth of this claim, as brought 
 forward by realism, must entirely depend on our own 
 conviction as to what is or is not " real." 
 
 The expression of realism, alike in art and thought 
 of any kind, is one which bases itself on the truth 
 of the testimony given by our senses what we see, 
 what we hear, what we touch, what we feel. If we 
 accept this testimony as our best proof of what is 
 real, then Realism will make good its claim to its own 
 name, and to our admiration and respect ; but if we 
 search for our reality in that which too often eludes 
 the senses, then to us this same realism will be the 
 most unsatisfying and the least true of things, and 
 the name the greatest of forgeries. To such amongst 
 us as take this view, the true word for the realism 
 of to-day is Materialism. It is well that this word 
 is beginning to be frankly used by the world in 
 certain directions ; but it is an honest word, and 
 stands self-convicted of limitation. We none of us, 
 doubtless, care to accept our limitations, and so the 
 great school and doctrine of appearances calls itself 
 Eealism. 
 
 The appropriation and use of this word is in itself 
 
 an audible confession of faith as to what views the 
 
 H
 
 114 THE ILLUSION OP REALISM 
 
 speaker holds on the subject of reality. As this 
 confession of faith is one that, beyond question, 
 would be readily endorsed by a large section of the 
 world, we may fairly ponder over our views of the 
 subject. 
 
 Truly no question seems fraught with vaster or 
 more immediate issues. It involves the very roots 
 of life, this question as to reality. One stands for 
 the moment abashed and awed before it. Have not 
 the greatest and wisest of all ages sought to answer 
 it? And yet, must we not all, down to the least 
 thoughtful and humblest-conditioned, answer it 
 practically, if unconsciously, in our lives, each for 
 himself as best he can ? It is a necessity of living 
 one of the conditions of the game of life. We 
 must have some sort of conviction of what reality 
 is, and what is or is not real ; and doubtless a large 
 number of comfortable folks find the conviction in 
 the realism of the senses find it, and neither ask 
 nor desire anything more. For others, no convic- 
 tion of reality, in any final or faith- worthy character, 
 exists anywhere; and, by an irony of fate that is 
 often busy in such matters, such men and women 
 are often found in the foremost rank of realism 
 Pyrrhonic realists, who in reality say there is none, 
 not even a final discovery of the illusion. 
 
 The greatest voices the world has heard have 
 given us ideas and conceptions of reality curiously 
 far removed from any attitude of realism. Plato
 
 THE ILLUSION OF REALISM 115 
 
 tells us that ideas are the only "truly existing 
 things," material things being but the appearance 
 in substance and materialisation of those ideas. The 
 reality of a thing is the creative idea of it the 
 "exemplary cause of it," as Zenocrates called it, 
 not the illusive corresponding appearance or ex- 
 pression of it an appearance that, even in the case 
 of substantial objects, is momentarily, if imper- 
 ceptibly, altering and passing away even whilst we 
 quote it as a reality. "Matter is only a sensuous 
 seeming, and spiritual essences are the only real 
 things in the world," was asserted by Lossius ; 
 and in 1893 we find in Mr. Bradley's lectures on 
 "Appearance and Reality" the confession that 
 "outside of spirit there is not, and there cannot 
 be, any reality : and the more that anything is 
 spiritual, so much the more is it veritably real." 
 This doctrine, still strong with imperishable youth, 
 still unwelcome and almost unknown to the world, 
 is of immemorial age. 
 
 It is at the heart of every faith, and is written 
 in every scripture. The " Bagavad Gita" and the 
 "Vedas," the "Avesta" and the "Book of the 
 Dead," assert with one voice that the things of 
 the spirit alone are real. The various schools of 
 philosophy which flourished in Greece, in Rome, 
 and in Alexandria agreed in this, at least that 
 phenomena are transitory and illusive. The Chris- 
 tian Church has always followed its Founder in
 
 n6 
 
 telling man that the realisation of the whole world 
 were profitless in comparison with the Reality that 
 is within him. And when, awakening from the 
 long arrest of thought in the Dark Ages, philosophy 
 again began to move forward after one brief out- 
 burst of natural materialism in the Cartesian reality 
 of matter the great thinkers, and notably the 
 group of illustrious German philosophers from 
 Spinosa l to Schopenhauer, soon showed that, how- 
 ever far removed one from another they might 
 be in their deductions, they were at one in ac- 
 cepting the premise that appearances are in no 
 sense real. 
 
 To the mind which has not accustomed itself by 
 inward perception, or by the exercise of technical 
 information, to this idea of the unreality of appear- 
 ances, the sober statement that the world in which 
 we live, and the things perceived by our senses, 
 are unreal, seems startling, and even ridiculous 
 a thing impossible and bordering on insanity. It 
 is difficult to see the grave difference between non- 
 
 1 "Mr. Lewes has well pointed out that had Spinosa used the 
 Greek word Noumenon instead of the Latin word Substans, a 
 great deal of unnecessary confusion would have been spared. 
 Whenever we come across the word ' substance ' we must re- 
 member he does not intend us to understand matter or anything 
 to do with matter, but that instead he intends to convey to our 
 minds the idea of the Noumenon or Reality which pervades and 
 underlies matter and all external nature ; the immanent, instead 
 of the extraneous, principle of the universe ; the one pervading 
 Reality, of which all phenomena are but transitory and fleeting 
 modes." C. E. PLCMPTRE, The History of Pantheism.
 
 THE ILLUSION OF REALISM 117 
 
 reality and non-existence. Bishop Berkeley works 
 these difficulties and objections out in more lucid 
 style than almost any other philosophic writer of 
 our speech. "It will be objected," he says, "that 
 by the foregoing principles all that is real and 
 substantial in Nature is banished out of the world, 
 and instead thereof a chimerical scheme of ideas 
 takes place. All things that exist, exist only in 
 the mind that is, they are purely notional. What, 
 therefore, becomes of the sun, moon, and stars? 
 What must we think of houses, rivers, mountains, 
 trees, stones nay, even of our own bodies? Are 
 all these but so many chimeras and illusions in the 
 fancy? To all which I answer, that by the prin- 
 ciples premised we are not deprived of anything in 
 Nature. Whatever we see, feel, hear, or anywise 
 conceive or understand, remains as secure as ever, 
 and is as real as ever. There is a rerum natura, 
 and the distinction between realities and chimeras 
 retains its full force." Doubtless this line of argu- 
 ment will never have many professed followers. 
 
 And yet, is it not a curious fact that in the 
 living world, in the daily acceptance of life by 
 the mass of people, the great reality of ideas and 
 the utter unreality and illusive character of appear- 
 ances is practically accepted and carried out with 
 unquestioning acquiescence ? The great realities 
 of life to the world at large, what are they but 
 those unseen forces which mould our life? Our
 
 n8 THE ILLUSION OF REALISM 
 
 hold on one another and on the social organisa- 
 tion of life, whereby and wherein our daily life 
 and well-being consists, all our deeper relations 
 with those around us, are they not in essence 
 immaterial, spiritual, real in the true sense (the 
 very reverse of the sense in which we generally 
 use the word), involving Thought and the Un- 
 seen as the great realities? What are Love, and 
 Hope, and Courage, and Faith, and Sympathy, and 
 Jealousy, and Doubt, and Fear ? What is the 
 Memory that moves us so deeply? what the Pur- 
 pose that holds us so strenuously to some aim in 
 life? It is not to the point to enquire if these 
 things are spiritual in the deeper sense, or merely 
 the result of certain workings of the brain-cells 
 and centres of our organic system. Whatever 
 they are, they have no "appearance," they are 
 unreal in the sense of having no appeal to those 
 senses which are the standard and test of Realism. 
 For all the world, after all, even for the material- 
 istic, realistic world, the real principalities and 
 powers of life are Love and Thought. Even the 
 tangled and apparently wholly physical growth 
 and action of passion strikes its roots deeper than 
 appearances, and has a vitality that physiology 
 cannot wholly unravel. 
 
 We all of us live and move and have our being, 
 not in what is seen and " real " in the parlance of 
 the world, but in the things we cannot see ; just
 
 THE ILLUSION OF REALISM 119 
 
 the very things we laugh at the philosopher for 
 calling the realities. The veriest sensualist lives 
 for and in the senses which he enjoys, and not 
 in and for the things enjoyed. They are not even 
 his realities. Let the sense that uses them fail, 
 and they are the most mocking and cruel of 
 illusions to him, even when he still clings to them 
 as realities. The great words of the Great Teacher 
 are true with an appalling truth. Whatever our 
 heaven may be, be it but a fool's paradise and a 
 dream, its kingdom is within us. It is not in 
 the external things which we think are its reali- 
 ties. If Nature, with her thousand voices, and 
 life, with all its daily lessons, fail to tell us of 
 the reality of things not seen, the unreality of 
 things we see, death at least, with ruthless and 
 irrefutable logic, should show us how little the 
 man and the appearance of the man are one. 
 
 In these days, when a knowledge of the results of 
 science are in great measure accessible to us all, it is 
 always interesting to turn and ask its witness to the 
 truth of a theory before us. In this case the wit- 
 ness is speedily found. It is only so universal that 
 it is difficult to know which special instance to 
 quote. In these pages a dozen passages from scien- 
 tific writers are given which might well be cited 
 here. 1 Science tells us, with reiteration, that the 
 
 1 Edward Clodd, Dr. Draper, Herbert Spencer, Oamille Flam- 
 marion, Sir Robert Ball, &c.
 
 120 THE ILLUSION OF REALISM 
 
 evidence of our senses is seldom trustworthy, and is 
 never final. The illusion is oftentimes twofold, for 
 not only is the thing seen a mere " appearance " a 
 " correlation of numberless forces and reflections, 
 molecular changes, and subtle predispositions ac- 
 quired and inherited " but the very " appearance " 
 itself is actually delusive and misleading. The 
 reality is an exact reverse of the appearance. 
 ,Realism would have told us that the sun moves 
 round the earth, rises, and sets. The illusion of the 
 appearance is complete. The ray of light which 
 strikes us noiv started on its tremendous journey 
 from the sun more than eight minutes ago. The 
 stars we see to-night may every one have ceased to 
 exist, some of them centuries, and even asons ago. 
 There is nothing in the whole scope of bodily sen- 
 sation and perception that is not a " deceiving 
 appearance," with some unseen force behind it, 
 which, if not final, is at least nearer to reality than 
 the appearance we call " real." Such instances we 
 often accept with all the cheap dignity and willing- 
 ness of one who receives gratis something he would 
 never have worked or paid for himself; but we fail 
 to carry the analogy, with all its suggestive thought, 
 into other matters. 
 
 Heraclitus of old pronounced eye and ear alike 
 to be false witnesses, and saw in continuous and 
 apparently fixed conditions of being only an eternal 
 flux. Seneca says : "No one is to-day what he was
 
 THE ILLUSION OF REALISM 121 
 
 yesterday. Our bodies change as streams do, and 
 everything flows away, as time does ; nothing en- 
 dures." This was the opinion of Heraclitus : "The 
 name of the stream endures the water runs away." 
 Yet these great philosophers of old perhaps scarcely 
 realised what now we know : that the eternal change 
 and flux of things is but a part of their illusiveness 
 the things themselves (as, for example, the water 
 of the stream that is " running away ") being but 
 phenomena capable of infinite transmutation and 
 resolution into constituent parts. " Everything 
 looks permanent until its secret is known;" but 
 " permanence is a word of degrees ; everything is 
 medial." l To him who would build his creed on 
 appearances, the world the universe is one great 
 snare for delusion. 
 
 The perception, indeed, of this fact alters all life 
 to him who gains it. It is in the region of Thought 
 a Copernican discovery. It reconstructs our idea of 
 the universe. The sunset and the dawn recur the 
 same as ever ; day and night reassert their sequence. 
 Only we find that it is the earth which is revolving 
 round the sun, and not the sun which is revolving 
 around us. Does the thought seem unimportant ? 2 
 To my mind the importance cannot be overstated. 
 
 1 Emerson. 
 
 - Extraordinary as it sounds to say so, the matter is of little 
 import to some people. Rossetti has left it recorded that he cared 
 nothing for such truths 1 So strangely does realism, i.e. content- 
 ment and satisfaction in appearances, assert itself sometimes.
 
 122 THE ILLUSION OF REALISM 
 
 It is nothing short of a birth into a new world. 
 Its correspondences with life and all the deepest 
 questions of life are vital. The difference between 
 the appearance and the reality in such a case is 
 literally a new heaven and a new earth. But it is 
 evident that all such truths, carried to their true 
 issues and analogies, strike a deeper note than the 
 world as a rule cares to hear. " Few men," says 
 Goethe, " have imagination enough for the truth of 
 Reality." 
 
 The thought involved in its reception is unwel- 
 come to people who live in and for appearances 
 as we must confess most people do. Nay, it is 
 even unwelcome oftentimes to the scholar and the 
 artist, for the professionalism of the schools and 
 the academies may be the be-all and end-all of 
 both learning and art. It is unwelcome to all 
 who would fain live in the external fairness and 
 beauty of things the colour, the form, the song, 
 the warmth, the emotion. Appearances can be so 
 dignified with great and sounding names, with such 
 authority of the letter of the law and the consensus 
 of opinion ; with such fine and convincing theories, 
 and such an appeal to pulsating human life; they 
 can, moreover, so completely fill all life to us, that 
 many never care to question their reality. And 
 let it be confessed that the detection of the illusion, 
 though it be a step on the real road to truth and 
 sanity, is like all such steps on the spiritual road
 
 THE ILLUSION OF REALISM 123 
 
 upward and onward attended with danger. He 
 who would see the unreality of things the world 
 calls real should guard his steps well, lest they 
 lead him to worse illusions than those of a sanely 
 material, or even of a frankly sensuous world. 
 Of the crisis that arises in the mind when the 
 veil of illusion lifts itself I need not speak. But 
 it is necessarily a crisis that brings a great light 
 or a great darkness. " Of the terrible doubt of 
 appearances," Walt Whitman has sung, as have 
 many poets and seers. Of the sight of realities 
 beyond them we have many songs also. And the 
 song of the poet and the seer at that Beatific 
 Vision must always be a hymn of initiation and 
 of triumph. But the initiation and the triumph 
 are not gained without a struggle or without danger 
 faced and conquered. 
 
 Men of science, one thinks, ought to be the last 
 to believe in " realistic " thought of any kind. And 
 yet we often find them emphatically believers in a 
 realism of their own. The elementary realism of the 
 world at large they do indeed reject and pass beyond. 
 Appearances are reduced to their last tenuity for 
 them. They follow "life" back to the cell and 
 protoplasm, and trace it up to the point where the 
 arrest of the body asserts itself in man. But it 
 seems to the observer as if science were often quite 
 willing to stop at these points and accept them as 
 finalities for us. That mysterious something which
 
 124 THE ILLUSION OF REALISM 
 
 fronts us alike in the formation of the amoeba or 
 of the human brain is just the part of the question 
 that interests us dwellers outside the magic circle 
 of science interests us in a way we refuse to have 
 belittled or labelled with a name, and so disposed 
 of. To us it would seem that the lowest or the 
 highest the densest or the most ethereal the first 
 step taken or the last in sight is but a question 
 of degree ; and to stop at any step of the road and 
 pronounce it final or satisfying is but to accept 
 Realism after all, and to rest contented with an 
 appearance. 
 
 But of all forms of this widespread realism there 
 is none more illusive or more perennial than that 
 of a certain order of religious belief. It is difficult 
 to speak of the subject without giving offence where 
 one would far liever give sympathy and assurance 
 of understanding. The conventional religionism I 
 refer to deserves, indeed, small respect or considera- 
 tion in and for itself, but with one of the many 
 contradictions of human nature those who hold it 
 often deserve not only consideration, but respect 
 as well. Without offence, however, one may con- 
 template the strange illusion of the religions posi- 
 tion that fights to the death for verbal accuracy 
 and literal interpretations of scriptures in which 
 it is distinctly asserted that the "letter" kills; or 
 the realism that delights in ceremonial for its own 
 sake. Form and definiteness are strangely attrac-
 
 THE ILLUSION OF REALISM 125 
 
 tive to most people in all religion, and the realistic 
 attitude of thought can supply both in generous 
 measure. 
 
 A resolute outline and capacity seem to argue to 
 many a good proof of a homogeneous inward sub- 
 stance. The desire to materialise, to personify and 
 embody, is, we all know, the great and besetting 
 temptation to all religious cults. It is the key to 
 the deterioration and decay of many a faith. The 
 phrase " a firm faith," as often means that the faith 
 has a firm material body as that it is firmly assured 
 of a living spirit. 
 
 It would appear that the highest forms of the 
 religious temper, and the highest examples of spiri- 
 tual insight, have always been of the incorporeal 
 and immaterialised kind. They have been essen- 
 tially mystical and unconventional ; they have often 
 seemed to be daringly indifferent to the seen, dan- 
 gerously percipient of the unseen : for ever trying 
 to pierce the appearance and face the reality. To 
 such natures a realism in religious faith must 
 always be the most abject of illusions. It is notice- 
 able that the only words of scathing scorn that 
 passed the lips of Him in Judaea of old who had 
 words of mercy and acceptance for all were directed 
 at those who were the followers of this realistic 
 theology this consecration of ecclesiastical appear- 
 ances. Such a realism is in truth the Hindoo Maya 
 Illusion : the world of sense that hides the real
 
 126 THE ILLUSION OF REALISM 
 
 world of spirit. To the truly religious and spiritual 
 mind, the witness of the senses, even in their highest 
 degree, is very fallacious. " Men who form their 
 judgment upon sense often err," writes Thomas a 
 Kempis. Holy writings in all ages have consis- 
 tently emphasised the unreality of the earthly wit- 
 ness and symbol, unless the eye sees the realities 
 beyond. 
 
 " We see as we have eyes to see " is a proverbial 
 truth that seems at once to undermine the stand- 
 point of realism, not so much from the region of 
 reality that may lie beyond, as from the region of 
 illusion in which the realist himself is placed. It 
 hints that appearances are themselves a variable 
 and uncertain quantity. Their character, arid cer- 
 tainly their appeal, seem to lie more in the eye that 
 sees them than in their own consistence. Do any 
 two people " see " one object exactly the same ? 
 In one sense, of course, they cannot do so at the 
 same time, since the difference in the point of view 
 that lies between two people standing even close 
 side by side is perceptible and affects the present- 
 ment of the thing seen. 
 
 There is a wonderful and searching parable in 
 this, if the world would but remember it. No two 
 people in the world, to follow Heraclitan thought, 
 can ever see exactly the same thing. To do so 
 would necessitate identity of point of view with 
 identity of moment of sight, and these are impos-
 
 THE ILLUSION OF REALISM 127 
 
 sible. The analogy explains a good many things 
 and differences of opinion in life. But who is 
 there who actually and consistently realises the 
 analogy ? There is even a truth in the further 
 elaboration of the thought that to see a thing 
 with the rounded and life-like truth of our full 
 vision, we must in ourselves see it at once from 
 two points of view; and though the angle of the 
 parallax that lies between our two eyes is very 
 small, yet it increases as the object is brought 
 near a feature well known in optics. It were 
 well if it were recognised in ethics and other 
 matters. But the difference between the vision 
 of A and B may be yet greater than this 
 more than a mere change of position and time. 
 It is difficult to gain any proof of such difference, 
 since there is no standard, and the same terms 
 may mean very different things in different 
 speakers' minds. In the perception of colour it 
 seems pretty evident that we differ strangely ; and 
 we know that colour in itself is not an objective 
 and primary fact, but the result of many forces 
 finally transmitted through the eye to the brain. 
 " Colour is not a property of the thing seen ; it 
 is a sensation produced in us by that thing." 1 
 
 And it is evident that although the undulations 
 and complex movements which transmit the force 
 to our eyes may in all cases be identical, the 
 
 1 A. Balfour, " The Foundations of Belief."
 
 128 THE ILLUSION OF REALISM 
 
 apparatus of sight which receives and transmutes 
 them into what we call colour may be surely 
 of varying power and receptivity. The extra- 
 ordinary differences of opinion and expression 
 about colour, the marked diversity of perception 
 of it which is observable in painters, who record 
 to the best of their abilities the impressions of 
 colour which they receive, can scarcely be ex- 
 plained on any other supposition than that in 
 this matter " we see as we have eyes to see." 
 Turner's famous speech to the lady who objected 
 to the colouring he had depicted on his canvas as 
 being unreal, is in truth the only answer that 
 can be given. " I do not see anything like that 
 in Nature ! " " Don't you wish you did ? " The 
 whole matter lay in that. She did not see it; 
 he did. Any one who loves colour, and endeavours 
 to train and educate his eye to perceive it, must 
 have noticed how perceptibly the " sense of colour " 
 grows, like any sense that is trained. " We see 
 as we have eyes to see." Kuskin has given us 
 some very fine and memorable passages on this 
 subject. 
 
 But perhaps we find the final argument that 
 proves what we may call the illusiveness of colour 
 in the experiments which have been made with 
 the solar spectrum. By these we learn that the 
 colour we see in an object, and by which we 
 describe it, is, in deeper truth, the very colour
 
 THE ILLUSION OF REALISM 129 
 
 it does not possess. The colour exhibited is the 
 rejected ray. The green leaf is green because it 
 has received and kept every ray except the green, 
 and that ray is therefore thrown back ; white 
 shows that the object so distinguished has refused 
 all the rays ; black is the reception of all. The 
 realisation of these facts alters the complexion of 
 our belief in the realism of colour : they show us, 
 in fact, the reality that lies behind all colours by 
 a true knowledge of their seeming illusions. Illu- 
 sion ceases when it recognises it. 
 
 Colour, then, is so obviously an uncertain 
 quantity that few people will resist the thought 
 of its illusiveness ; but form may seem a more 
 objective and substantial matter. It requires, there- 
 fore, a subtler perception to discern that it, too, 
 is a mere appearance. Its material expression is 
 not volatile like colour, and it cannot be gravely 
 suggested, even for a moment, that form is a 
 momentarily fluctuating and undulating thing. If 
 it be classed as non-real, it must be in the same 
 sense in which Berkeley argues the unreality of 
 substance. Form, in fact, is so to speak the 
 outline of substance, the edges where its condition 
 ceases. But it is probable, not only by Berkeleian 
 philosophy, but by experimental demonstration, that 
 substance is not a reality, and is merely a con- 
 dition, and at the densest is non-solid. If, then, 
 
 substance itself is but conditional, form is still 
 
 I
 
 130 THE ILLUSION OF REALISM 
 
 more conditional, since it is but a passing expres- 
 sion of the substance. Form is a reality, of course, 
 in one sense, just as time and place are real. 
 But in that perception of reality in which time 
 and place are seen to be the first and last of 
 illusions, form is also seen to be a thing that 
 only realism can accept as real. The man of 
 science now rises to the point at which, in 
 thought, time and place cease to have any mean- 
 ing ; l and certainly, to the world at large, form 
 itself, with all its outline of definite proportions, 
 is not held more real than the conditions of time 
 and place. 
 
 Yet he who believes that the things which the 
 world, with its many forms of realism, calls real, 
 are but appearances, veiling and revealing the real, 
 is no despondent dreamer wandering in a phan- 
 
 1 " Our conception of Nature should embrace time as well as 
 space. In space we see across millions and millions of miles ; in 
 time we may travel back through centuries and millions of cen- 
 turies. Our position and our time are important to us, but they 
 are absolutely nothing to Nature, for here there is nothing absolute 
 but infinity and eternity. . . . The moon is the world of yesterday ; 
 the earth is the world of to-day ; Jupiter is the world of to-morrow. 
 The idea of time is thus fixed on our minds like that of space, but 
 the law of the plurality of worlds rules for ever. ... It is we who 
 say yesterday and to-morrow ; for Nature it is always to-day. " 
 FLAMMARION, Popular Astronomy. 
 
 I need scarcely say that these considerations about form and 
 colour are in no sense meant to apply to artistic realism. It is 
 obvious that art must accept the finality of both form and colour. 
 The facts are only stated to form arguments against the spiritual 
 and mental realisms of the world arguments borrowed from the 
 natural world of phenomena, often spoken of as real.
 
 THE ILLUSION OF REALISM 131 
 
 tasmal and delusive world. For him the boundaries 
 that mark the sanities of this life, the healthful per- 
 ception of the separate senses, the healthful exer- 
 cise of their functions, the acceptance and commerce 
 of the necessary conditions of civilised social life, 
 the great established laws of right and wrong, are 
 all as clear as ever they can be to the earnest realist 
 or the simple, childlike "believer." They are, in- 
 deed, clearer, for they not only hold their own 
 truths, but reveal the presence of the deeper truth 
 that consecrates them. He knows that all these 
 things are absolutely true, and absolutely real in 
 their degrees. They are no delusions. The illusion 
 lies, he holds, in the way the realist regards all 
 appearances not in the appearances themselves. 
 They are real in so far, and in as long, as we are 
 placed amid them, ourselves the centre of them, 
 to learn of them, to rule them 
 
 " To be run, and continued, and ended who knows ? to 
 
 endure ! 
 
 The man taught enough by life's dream of the rest to make 
 sure ! " l 
 
 He sees in them the reality that shines brighter 
 as each veil of appearance rises. The sunshine is 
 not less " real " to the man of science who knows 
 that its light and warmth are, in one sense, illusions, 
 than it is to the child who never questions what it 
 is, but takes its heat and beauty and rejoices. Life 
 
 1 Browning, "Saul."
 
 132 THE ILLUSION OF REALISM 
 
 is not less real to the man who knows it is, in the 
 same sense, an illusion, than it is to him whose 
 creed is as the child's acceptance of the sunshine. 
 The man who sees all things as appearances that at 
 once veil and reveal realities attains in that vision 
 a true science and a true sanity. For him, as far as 
 may be and is possible in existing conditions, illu- 
 sion, as such, ceases. To no one is the sunshine so 
 bright and so health-giving, or the cloud so neces- 
 sary and inevitable a part of the sunshine it veils. 
 The illusion of life is his assurance of its reality : 
 to look on it as his reality were to him an incon- 
 ceivable and unbearable delusion a creed of dust 
 and ashes. And to him the attitude of thought and 
 mind represented in Eealism is, therefore, the one 
 attitude, the one " gospel " he fights and denounces 
 for to him it represents the real illusion of the world. 
 Our age has been often called a " realistic age." 
 It would truly seem in many ways to deserve this 
 definition. Many influences have brought about 
 the spirit of modern realism. The advance of 
 luxury, with all its appeals to the senses; the 
 spread of a superficial learning, which breaks down 
 old-fashioned reverence of awe, but does not go far 
 enough to build up a new reverence of knowledge 
 the worship of physical beauty for its own sake ; 
 the dogmatism of the faith that distrusted the New 
 Science ; the equal dogmatism of the New Science 
 that disliked faith ; all these things would go to
 
 THE ILLUSION OF REALISM 133 
 
 produce the widespread realism we have seen around 
 us in the world. In Art such a spirit becomes 
 obvious beyond escape of notice. But in a sense it 
 is essentially a mark of the inartistic temperament. 
 It seems difficult to imagine a really great artist 
 who is a pure realist. The world's insight in such 
 matters is not penetrating, and above all things the 
 world loves a label. It has, therefore, tied on the 
 label of " realist " to artists and writers who are 
 in heart seers and poets, although their mode of 
 expression and method of representation may be 
 relentlessly drawn from the life. Whilst, to pre- 
 serve a fine balance of inaccuracy, it has called other 
 artists and writers " idealists," who, in truth, never 
 go beyond the appearance of things, and under a 
 surface of decorative fancy and design, of sym- 
 bolic names and a romantic mise-cn-scne, are mere 
 realists. 
 
 It does not seem to have occurred to the world 
 at large, moreover, that realism finds its greatest 
 number of followers and shows its strongest en- 
 campments in the fields of Thought, Science, and 
 Religion. But it is cheering to discern signs here 
 and there of a new order of thought arising, or 
 shall we not say, of a return to the truer order of 
 thought ? One sign is notable. It was in the 
 ranks of Art the expression, as a popular one, arose. 
 It is in the ranks of Art we notice some of the most 
 distinct indications of a reaction. By many voices
 
 134 THE ILLUSION OF REALISM 
 
 and in many directions it would appear the world 
 is becoming conscious of the illusion of Kealism, 
 and is setting itself again to look deeper toward 
 reality : " Our question lies with the ideal reality 
 that exists behind- appearance." 1 
 
 1 In a letter from Plotinus to Flaccus.
 
 THE 
 
 LINES OF COINCIDENCE
 
 "This universe ah me ! what could the wild man know of 
 it ? what can we yet know ? That it is a force and thousand- 
 fold complexity of forces. . . . Force, force, everywhere force : 
 we ourselves a mysterious force in the centre of that. There is 
 not a leaf rotting on the highway but has force in it : how else 
 could it rot ? " CARLYLE. 
 
 "The study of 'mysterious' phenomena leads to the recog- 
 nition of important laws." Dr. ALBEET MOLL. 
 
 "There is no such thing as chance; and what seems to us 
 merest accident springs from the deepest sources of destiny." 
 SCHILLER. 
 
 "All nature is but art unknown to thee : 
 All chance, direction which thou canst not see." 
 
 POPE.
 
 Ill 
 
 FEW people, one may safely assert, pass through life 
 without experiencing certain events, or " occurrences 
 of thought," for which no better name is to be found 
 than Coincidences. Some people seem to be pecu- 
 liarly distinguished by such experiences. They are, 
 as Emerson puts it, " made up of rhyme, coincidence, 
 omen, periodicity, and presage : they meet the person 
 they seek : what their companion prepares to say to 
 them, they first say to him : and a hundred signs 
 apprise them of what is to befall." To all of us, 
 even of unrhythmic nature, circumstances will occa- 
 sionally arise outward event and inward thought 
 sympathies and antipathies sometimes in a matter 
 of importance and sometimes in the most trivial and 
 commonplace routine of daily life which strike us 
 as being at once unaccountable and significant. 
 We are conscious of a sense of unseen correspond- 
 ence, where none apparently exists ; of prevision, 
 
 '37
 
 138 THE LINES OF COINCIDENCE 
 
 of echo, of something which at least demands other 
 explanation than that which is afforded by casualty, 
 or the law and logic of everyday life as they are 
 gathered up in the colloquial use of the word 
 Coincidence. 
 
 The meanings applied to this word are many. 
 They cover a field that ranges almost from the 
 "Divinity that shapes our ends" to a chance nn- 
 tempered by any considerations, divine or otherwise. 
 Our modern Chance seems the apotheosis of Agnos- 
 ticism. The Pagan world gave it a firmer outline. 
 " Even the works of chance," writes Marcus Aurelius, 
 " are not without dependence on Nature." But in 
 our superstitious fear of superstition we have seized 
 on the words coincidence and chance, and, in defiance 
 of etymology, emptied them of all meaning. Coin- 
 cidence has become one of the favourite fetiches of 
 science and of popular scepticism. As Madame 
 Blavatsky humorously puts it, "For coincidences 
 our friends the sceptics appear to have an unappeas- 
 able appetite." And the curious part of the business 
 is, that it appears to be considered by many people, 
 who would in other matters be the first to use words 
 carefully, that when anything is labelled with this 
 word Coincidence it is thereby placed beyond the 
 region of intelligent interest. Why ? Is the mean- 
 ing of the word forgotten, or is it ignored ? 
 
 For when we consider the word in its derivative 
 signification, we find it is not far removed from the
 
 THE LINES OF COINCIDENCE 139 
 
 notion of absolute law. In the shorter form of 
 incidence it enters the region of pure science. 1 In 
 logic the whole word coincidence is often used. 2 It 
 may be said, when we come to look at it seriously, 
 to be positively mathematical in its meaning. In 
 physics and optics incident and incidence are terms of 
 frequent and important use. The angle of incidence, 
 the line of incidence, the ray and the point of inci- 
 dence, are expressions familiar to us all. Surely this 
 suggests, to say the least of it, a line of thought 
 diametrically opposed to anything haphazard or 
 savouring of the nature of blind irrational chance. 
 The word, rightly considered, strikes a note of cause 
 and effect. It seems to involve some starting-point 
 of impetus, some foreseen point of contact, an initial 
 velocity or force for those lines or bodies that are 
 to meet or strike a given plane coincidently. It 
 is, therefore, strange that a coincidence should be 
 regarded, not only by the casual speaker, but by men 
 of exact thought and careful vocabulary, as some- 
 thing confessedly outside the region of law; and 
 that in using the word it should be held that the 
 thing so described is deprived of all its mystery or 
 possible meaning. " A mere coincidence ! " It is a 
 
 1 " In equal incidences there is a considerable inequality of 
 refractions." NEWTON. 
 
 2 " The want of exact coincidence between these two notes is an 
 inherent imperfection in the musical scale. " WHEWELL. 
 
 "Christianity teaches nothing but what is perfectly coincident 
 with the ruling principles of a virtuous man." SOUTH.
 
 140 THE LINES OF COINCIDENCE 
 
 delightful label. But what does it mean? What 
 does it mean notably to those who keep a plentiful 
 supply of the labels always on hand ? A cast of the 
 dice no more ? Nothing more : save, it may be, 
 occasionally in some weak and too-imaginative minds, 
 an unpleasing suspicion that the dice are loaded. 
 
 It is not my purpose to do more than glance at 
 some of the aspects Coincidence presents to us 
 to-day, or has assumed in the past. To enter into 
 such a subject in any way would demand the pro- 
 portions of a volume and the information of a 
 scholar. It opens a field of research rather than 
 of suggestion ; and it is suggestion alone, and that 
 in but elementary form, I desire to touch. 
 
 Nothing in the world, as far as we see, is other 
 than the work of fixed and absolute law. The law 
 is not in all cases yet discovered, in many is scarcely 
 apprehended ; but its existence is not for a moment 
 doubted or questioned. " Everything which per- 
 tains to the human species, considered as a whole, 
 belongs to the order of physical facts." Such is the 
 statement of the great Flemish astronomer and 
 mathematician, Quetelet. Physical facts are indis- 
 putably the expression and result of exact laws. 
 Unquestionably, too, it may be asserted that the 
 existence and confession of the strange experiences 
 and events which may be gathered under the head 
 of coincidences " pertain to the human species, con- 
 sidered as a whole," for it would be difficult to find
 
 THE LINES OF COINCIDENCE 141 
 
 the age or country where, in some form or other, 
 Coincidence has not been observed and confessed. 
 It may, therefore, be stated that Coincidence "be- 
 longs to the order of physical facts." It must, then, 
 be obedient to law. We have come to the con- 
 clusion that even that most uncertain and insecure 
 of physical facts, the weather, is governed by law. 
 Our weather reports and prognostications are not 
 very hopeful as yet, but that would appear to arise, 
 not so much from the magnitude of the elements 
 and conditions to be observed, as from their com- 
 plex and involved character and our own entangle- 
 ment (so to speak) with their manifestation. It is 
 a case of not being able to see the wood for the 
 trees. We need a coign of vantage from which to 
 survey the whole question. 
 
 It is much the same with Coincidence. To dis- 
 cover its laws would seem to be even more delicate 
 and difficult a work than to formulate the laws 
 which govern the weather. But the first step 
 must certainly be to acknowledge that such laws 
 exist. We have taken that step with regard to 
 the weather. The rainfall, the clouds, the winds, 
 the isotherms of the year, the atmospheric de- 
 pressions, cyclonic and anticyclonic conditions, are 
 all being studied and reduced to a perceptible 
 system. But we stop at the physical world, as we 
 so often do, and are minded to consider that the 
 laws which have led us so universally and unfail-
 
 142 THE LINES OF COINCIDENCE 
 
 ingly on our way thus far suddenly break off here, 
 and leave us in a supernatural, super-rational, law- 
 less sort of region where law does not exist. We 
 resign the ethical region of coincidence either to 
 the hazy, illogical, reverently-blasphemous notion 
 of some capricious and accidental Divine gover- 
 nance, or to the empty anarchy of chance. But it 
 would seem that the truer view were to regard it 
 as belonging to a higher "order of physical facts." 
 It will lose nothing of mystery or of difficulty in 
 this association; it may rather be found to gain 
 in both, and at the same time to show the grave 
 error that has been made by the over-credulous in 
 imputing to coincidences an unreasonable mean- 
 ing, and the still graver error of the over-sceptical 
 in denying that they possess any meaning at all. 
 
 When we take some of the instances of Coin- 
 cidence, we perceive signs that surely tell in favour 
 of the presence of law. We may quote the follow- 
 ing examples : The recurrence of similar events in 
 the world at stated intervals : l the way in which an 
 idea is seized or an influence felt simultaneously by 
 people unassociated with one another : the waves of 
 thought and feeling which will pass through the 
 world, finding expression in varied forms, but tak- 
 ing the same direction : the cluster of answering 
 
 1 " It is a rule that the most casual and extraordinary events, 
 if the basis of population is broad enough, become matter of fixed 
 calculation." EMKBSON.
 
 THE LINES OF COINCIDENCE 143 
 
 ing thoughts and occurrences that will gather round 
 a given centre of interest : the chain of events of like 
 kind that will form itself without apparent cause 
 or concert : the strange and sometimes inexplicable 
 good or ill fortune that will follow a man through life, 
 or a community through its career. 
 
 It is not necessary to enter on the lengthy task of 
 exemplifying these instances. The greater number 
 of them are matters of personal experience with us 
 all, and a consideration of the public events of a 
 century will testify to the possible existence of the 
 larger areas of Coincidence. 
 
 Now in all these examples of Coincidence we per- 
 ceive what may be taken as evidence of the pre- 
 sence of three great laws Attraction, Repulsion, 
 and Affinity. These laws are amongst the greatest 
 governing forces we know in matter. And why 
 should they be limited to matter ? And even if 
 they are, who can absolutely affirm where the realm 
 of matter ends ? It is the old ever-recurring ques- 
 tion are we not misled by our notions of what 
 matter is ? We are apt to think of it as something 
 gross, tangible, palpable ; something to be cognised 
 by the senses of touch and sight. We do not suffi- 
 ciently realise even the more ethereal forms of matter 
 of which Science herself tells us nay, of which we 
 ourselves have daily experience, as in scent, in the 
 air, and in many material forms which escape de- 
 tection by our ordinary senses. The light from one
 
 144 THE LINES OP COINCIDENCE 
 
 of Crookes' vacuum tubes, by which photography 
 seems initiating a new era for medical science, is 
 almost too rare for ocular perception. It seems to 
 be to light what the ether is to air. The light of 
 a comet is matter in such a high state of tenuity 
 that, bright as it is, it is scarcely more materialised 
 than the ether itself, for the most distant stars have 
 been discerned through the streaming tail of such a 
 body with no perceptible diminution of their lustre 
 or their size. We can, then, trace matter back to 
 the unseen long before it passes on to the realm of 
 the unknown. It may well be, therefore, that laws 
 which attend matter all the way on this journey to 
 the point where it passes from the ken of the scien- 
 tific student, may pass with it over that mysterious 
 limit, and rule it in the unknown as we confess they 
 rule it in the known. 
 
 And in naming comets we bring into the subject 
 mysterious visitors to our system in whom we may 
 find an analogy for the mysterious visitations of 
 Coincidence. For as comets visit our solar system 
 in cycles, the parabolas of which are determined so 
 accurately that the return of these brilliant meteoric 
 Free Lances of the universe can be prophesied al- 
 most to an hour, so there may be visitors of still 
 more etherialised character, of matter so fine as 
 to pass beyond the sphere that we call material 
 and enter that we call spiritual or psychic, which also 
 may have their periodicity, in cycles of advance aud
 
 THE LINES OF COINCIDENCE 145 
 
 retirement, exercising influences and causing pertur- 
 bations, as they pass, on the thought-life of earth 
 and even on the sphere of human action. It seems 
 unreasonable to allow that Nature is one vast and 
 complex system, a cosmos of rigorous and irrefran- 
 gible law, not an atom being left free or uninflu- 
 enced, and yet to argue or take it for granted that 
 life the world of thought and circumstance, and all 
 that is covered by the term "human life " presents 
 to us no such system or cosmic order. Still less 
 reasonable would it seem to be to argue (as it is 
 to be feared many do) that an enquiry into these 
 questions is beyond our right or power. 
 
 A few centuries ago the world at large in Chris- 
 tendom considered it impious to study the physical 
 universe, and found black heresy in the assertions 
 that our earth is a globe and moves round the sun. 
 We have long passed that dismal stage of supersti- 
 tion miscalled the Age of Faith, but it is to be ques- 
 tioned whether many people to-day would not find 
 some danger in scanning questioningly the pheno- 
 mena of that world which is called Mind and Spirit. 
 To hint that the same laws probably rule, and the 
 same substantiality under different expressions pro- 
 bably forms, both the " Natural " and the " Super- 
 natural" worlds, seems to involve in certain minds 
 either a degradation of spiritual things or a perilous 
 mystification of the material creation. To all such, 
 
 no doubt, these matters are best left to the safe con- 
 ic
 
 146 THE LINES OF COINCIDENCE 
 
 fusion of the orthodoxy that has pigeon-holed the 
 universe, and keeps life " ticketed, sorted, and num- 
 bered." But to any one who loves above all things 
 the idea of unity, any advancing probability of 
 parallel, and even of coincident lines in all the 
 worlds that go to make up our life, is always a 
 thought that leads toward hope and beauty. It is 
 certain that the known and established laws, Attrac- 
 tion, Repulsion, and Affinity, in physical science 
 offer points of analogy that go far to explain the 
 strange element in life we call Coincidence. 
 
 Let us find other analogies for Coincidence from the 
 world of Physics. Speaking of " elective affinities," 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes says : " What tremendous 
 forces they are if two subjects of them come within 
 range ! There lies a bit of iron. All the dynamic 
 agencies of the universe are pledged to hold it in 
 just that position, and there it will lie until it be- 
 comes a heap of red-brown rust. But see ! I hold 
 a magnet to it and lo ! it leaves them all the 
 tugging of the mighty earth, of the ghostly moon 
 that walks in white, trailing the snaky waves of the 
 ocean after her ; of the awful sun, twice as large, 
 as a sphere, that the whole orbit of the moon would 
 but just girdle, it leaves the wrestling of all these 
 forces which are at a deadlock with each other, all 
 fighting for it, and springs straight to the magnet." l 
 Thus, in the unaccountable rush of thought, and 
 
 1 " The Poet at the Breakfast Table."
 
 THE LINES OF COINCIDENCE 147 
 
 even of action, that sometimes occurs in the world 
 toward some idea, we might, surely without un- 
 reason, see the working of some magnet - like 
 thought. 
 
 And thus, too, the law of polarity, by which a 
 magnet will evolve order and form out of " a con- 
 fused mass of inert matter," l may well have a 
 parallel law in life. Does it seem as if the simile 
 were too far-fetched, and that to see any analogy 
 between a bit of iron and human thought and action 
 is too wide a leap? The leap is certainly wide 
 enough. But let us recollect that, after all, the 
 bit of iron approximates the ethereal conditions far 
 more nearly than most people suppose. It seems 
 solid and compact, material to the last degree. But 
 it is not. It is neither solid nor compact. It is but 
 a coherent mass of infinitely minute atoms, held 
 together by a mysterious force. But the atoms are 
 each separate and separated, each having, so to 
 speak, its own enveloping atmosphere. The ether 
 penetrates every part. A sight is conceivable which 
 would see right through it, and yet in no sense be 
 supernatural. It is not solid in reality. The 
 atoms are held together by an infinitely rapid and 
 
 1 " Scatter a heap of iron filings on a plate of glass ; bring near 
 it a magnet and tap the glass gently, and you will see the filings 
 arrange themselves in regular forms. ... In other words, the 
 chaos of a confused mass of inert matter has become a cosmos of 
 harmonious arrangement, assuming definite form in obedience to 
 law." LAING, A Modern Zoroastrian.
 
 148 THE LINES OF COINCIDENCE 
 
 fine movement. The movement can be quickened 
 until the particles disintegrate and fly asunder and 
 the solid becomes a liquid, and that in turn can 
 be raised into a vapour and disappear in a puff of 
 steam. But the atoms remain unchanged, and the 
 puff of vapour is, in essence, the same thing exactly 
 as the bit of iron. We may soon have a light that 
 will pass through iron. It is only a question of 
 degree between the iron and the puff of vapour. 
 Even the final invisible atoms may not be Matter at 
 all. It seems a question whether they are not Force, 
 and if Force, then Movement ; and thus even in the 
 bit of rusty iron we approximate the idea of life 
 very closely, if we only look deep enough. And 
 who can say that if we could look, in inverse ratio, 
 as deeply into human thought and action, we should 
 not find an answering process, approximating 
 matter at last quite as closely as the iron approxi- 
 mates life ? Both are manifestations of one force 
 movement. Let us have the courage of our convic- 
 tions, and, running before science a little way (in 
 the wise fashion of children ?), own that " matter " 
 and " spirit " are one and the same, in different 
 degrees and under many expressions, obeying one 
 law. And so we will not quarrel with the analogy 
 of the magnet with certain examples of Coincidence. 
 Analogy is not proof, certainly, and doubtless in 
 all regions of thought strange correspondences may 
 be traced to natural laws. But we have always
 
 THE LINES OP COINCIDENCE 149 
 
 allowed that thought is a rational and ordered 
 world in itself. The plea for pointing such analo- 
 gies, then, and claiming whatever argument lies in 
 them for Coincidence, is that the world has not as 
 yet credited it with any such attributes of order. 
 But surely it is significant that the phenomena 
 of Coincidence certainly answer to the working of 
 many confessed laws. Why should, for instance, 
 the energy known as chemical affinity have no ex- 
 pression in this matter ? The coincidental events 
 and discoveries, the thoughts which are hit on, 
 and even sometimes expressed in almost the same 
 way, seem strangely like a congeries round some 
 unseen point or centre of attraction. 
 
 Or, again, if waves of force pass through earth 
 and rock, as we know they do in seismic disturb- 
 ance ; if the ethereal undulations, and even certain 
 forms of light (as now is also proved), pass through 
 our bodies and substances which we call solid ; and 
 if (as now is also believed) the electric force can 
 be transmitted with certain direction and intelligent 
 application of use without the clumsy apparatus 
 and medium of wires it may well be that psychic 
 and mental force can be, and is, transmitted and 
 exercised in a hundred unknown and mysterious, 
 but absolutely natural, ways in the unrecognised 
 ether of thought.
 
 150 THE LINES OF COINCIDENCE 
 
 II 
 
 "Coincidence" is a very useful word. It covers 
 a multitude of sins, which, in spite of all satire, 
 anger, and argument, the more hidden and less 
 understood forces of Nature are continually and 
 most tiresomely committing against the conven- 
 tional sanities and rule-of-thumb measurements of 
 the orthodox man of science and of common sense. 
 The tales and experiences which the Society of 
 Psychical Research investigates are all labelled Coin- 
 cidences by a large number of otherwise clever and 
 liberal-minded people. They appear to consider the 
 matters thus labelled are finally and satisfactorily 
 settled. They find an enviable and almost occult 
 satisfaction in this label. It is unnecessary to 
 touch on this vexed question save to note in pass- 
 ing that Coincidence is the favourite term for 
 everything in heaven and earth which Science con- 
 fessedly does not understand. It is thus built up 
 into something almost more extraordinary and 
 inexplicable than the experiences and theories it 
 is supposed to simplify. 
 
 But there is an agreeable humour in the suspicion 
 that the good folks who so triumphantly say to 
 those who are mystic-minded, " Nonsense ! your 
 wonderful and mysterious events and circum- 
 stances, thoughts and feelings, are nothing but 
 coincidences ! mere coincidences ! " are, as a matter
 
 THE LINES OF COINCIDENCE 151 
 
 of fact, announcing a great truth on lines they 
 never meant to occupy. It is possible that the 
 word may be found to hold a truer and fuller ex- 
 planation of such matters than is at first discerned 
 or intended. For, taking the scientific meaning of 
 the word, it may be held to credit a circumstance 
 which wears a mysterious, and even supernatural 
 aspect, with the evolution of perfectly natural laws 
 in the higher and less-known planes of Nature, 
 answering to those laws of optics, physics, and 
 logic with which we otherwise associate the word. 
 Thus looked at, it may indeed strike the keynote 
 in a matter that has appeared to have many dis- 
 cords, or at best to give out a very complex and 
 uncertain sound. If the laws of Coincidence be 
 ever confessed and tabulated, they will probably 
 be discovered to be as purely and simply natural 
 as any other laws of Nature ; but they will often 
 work on lines and touch things which have been 
 hitherto miscalled supernatural. Trench points out 
 that "men are continually uttering deeper things 
 than they know, asserting mighty principles, it 
 may be asserting them against themselves, in words 
 that to them may seem nothing more than the 
 current coin of society." Perhaps the man of 
 hard-headed convictions and robust prejudices, 
 who sweeps aside, as he thinks, an occurrence or 
 experience of mysterious and supernatural aspect 
 and import as "a mere coincidence," is in reality,
 
 152 THE LINES OF COINCIDENCE 
 
 as I have said, enunciating a mysterious and super- 
 natural truth which would amaze no one more than 
 himself. 
 
 Mr. Richard Proctor, in his delightful volume, 
 "The Borderland of Science," has an amusing, if 
 not very convincing, article on " Coincidence and 
 Superstitions." But he relegates the whole matter, 
 broadly speaking, to the No-Man's Land of con- 
 ventional popular superstition. Once, indeed, he 
 seems minded to look seriously into the matter. 
 "When we have undoubted cases of coincidence," 
 he says, "without the possibility of any real asso- 
 ciation (setting the supernatural aside), we have a 
 problem of some interest to deal with." There is, 
 however, no attempt made to do so. He gives no 
 hint at a solution save that of "miraculous inter- 
 vention," and this he naturally and wisely rejects 
 at once. He is " content with indicating the general 
 interpretation of coincidences which appear very re- 
 markable, but which nevertheless cannot be reason- 
 ably referred to special interpositions of Providence." 
 He is occupied solely and entirely with considering 
 the two positions which are usually drawn up as 
 the base of the question : ist, That coincidences 
 are the results of mere chance or casualty, and are 
 therefore in no way worthy of the notice they often 
 receive. 2nd, That they are due to "supernatural 
 intervention," " miraculous intervention," and are 
 the result of some overruling Providence acting
 
 THE LINES OF COINCIDENCE 153 
 
 rather in defiance of natural laws than by virtue 
 of them. Having to choose one of these uncom- 
 fortable and uneasy horns of dilemma as his rest- 
 ing-place in this matter, he unhesitatingly, and 
 reasonably enough, chooses the first. A large 
 number of people, and, one may broadly say, the 
 whole scientific world, make the same choice. 
 
 We will trust that greater satisfaction is found 
 in the position than the picture conjured up would 
 suggest. The idea, or suspicion of the idea, that 
 the truth probably lies between these two equally 
 unsatisfactory seats, and that Coincidence may be 
 under laws as true and cosmic as those which govern 
 astronomy, never seems to have presented itself in 
 faintest outline to Mr. Proctor's imagination. It 
 is thus that the great scientific thinkers so often 
 fail as it seems to us who look on, and love these 
 Borderlands of science so often fail, and adopt 
 a line of thought that appears to us strangely 
 unscientific. They refuse to carry on their own 
 thought and methods beyond a certain arbitrary 
 line which they themselves draw. Everything be- 
 yond is labelled " Spiritual," or " Supernatural," or 
 " Unknowable," or some such term. Everything 
 on this side the line is called "Material." The 
 result, in many minds, is a sad and painful confu- 
 sion, giving us gross Materialism on the one side, 
 and an equally gross Supernaturalism on the other. 
 Both sides are in fact and essence superstitious,
 
 154 THE LINES OP COINCIDENCE 
 
 and therein lies the centre of the confusion. It 
 has been truly said, "There is this similarity be- 
 tween the scientific superstition and the theological 
 superstition, that they both believe that they have 
 explained all, and they thereby place themselves 
 beyond the possibility of being right." 1 
 
 The suggestion that both sides of the arbitrary 
 line I have mentioned are in essence the same 
 under different expressions, and that there is no 
 hard line anywhere at all, and that the same laws 
 govern all, seems to be a scientific heresy of a kiud 
 that demands a scientific anathema with bell, book, 
 and candle. In fact, I fear that the anathema might 
 come also from other quarters. Mr. Proctor, how- 
 ever, points to the danger of confusing probability 
 with proof, and this of course is the danger the 
 advocates of the " supernatural " side are always 
 falling into. "There arises in certain cases," he 
 says, "the question whether coincidences may not 
 appear so surprising as to justify the assumption 
 that they are due to a real though undiscerned 
 association between the coinciding events. This, 
 of course, is the very basis of the scientific method ; 
 and it is well to notice how far this method may 
 sometimes be unsafe. If remarkable coincidences 
 can occur where there is no real connection as 
 we have seen to be the case caution must be re- 
 quired in recognising coincidence as demonstrative 
 
 1 "Regeneration: An Answer to Max Nordau."
 
 THE LINES OP COINCIDENCE 155 
 
 of association." This is, we must all agree, most 
 clear and admirable, and it points out a weakness 
 that many of the believers in the supernatural 
 exhibit too often. But it appears, by what fore- 
 runs and follows this passage, that the danger he 
 sees and naturally wishes to guard against in trac- 
 ing "coincidence as demonstrative of association," 
 is that of being forced thereby into accepting the 
 old conventional position of that sadly unscientific 
 " supernatural agency." One cannot think he would 
 have been so unwilling to perceive in coincidence 
 something more than blind and empty chance had 
 he for a moment apprehended the possible thesis 
 of known and natural laws working in its "mys- 
 terious " and " supernatural " phenomena. 
 
 Emerson, in his essay on "Power," says: "The mind 
 that is parallel with the laws of Nature will be in the 
 current of events, and strong with their strength. 
 One man is made of the same stuff of which events 
 are made ; is in sympathy with the course of things." 
 Much that would be called coincidence in the life 
 of such a man would in reality, by this reasoning, 
 be the inevitable result of law and of the elements 
 employed in the material of the man. He is in 
 correspondence with the order and growth of life. 
 The reverse condition may be equally true. " The 
 good stars" may not have "met in his horoscope," 
 and there may be an actual force of repulsion at 
 work. The elements of success, of well-being, may
 
 156 THE LINES OP COINCIDENCE 
 
 be driven away from him by a repulsion as natural 
 as any that is discernible in the physical world, 
 or an affinity with what is weak and disintegrat- 
 ing may draw misfortune to him as he passes on 
 his way. 
 
 Such cases have come under one's personal ex- 
 perience. The ideas of fate or destiny doubtless 
 grew from such instances. The world has always 
 recognised that such ideas express a great truth. 
 The Greek tragedies embody them with majestic 
 utterance. They have been the cause both of 
 strength and weakness in men ; but on the whole, 
 like all truths, however partial and one-sided, they 
 have wrought more of good than of ill in the 
 world. Some of the strongest and grandest 
 nations of history have been deeply imbued with 
 the idea of fate and destiny. In religion it has 
 oftentimes played a foremost part. It accompanies 
 the development of some of the grandest of the 
 biblical characters. The belief in fate of any kind 
 no longer holds the place in the world it once 
 occupied ; though we still see men of strong nature 
 who have a decided bent toward fatalism. But 
 the influence of our emancipated religious thought 
 on the one hand, and of the questioning and scep- 
 tical spirit that has characterised modern thought 
 and science on the other, alike work against the 
 conception of an overshadowing or illuminating 
 destiny. It is antagonistic to the spirit of the
 
 THE LINES OF COINCIDENCE 157 
 
 age. We more than echo the phrase of him who 
 said that the destiny the gods make for us we 
 may indeed hope to escape, but from the destiny 
 we make for ourselves there is no escape. We 
 carry the thought on to the point that doubts if 
 there is any destiny at all save that which is self- 
 made. And yet, even so, we do but shift the dis- 
 pensation of the burden of fate from "the gods" 
 to our own hands. The sense of the burden and 
 mystery remains. " Wise men feel that there is 
 something which cannot be talked or voted away 
 a strap or belt which girds the world." : 
 
 And after all, it would^ seem this feeling, this 
 sense of Fate, of Fortune, of strange coincidence 
 which rules the lives of some people, even some 
 communities, is a rational and true one, based on 
 a life reality and the perception of many ages. Call 
 it what we may, and place its origin where we will, 
 it exists. And by facing it with the thought in 
 our minds that it is the expression of natural laws 
 acting in the spiritual world (to quote Professor 
 Drummond's words), it frees itself from the gloom 
 of a superstitious notion of an irrational Fate, and 
 its workings at once seem thrown open to light and 
 hope, and even to possible final understanding. 
 
 The ideas of fate and destiny which the classic 
 age centred in the gods, at later times found ex- 
 pression in the astrologer's horoscope. The planets 
 i Emerson.
 
 158 THE LINES OF COINCIDENCE 
 
 and stars were the rulers of men's lives and fortunes 
 The world in general smiles at such ideas nowadays 
 smiles perhaps with too assured a superiority. For 
 after all, the idea of planetary and stellar influence 
 is in essence a scientific one. Possibly the expres- 
 sion was often phantastic and even foolish. But we 
 must recollect that the theory of attraction and of 
 definite forces exercised by all the members of the 
 solar system on one another, nay, by the galaxies of 
 suns that throng the sidereal universe, is accepted 
 and proved. Is there, then, anything unreasonable 
 or unscientific in the corollary that there is also a 
 psychic force at work from the same bodies bodies 
 we may, surely with justice, imagine are the centres 
 of life and intelligence and spirit ? If our insignifi- 
 cant world is the scene of such a mighty drama as 
 is unrolled to our eyes in the history of Man, even 
 as far as we know it, who can suppose that for 
 every glittering point which gems the starlit sky 
 there is not an answering centre of Life of Life 
 perhaps as far more glorious than ours as those 
 glorious orbs exceed in splendour and majesty our 
 tiny planet? "The mutual dependence all things 
 have, and the relation they stand in to each other," 
 was noted by the imperial philosopher of Eome ; 
 " for all parts of Nature," he writes, " are in some 
 measure united together and interwoven, and for 
 this reason have a natural sympathy for each 
 other."
 
 THE LINES OF COINCIDENCE 159 
 
 The most occult and necromantic horoscope that 
 was ever drawn up to order by paid and fraudu- 
 lent astrologer seems more scientific in its root-idea 
 than the happy-go-lucky scheme of Chance the 
 notion of isolated, disconnected, answerable-to-no- 
 one and responsive-to-nothing scheme of Life which 
 too often obtains in these latter days. To credit 
 Nature with too much meaning is not an ignoble 
 thing ; it might be questioned if it were a possible 
 one. The mystic has always believed to put it in 
 homely and colloquial phrase that nothing can mean 
 nothing. But many people nowadays seem to like to 
 believe that the greater number of things are inno- 
 cent of meaning. Astrology only credited Nature 
 with a corresponding unseen force for every part of 
 her manifestation. And after all, modern science 
 works on somewhat similar lines. Mr. Proctor, who 
 is no friend to anything savouring of the occult, 
 owns that astrology is based on a truth. " The 
 heavenly bodies," he says in his "Borderland of 
 Science," do rule the fates of men and nations in 
 the most unmistakable way, seeing that without the 
 controlling and beneficent influence of the chief 
 among those orbs the sun every living creature on 
 the earth must perish." 
 
 If the sun, the moon, and the planets hold our 
 earth in its orbit, give and control its many motions, 
 and have been, and are, and ever will be, the prin- 
 cipal moulders of its form and arbiters of its character,
 
 160 THE LINES OF COINCIDENCE 
 
 why should we reject the idea that their influence 
 is not merely material, but that they exert also an 
 influence on the human life of the planet ? It seems 
 a curious and dismembered argument which allows 
 that physical forces of all kind issue and radiate 
 from our earth in all directions through space, but 
 that the greatest force the earth knows the will 
 and spirit of Man the force, in fact, to which the 
 whole creation and evolution of earth appears to 
 have led, has no issue and no radiation. If such 
 a force be existent and operative, it must journey 
 out into space, and affect other planets, even as the 
 physical forces sent off from us affect them. 
 
 And if this* be granted as a possibility, the door 
 opens which admits the answering possibility that 
 the other planets send out psychic force to us. 
 Our earth, then, might be touched by these unseen 
 forces which are travelling to it from other worlds, 
 just as the material forces are possibly from 
 regions of space and infinity beyond the range of 
 farthest sight. For we notice that such conceivable 
 undulations of on - travelling force would be in- 
 exhaustible, and, further, would never neutralise 
 one another ; for even like the more materialised 
 forces that issue from the great centres of force, 
 these circling waves would never interfere one with 
 another. " Every sun in space is the centre of 
 constant undulations, which thus perpetually cross 
 each other through immensity, without ever being con-
 
 THE LINES OF COINCIDENCE 161 
 
 fused or mutually minyled." 1 This marvellous and 
 endlessly suggestive fact may be read in the ripples 
 of water, which will cross and recross each other 
 without being destroyed. How much more readily, 
 then, could those psychic undulations, if they exist, 
 cross one another through immensity. The dis- 
 tances of space may seem almost unthinkable to 
 us, but they scarcely exist for Attraction. Light 
 travels quickly at the rate of 186,660 miles per 
 second. But light is a slow traveller when com- 
 pared with Attraction and other great forces in 
 Nature. 
 
 The forces that have been called supernatural 
 may flash through space with a speed to which 
 Attraction itself is a laggard. Space, we are told, 
 is not to be thought of as the "aching void" of 
 old ; not as a gulf which separates the worlds, but 
 as a means of communication between them. Our 
 physical world and atmosphere are filled and pene- 
 trated through all their compacted yet separated 
 molecules with forces which have voyaged from the 
 sun and those distant suns, the stars. Our thought- 
 atmosphere and the world of human life may be, 
 a fortiori, filled and penetrated with mental and 
 spiritual influences. The strange coincidences of 
 our lives and of history may thus be proved some 
 day to be but the natural and inevitable results of 
 laws as natural and inevitable as those which govern 
 
 1 Flammarion, '' Popular Astronomy."
 
 1 62 THE LINES OF COINCIDENCE 
 
 our atmosphere and hold our globe in its place in 
 the universe. Fate and destiny may be found, 
 after all, to be realities, although the names show 
 but a partial perception of the truth. They are 
 coincidences of great and unknown forces. 
 
 That each generation presents a typical attitude 
 of mind as well as a certain marked type of face is 
 a fact that may be explained to some extent by 
 more obvious and material arguments than the 
 subtleties of Coincidence. Yet physiology can 
 scarcely account for all the distinguishing traits 
 of a generation. The similarity of feature and 
 general contour of face, which we cannot fail to 
 observe in the men and women of our own time, 
 as well as in those of past generations, whose 
 "counterfeit presentments" have been preserved 
 for us on canvas and in stone, may in part be 
 explained by what Oliver Wendell Holmes calls "a 
 certain involuntary adjustment." " Every former 
 thing we look upon," he says, " puts its special 
 mark on us. If this be repeated often enough, we 
 get a permanent resemblance to it, or at least a 
 fixed aspect which we took from it." But apart 
 from, and beyond all such characteristics as may 
 be thus accounted for, there are signs of a domi- 
 nance of "the spirit of the age," which cannot be 
 explained in any such way. It is, for example, 
 no exceptional thing to find a boy or girl who is 
 eminently a child of the age, but whose parents
 
 THE LINES OF COINCIDENCE 163 
 
 and family are what is called " thoroughly old- 
 fashioned " folk, untouched by the life aud thought 
 of their day, ignorant perhaps of its tendencies, 
 and far removed from its influence. Yet the child 
 is, by instinct, by intuitive choice, and self-forma- 
 tion, in touch with all current feeling and as- 
 piration even (in some cases) with the outward 
 fashions and modes of living. Such cases have 
 come under one's personal observation. This in- 
 born sympathy with the spirit of the day may be 
 labelled a coincidence, but it is a coincidence so 
 common that it presents good reason for presup- 
 posing an underlying law. It must surely be the 
 response and expression of some force not to be 
 explained on material grounds entirely, or left to 
 the witless vacuity of chance. It may be the ful- 
 filment of the Idea which was dimly apprehended 
 by the philosopher poet when he wrote 
 
 " For the prevision is allied 
 Unto the thing so signified ; 
 Or say the forethought which awaits 
 Is the same genius that creates." l 
 
 The perception of some such law has often been 
 expressed by men of insight and poetic vision. 
 Kingsley carries it far when he says, "The same 
 law creates both the giver and the receiver, the 
 longing and its home." Certainly it would seem 
 that there is oftentimes a spirit of the age which 
 
 1 Emerson.
 
 1 64 THE LINES OF COINCIDENCE 
 
 prepares and produces human instruments subtly 
 allied to its previsions and adapted to fulfil its 
 prophecies. 
 
 But of all the considerations which present them- 
 selves to our mind in connecting coincidence with 
 the idea of law, the strongest suggestion, after all, 
 lies in the fact of periodicity, which is confessedly a 
 feature in so many forms of coincidence. Herein 
 we see a sign that is always welcome, and hear a 
 note that gives accord with the universe, for it sug- 
 gests Movement. In "movement, sovereign and 
 supreme," lies the root of all phenomena. It gives 
 us the beauty and music and life and warmth of the 
 world gives us life itself, and is perceptible in our 
 highest emotions and thoughts. 
 
 In periodicity we further find the idea of move- 
 ment possessing discernible, or at least apprehended, 
 order and rhythm. The very word coincidence in- 
 volves the notion of movement : and with periodicity 
 added, cadence, consonance, and harmony itself seem 
 faintly outlined in its unexplored depths. We per- 
 ceive that it is a word of exact meaning, not to be 
 shuffled discreditably away, or emptied, with a laugh, 
 of its just and proper meaning. It can by no 
 means be lightly pronounced to be a mere synonym 
 for Chance. " Chance is a word void of sense," 
 wrote Voltaire. Let us emancipate Coincidence 
 from association with so senseless a word. And in 
 doing so, let us own that the things designated thus
 
 THE LINES OF COINCIDENCE 165 
 
 the coincidences of life are manifestions, often 
 mysterious, baffling to all present search, and work- 
 ing by means and in ways not yet understood, of a 
 movement in the unseen world in correspondence 
 with the force of movement which seems to underlie 
 all life ; manifestations freed on the one hand from 
 the childishness of superstitious credulity, and on the 
 other from the would-be-worldly wisdom of equally 
 superstitious scepticism.
 
 ARREST OR ADVANCE?
 
 "As for us, we are called to a higher life, we ascend to a 
 nobler standpoint, and brace ourselves in a manlier school. 
 We are bidden to strive for a life like that of the life of the 
 spiritual and bodiless powers." ST. JOHN CHEYSOSTOM. 
 
 "Before the immense possibilities of man, all mere experi- 
 ence, all past biography, however spotless and sainted, shrinks 
 away." EMERSON. 
 
 " Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt the place, 
 give me beauty in the inward soul, and may the outward and 
 the inward man be at one." SOCRATES, in the " Ph&drus" of 
 Plato. 
 
 " Dissatisfaction is a necessary condition of progress." 
 EDWARD CLODD. 
 
 " For of the soul the body form doth take, 
 For soul is form, and doth the body make." 
 
 SPENSER.
 
 IV 
 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 
 
 EVEN the most casual reader of current science 
 must be familiar with the expression, " the Arrest 
 of the Body," and the thoughts it presents. The 
 profound investigations and accurate knowledge 
 that have led to the idea thus specified are well 
 authenticated and established. Anatomy and phy- 
 siology, speaking with certain voice in this matter, 
 assure us that Man has reached his highest physical 
 development, and earth has therein probably at- 
 tained her highest material expression. To the 
 many of us who have no technical knowledge of 
 anatomy and biology, it is a welcome possibility 
 that a statement of the results of research and 
 experiment in these fields of science may nowadays 
 be gained through the works of men, who give us, 
 in more or less popular form, the gathered wisdom 
 of their schools. Such a work is the " Ascent of 
 Man," by Professor Drummond, a chapter of which 
 
 is devoted to the subject of the Arrest of the Body. 
 
 169
 
 i yo ARREST OR ADVANCE? 
 
 Therein may be found the weighty reasons that 
 have led to the conclusion formulated in this ex- 
 pression. He tells us, in his lucid style, the steps 
 by which science has come to the conviction that 
 it is probable that "the goal looked forward to 
 from the beginning of time has been attained," 
 and that "Nature, in making a Man, can go no 
 further : organic evolution has done its work." He 
 points out that this idea is " no conceit of science, 
 nor a reminiscence of the pre-Copernican idea that 
 the centre of the universe is the world, and the 
 centre of the world Man ; " but that it is, on the 
 contrary, " the sober scientific probability." He 
 goes on briefly to explain the answerable reasons 
 for this premise, reasons approximating proof so 
 closely, that they leave from the scientific point 
 of view no foothold for reasonable doubt. 
 
 We may, then, fairly take it for granted that 
 this theory of the arrest of the body is an accepted 
 one. The scientific world of to-day stands up and 
 owns that Man, as animal, is perfected ; that, in 
 the words of Fiske, " On earth there will never be 
 a higher creature than Man." 
 
 Yet, when we turn our eyes to other fields of 
 thought, and of science itself, we find a possibility, 
 almost a prophecy, of higher things for Man than 
 he has yet reached. We hear on many sides a de- 
 mand, an urgent aspiration, for wider horizons, further 
 developments, ampler powers, fresh avenues of life
 
 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 171 
 
 and energy, more spiritual conditions. There is a 
 widespread hope amongst men that they may connt 
 
 " That which they have done but earnest of the things 
 that they shall do." 
 
 And although those words must be held to refer to 
 Man's achievements more than to his embodiments, 
 they have their meaning also when taken with regard 
 to his own evolution to his becoming as resultant 
 from his doing ; since in the long periods of human 
 development it is impossible to entirely separate the 
 two things. As Emerson says, " Nature is not fixed, 
 but fluid and spirit ; spirit alters, moulds, makes it. 
 . . . There are no fixtures in Nature." What we do is 
 prophetic of what we shall be: and perhaps thought 
 rooted living thought is a more potent creative 
 force even than deeds. " Properly it is the course 
 of his unseen life," says Carlyle, "which informs 
 and rules his external visible life, rather than receives 
 rule from it." Poets, whose intuition and power of 
 vision are great, have sung to us of the possibilities 
 in Man which have not been yet realised. Browning, 
 if utterances he places in the mouths of his person- 
 ages are in any way his own, seems to think that 
 growth need not cease for Man because earth has 
 done its work. 
 
 " I say that man was made to grow, not stop ; 
 That help he needed once, and needs no more, 
 Having grown but an inch by, is withdrawn : 
 For he hath new deeds, and new helps to these.
 
 172 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 
 
 This imports solely man should mount on each 
 New height in view : the help whereby he mounts, 
 The ladder-rung his foot has left, may fall, 
 Since all things suffer change save God the truth. 
 Man apprehends Him newly at each stage 
 Whereat earth's ladder drops, its service done." 
 
 The prophetic poet of the West, Walt Whitman, 
 sings preans of welcome to the Man whom his faith 
 discerns in the future. In the " Song of Myself " he 
 sings : 
 
 " There is no stoppage, and never can be stoppage, 
 If I, you, and the world, and all beneath or upon its surface, 
 
 were this moment reduced back to a pallid float, it 
 
 would not avail in the long-run : 
 We should surely bring up again where we now stand, 
 And surely go as much farther, and then farther and 
 
 farther." 
 
 And again, in his " Mystic Trumpeter : " 
 
 " glad, exulting, culminating song ! 
 A vigour more than earth's is in thy notes, 
 Marches of victory man disenthralled the conqueror at 
 
 last, 
 
 Hymns to the universal God from universal man all joy ! 
 A re-born race appears a perfect world all joy ! 
 Women and men in wisdom, innocence, and health all joy ! 
 
 War, sorrows, suffering gone the rank earth purged 
 nothing but joy left ! 
 
 Joy ! joy ! in freedom, worship, love ! joy in the ecstasy 
 of life!" 
 
 Nor is it alone in the rhapsodies of poetry that the 
 possibility of life opening into new channels is pre-
 
 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 173 
 
 sented to our thought. Modern philosophy gives an 
 answering word. In Mr. Bradley's work, " Appear- 
 ance and Reality," we find this passage : "A future 
 life is possible, even on the grounds of common 
 crude materialism. After an interval, no matter how 
 long, another nervous system sufficiently like our 
 own might be developed ; and in this case memory 
 and a personal identity must arise. The event may 
 be as improbable as you please, but I, at least, can 
 find no reason for calling it impossible. And we 
 may even go a step farther still. It is conceivable 
 that an indefinite number of such bodies should exist, 
 not in succession, but altogether and at once. But 
 if so, we might gain a personal continuance, not 
 single but multiform, and might secure a destiny on 
 which it would be idle to enlarge." And in a note 
 he adds : "It may, perhaps, be worth while to add 
 here that apparently even a higher organism is pos- 
 sible, which, apart from accidents, would never die. 
 Apparently this could not be termed impossible in 
 principle, at least within our present knowledge." 
 The philosopher herein really seems more daring in 
 speculation than the poet, and opens out even more 
 startling possibilities to Man. 
 
 A larger number of teachers than any one not 
 interested in the matter would credit are to-day 
 spreading the gospel in the world that Nature 
 denies nothing to earnest true demand, and that 
 Thought is the life, the health, and the moulder
 
 174 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 
 
 of the body. Enthusiasm carries many of these 
 teachers to the point of taking the apostolic words 
 literally, that the last enemy to be overcome is 
 death. And any one who has carefully, and with- 
 out the antagonism that in all such matters closes 
 the very door that is to be opened, followed the 
 line of thought that leads to this very surprising 
 belief and hope, must confess that it has a direct 
 and logical sequence. The works of that remark- 
 able writer, Prentice Mulford (of whom the grave 
 and reasonable Whittier wrote a memorial verse of 
 almost measureless praise), give, in brief and popular 
 form, a wonderfully practical outline to a creed that 
 else might seem to many to belong to a world of 
 dreams and impracticable ideas. He spoke to busy 
 men and women, and met them on their own lines. 
 But those who care to see his purpose will find 
 the- words capable of great expansion and high ap- 
 plication. Seldom, one is minded to think, in the 
 history of the world has there been a greater sense 
 of expectancy than is in the air around us to-day. 
 It is natural it should be so. The cycle of perio- 
 dicity appears to be complete. The time seems 
 to point to an advance, and a questioning outlook 
 toward what may be coming is discernible amongst 
 all people. It may indeed be that the learned ones 
 of the earth despise these fermentations and dreams 
 of the popular mind, even if they know that such 
 fermentations and dreams assert themselves. The
 
 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 175 
 
 schools, and academies, and temples of thought and 
 science, are sometimes the last places that are reached 
 aud penetrated by the great flood-tides of the world. 
 All such majestic structures lie high, and the dry- 
 uess that is attendant on height is not always an 
 advantage. 
 
 But there are signs that Science itself (at least 
 when represented by men who hold that it is 
 something better than "a trained and organised 
 common-sense," and who strive not only to see signs, 
 but 'also the things signified) is not untouched by 
 the general flow and feeling of expectation. 1 The 
 borderland of science which lies between the phy- 
 sical and the psychical is no longer given up to the 
 dreamer and the charlatan. With the acceptance 
 of the "stupendous crisis in Nature" as Professor 
 Drummond calls it which is signified in the phrase, 
 
 1 In " The Present Evolution of Man," Mr. G. Archibald Reed, 
 whilst noting that most of the old factors of evolution in the 
 struggle for existence are no longer potent enough to work a sur- 
 vival of the fittest, observes that there are still " potent and effective 
 physical agents at work." These agents, he declares, are capable 
 of effecting still further evolution for man. Chief amongst these 
 agents he ranks "zymotic disease." He argues even further. He 
 suggests that certain "moral" resistances and factors may also 
 be at work and develop man on a higher road. Thus he takes 
 alcohol and opium. His arguments for this "moral" evolution 
 producing in time a race " immune " to certain temptations now 
 potent for destruction are very striking and suggestive, and open 
 out an avenue of thought it is impossible not to accept with hope. 
 It seems to point to the "good in things evil," and to be a sign 
 that even science is beginning to wonder if the arrest of the body 
 is final after all.
 
 176 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 
 
 the Arrest of the Body, a second thought seems to 
 be coming luminously into sight, which gives the 
 body a word of advance such as the world at large 
 has never before realised. It is that man is "a 
 great deal more than the physiologist has told 
 him ; " 1 that for the Generation and Arrest of the 
 body there is a corresponding Regeneration and 
 Advance. 
 
 It will be urged that this is no new doctrine. 
 Nor is it. The Church would claim that it was 
 enunciated eighteen hundred years ago. Many 
 believe it was but reasserted then, and is as old 
 as the world. Keligion, it would seem, has always 
 taught the truth in some form, and claims examples 
 to prove that it has been accepted and realised. 
 But the form in which it is now more and more 
 proclaimed in the world is new to this era, in 
 that it comes not exclusively as a " religious " and 
 "spiritual" truth, but as a truth for the entire 
 man. That a regeneration of a " spiritual " kind 
 is possible for man, nay, is his great secret and 
 mission in this life, has been, of course, the great 
 message of religion through the centuries of our 
 era. But with the inclination the world has nowa- 
 days to isolate each subject and department of 
 thought, and keep it labelled and separate from 
 all the others, we are apt to limit the idea of 
 regeneration (if we accept it) to some spiritual and 
 
 1 Edward Berdoe.
 
 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 177 
 
 theological abstraction that has little or nothing 
 to do with daily life and environment, or with 
 the " fleshly tabernacle " the spiritual essence in- 
 habits, save in giving a sanction and sanctification 
 of piety to them all. 
 
 But surely there is something more than this 
 in the great idea. Is not regeneration to include 
 the whole entity and nature of Man in his fourfold 
 state of body, mind, soul, and spirit? Such a 
 thought at least seems clearly if mystically written 
 on the pages of our Scripture, though it may be 
 but little realised by the world at large. If the 
 body be capable of the consecration the words of 
 Scripture imply, it would seem but a natural, nay, 
 an inevitable result that the Divine creative spirit 
 should bring illumination and transmutation with 
 its presence. Religion in its highest form has al- 
 ways, in a certain degree and under given condi- 
 tions, claimed this power. Doubtless it will always 
 claim it, and be able to point to its exponents. 
 But they are rare, and it can scarcely be .denied 
 that the doctrine of regeneration has, as a rule, 
 in its practical instances, ignored or contemned the 
 body, and been a matter of spiritual meaning alone. 
 This is especially noticeable in the East to this day, 
 and in the history of the saints of the early Christian 
 Church. In the ancient Egyptian faith it would 
 appear that the body was supposed in some way 
 
 to share in the regeneration of the indwelling spirit. 
 
 M
 
 178 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 
 
 In the " Book of Inspirations " (a name which 
 significantly dwells on the idea of Breath) we read 
 in the " Dirge to the Dead " 
 
 " Thou dost enter the horizon with the sun. 
 Thou art justified ever and ever. 
 
 Hail to the Osiris ! 
 Thine individuality is permanent. 
 Thy body is durable. . . . 
 Thy body is rejuvenated. . . . 
 Thy flesh is on thy bones ; 
 Like unto thy form on earth. . . . 
 Thou art divinised with the souls of the gods. 
 Thy heart is the heart of Ra. . . . 
 Thou art prepared for life. 
 Thou remainest in a healthful state ; 
 Thou walkest, thou breathest everywhere." 
 
 This, it is evident, is a very much more definite 
 idea than our Eesurrection of the Body, as that 
 doctrine at least is received by the laity. The 
 Egyptian Hermes, the Thrice-Great, was held to 
 have conquered the three states of body, soul, and 
 spirit. Moses, deeply initiated in the mysteries of 
 Egypt, 1 appears to have possessed the magic power 
 
 1 Recent investigation and research in the hieroglyphic writings 
 and papyrus rolls that have been elucidated and discovered, seem 
 to prove that Moses was in reality an Egyptian of the royal house. 
 The whole narrative points to this, if carefully examined. The 
 Hebrews would naturally wish to claim him. The Egyptians 
 would have no such wish ; yet they have recorded the fact. The 
 symbolic figure of Moses, so constantly seen in Christian churches, 
 is also a proof of his Egyptian origin. The horns were the symbol of 
 the royal priesthood of Osiris : Moses, whose Egyptian name is said 
 to be Hosarsiph, being one of the Pharaohs.
 
 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 179 
 
 over the body, by the account given of him ; and 
 we notice that in his case, as well as that of Elijah 
 and other great ones of old, it is implied that 
 death was a transition and transmutation. The 
 transfiguration was complete, as was subsequently 
 typified. If we are not prepared to deny these 
 examples and the religious world could scarcely 
 do so it must be held that this wonderful power 
 has passed from amongst us, or that it has in 
 later ages been strangely hidden. It would be 
 claimed by some people that the latter is the 
 truer view of the matter. It seems pretty certain 
 that the search of alchemy in its highest instances 
 was a quest for this higher development of life. 
 Whether it was a mistaken one, and whether it 
 was not often perverted into dark and tortuous 
 ways, is not the question. But those mysteries 
 and much-derided expressions, the Elixir of Life, 
 the Philosopher's Stone, the Transmutation of 
 Metals, and many others, certainly meant in 
 their ideals nothing less than the realisation of 
 the stupendous ideal of a higher life for the whole 
 entity and substance of Man, an immortality in 
 the flesh, not by lengthening the mere mortal 
 life, but by transmuting or transubstantiating its 
 elements. 
 
 This ideal, however far removed it may be from 
 the thoughts of to-day, however dangerous and re- 
 pellant it may seem to some, can scarcely be pro-
 
 i8o ARREST OR ADVANCE? 
 
 nounced either ignoble, absurd, or in its deepest 
 sense anything but essentially religious. "Know 
 that the quintessence and hidden thing of our stone 
 is nothing less than our celestial and glorious spirit, 
 drawn by our magistery out of its mine," is the 
 confession of Synesius. Of course these intrepid 
 searchers after deep mysteries had the faults of their 
 time. Medievalism had a spirit of its own, as every 
 age has, and it is naturally very much at variance 
 with the spirit of our own day. But a thought rules 
 many ages under different expressions ; and it seems 
 difficult to deny that, however much a certain atti- 
 tude of modern thought fights and derides any 
 notion of a sacramental mystery in the life and 
 body of man, and however much the Church in the 
 long darkness of the Middle Ages denounced and 
 persecuted those who believed in and sought for it, 
 the mystery itself lives in the very centre of reli- 
 gious belief, and is written in undeniable characters 
 on the writings we hold as sacred. 
 
 The idea of a higher evolution for the whole con- 
 stitution of Man seems to have held a place in many 
 forms of faith. That such a possibility is acknow- 
 ledged in the great faiths of India is generally 
 confessed, although the systems and means of de- 
 velopment and reception are very partially known, 
 and less understood. The general instinct of the 
 Anglo-Saxon is strongly against such theories. A 
 certain strong, wholesome animalism, and an equally
 
 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 181 
 
 strong, aud, in a sense, wholesome " common-sense," 
 shuts off the Western world very much from the 
 perception of such bright and dangerous truths. 
 For the average and aggregate well-being of a strong 
 nation this is, no doubt, a good thing. It has its 
 reward. But the fact remains, that people who 
 have honestly looked into the matter and seen the 
 systems in work, even though they confessedly did 
 not understand or greatly admire them or their re- 
 sults, own that there are strange and inexplicable 
 experiences and facts to be met with in the myste- 
 rious fraternities of Hindostan which point to the ex- 
 istence of possible forces and resources in Man which 
 are at the most only " dreamt of in our philosophy." 
 Any living and rooted thought will certainly work 
 its will on the human organism, even when no such 
 possibility is conjectured. We see that before us in 
 the world every day. We notice it at work with 
 those around us. There can be no question that 
 the impress and complexion of a national thought, a 
 national faith, moulds and colours the people of the 
 nation. It may be that the great physical perfection 
 to which the Greeks of old certainly appear to have 
 attained was in a measure due to some compelling 
 influence of this kind. Beauty and a high regard 
 for the body had their place in the worship of the 
 nation. Never has history seen humanity more 
 deified, a theogony so humanised, or spiritual truth 
 taught in such fair and seductive forms. The result
 
 1 82 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 
 
 was expressed in the rare artistic power and percep- 
 tion of Greece, and in the extraordinary personal 
 beauty that has become an ideal to all after-ages. 
 The mystic wine of Dionysos fired alike the soul and 
 the body. The Greeks and their Art are a last- 
 ing proof to the world that the worship of the 
 Beautiful moulds its votaries to its own personifi- 
 cation. That the worship deteriorated as the spirit 
 was lost, and the form became materialised more and 
 more, till it sank into gross idolatry of the form 
 alone, is not a part of the question, which is simply 
 that of the possibility of inward thought expressing 
 itself outwardly in the body. 
 
 It would seem that for some centuries we have 
 ignored or denied this theory, and we appear to 
 have physically retrograded in consequence. The 
 dogma which separated body from spirit and called 
 it "vile" has done its work. Monasticism and 
 Calvinism have distinctly hindered the perfecting of 
 the body, or any realisation of the mysterious and 
 majestic idea of the ancient world, and of the highest 
 revelation accorded to Man. The doctrine of the 
 body that was to be denied for the sake of the soul 
 that was to be saved, a doctrine that actuated the 
 religious world from the time of St. Simon Stylites 
 to that of Praise-God-Barebones, was in its way a 
 noble one, as it was also a necessary one, in its 
 time and place ; but the world is clearly and unequi- 
 vocally passing beyond and away from it in our day.
 
 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 183 
 
 We have rediscovered the fact that if we would be 
 free from the body we must neither despise, neglect, 
 nor misuse it, any more than we must pamper or 
 worship it. It must have an Ascent. The old sym- 
 bol of Solomon's seal was deep in its significations. 
 The triangles must be interlocked and form one 
 star. 
 
 Contempt for, and fear of, the body has so long 
 and superstitiously been read into revelation, that 
 it is with difficulty we can rid ourselves from the 
 nightmare. But it is certain that the words which 
 chiefly seem to justify the asceticism and manicheism 
 of the Middle Ages, and of the Calvinistic idea of 
 the body, can be equally well read from the point of 
 view which includes the whole entity of man, re- 
 generated and transmuted. This, however, is no 
 real part of the subject, and it is scarcely on religious 
 grounds that the idea is to be taken in connection 
 with the thought of a possible Advance for Man. 
 Such an idea is indeed religious in one sense a 
 true binding anew of what might else be lost ; but 
 it is when applied to man as Man, the denizen of 
 earth, and not alone to him as a progressive soul 
 journeying on toward "another and a better world," 
 that the thought strikes a note in our ear that 
 seems to introduce a new harmony in the planetary 
 music, a harmony that promises resolution into a 
 higher and grander key than is heard in the theory 
 of Man as arrested in his human evolution.
 
 184 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 
 
 Arrest must surely imply doom. Nature cannot 
 stand still. " There are no fixtures in Nature." It 
 is true that there is that wonderful and incomplete 
 puzzle which Professor Huxley first presented to 
 naturalists in those climacteric forms of life known 
 as Persistent Types. These types, we are told, have 
 stood still and flourished in what appears to be an 
 arrested state for countless ages. During these 
 periods other types have evolved in a manner that, 
 when foreshortened in the retrospect, appear so 
 magical that they practically erase the word impos- 
 sible from our vocabulary, especially when applied to 
 the latent potentialities of Nature. It is true these 
 Persistent Types have held their own through all 
 these long ages, yet we cannot but remember that 
 these immense vistas of time are in reality only a 
 minute of infinity. We must rise in thought to the 
 point whence time and place are but the illusions of 
 planetary life. " Time has only a relative exist- 
 ence," Carlyle tells us, and in saying so he but re- 
 peats the thought of all science and all philosophy. 
 
 These Persistent Types may have had doom 
 written on them in spite of what seems to us their 
 unconquerable longevity. Our reason and intuition 
 tell us that when Man himself, the highest of all 
 earthly types, has arrived at his natural goal, and 
 has accepted the sentence of material maturity, it 
 must be a crisis of the most portentous kind in 
 his history. Possibly this crisis has been the point
 
 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 185 
 
 of time which we know as the history of mau. 
 Enormous as are the periods of time which the 
 geologist claims for the indications he has dis- 
 covered of the presence of Man on this planet, 
 they are to the life of infinity but as this passing 
 moment of time is to them. It may be Man has 
 stood at the arrested stage for many ages. Such 
 as he is now, he probably was in the earliest 
 known times of Egypt and India. Perhaps he 
 was the same creature he is now in those far-oif 
 ages of which the only relics are a few roughly- 
 hewn stones and implements buried in the deeper 
 strata of the earth. He may have been working 
 out in this span of time, this moment of infinity, 
 the question of physical advance or deterioration ; 
 if evolution is to cease, or to be carried on 
 upon new lines, and by the demands of a new 
 environment. 
 
 The whole story of evolution shows us that the 
 survival of the fittest and the struggle for life, 
 and all the means we have been told are employed 
 by Nature to perfect her types whether born from 
 an upward-striving instinct, or a selfish desire to 
 keep in the ranks, and consequently escape the 
 penalties of " falling out " are all expressed in 
 the creature's adaptability to its environment. We 
 are familiar with Mr. Herbert Spencer's celebrated 
 definition of life "a continuous adjustment of in- 
 ternal relations to external relations." That our
 
 1 86 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 
 
 advance in the scale of creation that health and 
 well-being in life that life itself is dependent 
 on a swift power of adapting ourselves to our 
 environments ; and that, when Nature refuses to do 
 so, or loses such power, arrest of the species and 
 death in the case of the creature, supervenes, is 
 the accepted belief in these days. If, then, we 
 take the scientific dictum as final, and believe that 
 the arrest of the body is indisputably proved, it 
 is clear that Man, if he is to advance, must find 
 some new environment, other than that which science 
 takes cognisance of in his physical evolution ; or it 
 must be proved that there are subtle but vastly 
 important elements and factors in the environ- 
 ment now accepted which have been overlooked or 
 ignored by 'science, and to which Man has not, as 
 yet, fully adapted himself. 
 
 II 
 
 Our first question naturally is, whether it be in- 
 deed satisfactorily proved that Man, in his natural 
 evolution, has reached the stage of arrest? Has 
 not some factor in the subtle constitution of the 
 body escaped the eye of the physiologist and the 
 biologist? Perhaps there is something in our 
 structure which no anatomy will ever detect. To 
 pass sentence on Man, or indeed on any living 
 organism, simply as a physical creature, is surely
 
 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 187 
 
 a dangerously elementary and unimaginative pro- 
 ceeding. In the reverent and noble, yet it may 
 be limited and mistaken, accuracy of science in 
 its consideration of nothing but what it calls 
 "facts" has it not lost one-half, and the most 
 important half, of the subject of " Man " ? A large 
 section of the scientific world, I suppose, would 
 own at once that there is something in life more 
 than matter. But matter alone is what science 
 seems to feel itself competent to deal with or 
 desirous to consider. All else is put aside and 
 left to the metaphysician and the theologian. But 
 in doing this, does not science ignore the very 
 method it follows in other subjects? The analysis 
 seems partial only. A prognosis that is founded 
 on an imperfect diagnosis is not of final value. This 
 possible deficiency in scientific methods is being more 
 and more pointed out by writers of influence and 
 the thoughtful part of the community. The ques- 
 tion is even represented in the ranks of science 
 itself. 
 
 It may be, indeed, too much to ask or expect 
 science to go beyond her proper range and self- 
 ordained domain of phenomena. In refusing to 
 do so she may be entirely right, but is she en- 
 tirely right when she ignores in her calculations 
 and deductions the existence of anything beyond 
 phenomena? In the ranks of her own studies 
 she might read a parable. If the mathematician
 
 1 88 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 
 
 were left to solve the problem of solar heat, he 
 apparently could do so very satisfactorily. But the 
 geologist steps in and proves his figures are wrong, 
 though they are flawless, since they will not work 
 in with other facts, proved and confessed. His 
 unassisted explanation fails because it is too ex- 
 clusively technical. It does not take cognisance 
 of all the data. It seems to us who look on, that 
 science altogether, in its analysis and explanation of 
 Man, is very apt to act the part of mathematics in 
 the question of solar heat ; only, unlike the mathe- 
 maticians, she is unwilling to accept the sentence 
 passed on her by the other great factors in life, and 
 confess that her resultant calculations, though perfect 
 in themselves, are somehow only partial, since they 
 present the obvious mistake and anomaly of leaving 
 a large and most important part of the constitution 
 of Man (the very part that makes Man great, and 
 has been most considered and most appealed to by 
 the greatest men) wholly unaccounted for. It is 
 not surprising, therefore, that Man remains as mys- 
 terious a problem as solar heat, and presumably 
 will prove the more difficult of solution. 
 
 The thesis of the Arrest of the Body seems to 
 rest mainly on the fact that in his structure and 
 constitution Man as an animal has adapted himself 
 to his environment to the last possible point. The 
 organic structure of his brain is developed until 
 development can go no further without interfering
 
 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 189 
 
 with the other organs. But all these proofs are 
 based on the assumption of Man as the human 
 animal, and nothing more ; and the environment 
 that is considered is purely that of the physical 
 constitution, in which it appears to be taken for 
 granted that Man is, always has been, and always 
 will be content. Bat surely one of the distinguishing 
 marks of Man in all his higher evolution is that, 
 whilst the animal creation seems content with its 
 environments, and but seeks to adapt its constitu- 
 tion and structure and functions to these environ- 
 ments, the human race, on the contrary, exhibits 
 in its highest examples and races a grand dis- 
 content at its physical environments, and is for 
 ever seeking to transcend them. Does it not seem 
 almost as if Man, in this upward and outward 
 striving after something higher and wider than 
 animal life at its highest and best, is for ever com- 
 pelled by some mysterious instinct to call for and 
 receive loftier conditions and an ever -advancing 
 environment, which demands in its turn an ever- 
 responding adaptability ? It surely may be taken 
 as significant of this mysterious instinct that the 
 human race, as it advances in civilisation, appears 
 to feel an intuitive and unaccountable dissatisfac- 
 tion may one not almost say, shame ? in its 
 conditions. 
 
 The perception that " every prospect pleases, and 
 only man is vile," to which few people, I suppose,
 
 1 9 o ARREST OR ADVANCE? 
 
 are in some form or other strangers, has small 
 correspondence with the assurance which science 
 gives us that Man as a creature is perfected. Ages 
 ago Plato put the feeling into words for us, and 
 the words ring true still. He says : " There is a 
 certain grief in things as they are, in man as he 
 has come to be, as he certainly is. Over and above 
 those griefs of circumstance which are in a measure 
 removable, some inexplicable shortcoming or mis- 
 adventure on the part of Nature itself." The words 
 are full of meaning. " In man as he has come to 
 be," suggests strange thoughts which answer to that 
 mystic " Fall " of which the Bible speaks. " Some 
 inexplicable shortcoming " hints at a grander fate 
 or recovery awaiting him. It all points to the 
 thought that man is "a great deal more than the 
 physiologist has told him." The trees, the flowers, 
 the birds, the animals, all created things in their 
 several degrees and kinds, appear beautiful to us. 
 Save for "those griefs of circumstance which are 
 in a measure removable," the creatures seem perfect 
 in their adaptability to their environment. But at 
 Man, despite the godlike beauty of his form, despite 
 the "how excellent a piece of work" we perceive him 
 to be, there comes a sense of something far below 
 the realisation of his original idea or his final 
 destiny. We seem to feel that the type has not 
 yet realised the archetype. There is let us confess 
 it an inexplicable dissatisfaction and shame. In
 
 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 191 
 
 some natures of a noble type it takes the form 
 almost of a quarrel with the actual conditions of 
 life. In others, the conditions are happily submitted 
 to, and made the best of. 
 
 But few, it would appear, accept the conditions 
 other than on distinctly conditional terms, even 
 when the terms are given with the calm of philo- 
 sophy or the faith of religion. Yet there is surely a 
 point of view from which the quarrel might vanish 
 into a mysterious understanding and the submission 
 rise into a glad acceptance, since it would be per- 
 ceived that there is something in Man not discer- 
 nible in the rest of creation, and that this subtle but 
 wonderful element is his birthright to claim an 
 environment that never closes, giving him for ever 
 the word of an eternal advance. 
 
 If we accept the idea that man can make, and 
 has to some extent always made, his own environ- 
 ment, we may fairly go on to consider if this power 
 may not be increased by being consciously and ex- 
 perimentally exercised ? It would be hard to say 
 where we can place limits to the workings of that 
 great law of the universe Attraction. It seems 
 pretty evident that Man in certain small matters (if 
 there be any great or small in such considerations) 
 is more and more creating his own environment ; 
 making it in a way that would have seemed impos- 
 sible to our grandfathers. Distance that heavy 
 and cramping factor in our life is wonderfully
 
 192 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 
 
 lessened in its power in these days of railroad and 
 steamship, telegraph and telephone. Our surround- 
 ings no longer shut us in as once they did. We 
 have compelled them to open out in many directions. 
 In some measure, with our resources of science and 
 facilities of transport, we make and seek our own 
 climate and temperature. Man has developed his 
 brain, and to a certain extent gained the control of 
 nature. He cannot fly, but he can force steam to 
 his service, and pass rapidly from place to place : he 
 is not ubiquitous, but can speak from a distance of 
 hundreds, if not thousands, of miles : he has only 
 one pair of hands, but can save and perform an 
 immensity of Herculean labour by the construction 
 and use of machinery : by means of instruments he 
 can overcome the limitations of his eyesight, and 
 perhaps of his hearing : and every sense he has can 
 be complemented by sensitive elements under his 
 control. 
 
 We are being told that it is an open question 
 whether we have been right in speaking of only 
 five senses : sense of weight and sense of heat are 
 added, others are in question. Scientific investiga- 
 tion is diligently and intelligently at work exa- 
 mining many mysterious and ambiguous psychic 
 experiences, and our possible control over them, 
 and adaptability of our organism to them and their 
 laws. Practical possibilities in the world of scien- 
 tific experiment and discovery, which, a generation
 
 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 193 
 
 ago, would have been voted wild fairy tales and 
 the dreams of magic, are now gravely spoken of 
 and discussed. The photographic camera alone is 
 giving us strange promises of revelation in dark 
 places. The thoughts of the people are widening 
 to a more universal outlook than has been hitherto 
 attained. If the body, in its animal aspect and struc- 
 ture, seems arrested in some particulars, the brain 
 metis, the instrument of the soul is not, but seems, 
 on the contrary, to be showing signs of a marvel- 
 lous advance, ever compelling a new environment 
 and fresh conditions whereunto man is called, and 
 will be called, more and more to adapt himself. 
 
 The tremendous and daring words of Schelling 
 come to us at such a crisis with peculiar aptness : 
 "Man becomes greater in proportion as he learns 
 to know himself and his faculty. Let him once 
 become conscious of what he is, and he will soon 
 learn to be what he should." Precisely. The Ideal 
 Man is always within his actual possibility. To 
 perceive the limits is the first step toward passing 
 beyond them. Whilst for the thought of advance 
 for man as Man, there is, to those who care to 
 receive it and value the words as an utterance 
 of power, a warrant for the highest dreams of 
 humanity a warrant of unmeasured authority, in 
 the mysterious statement that, "All things, what- 
 soever ye pray and ask for, believe that ye have 
 received them, and ye shall receive them."
 
 194 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 
 
 But we must remember that in some respects 
 there are signs of the body deteriorating under the 
 enervating life of our civilisation, and the very re- 
 sources which man has invented to supplement his 
 imperfect senses. Our senses in many ways are not 
 as acute as those of the savage and the Eed Indian. 
 Our powers of bodily endurance, strength, and skill 
 are scarcely as great as they appear to have been 
 in simpler ages. Degeneration, we are informed, is 
 busy around us in our race. On the other hand, it 
 is allowed that the average of life is greater than 
 it was. Certain ravages of disease are mitigated, 
 whilst others threaten an increase. The general 
 well-being of the community in civilised countries 
 advances, but, under the pressure and hurry of 
 modern life, nervous illnesses are alarmingly pre- 
 valent, and the madhouses give startling statistics. 
 
 Such facts some arguing advance of sanity, and 
 others an advance of degeneration may, if such be 
 the bent of the mind, be taken as proving the per- 
 petual presence of a great mass of suffering evil 
 call it what we may. The mass may be shifted, it 
 would be reasoned, but the burden remains, with 
 simply a question as to how and where it is dis- 
 tributed. But all such views seem to arise from 
 narrowness of outlook and vision. The tremendous 
 cycles of evolution are not sufficiently remembered, 
 or the infinite possibilities of universal Nature suf- 
 ficiently honoured in such considerations. Without
 
 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 195 
 
 discrediting the theory of averages, one may reason- 
 ably point out that it, and every like theory, is built 
 on a survey that does not extend beyond a small 
 area of our age and civilisation a survey that is 
 little more, in any large sense, than local and tem- 
 porary. The theories thus evolved are practically 
 useful for to-day, but are quite insufficient and in- 
 adequate to be quoted as serious arguments against 
 principles and possibilities which in their very 
 nature and aim transcend the ordinary limits of 
 time and place. Those people who refuse to accept 
 the idea of Man evolving a higher organism than 
 he now possesses, usually limit their arguments, both 
 in thought and outlook, so to speak, to the history 
 of a yesterday and the probabilities of a to-morrow. 
 The cycles to which the mystic looks trend far 
 back, even beyond the aeons claimed by the geologist, 
 and far ahead of the periods that are usually hinted 
 at in the teaching of theology. Yet he holds no 
 depressingly cheerful views of the Perfectibility of 
 the Human Eace, since he is willing to believe that 
 humanity has seen, and will see, many Races and 
 " Families " in the Evolution of its mysterious plane- 
 tary cycles. 1 Beyond question, science affords him 
 specimens of wondrous evolution, which go to jus- 
 tify his theory, not indeed with proof, but with 
 striking analogy and startling example. The man 
 of science surely should be the last person in the 
 
 1 See page 102.
 
 196 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 
 
 world ever to affirm evolution even of the astound- 
 ing and miraculous kind is impossible. That science 
 also gives facts which are antagonistic to any such 
 possibilities is but to be expected, since advance of 
 any kind is never an easy or undisputed path. And 
 although theological dogma may pronounce any 
 such ideas as dangerous, theology itself can scarcely 
 call them irreligious or impossible, since it must 
 accept what is called the "miraculous" element, 
 and the statement that certain human lives have 
 touched and gained superhuman powers ; nor can it 
 ignore the mysteries with which our Scriptures 
 begin and end, mysteries which surely point to 
 humanity as having once seen higher races than 
 it now holds, and as capable of attaining a state of 
 higher development and spiritual power. 
 
 If the triumphs of faith-healing lie within the 
 potentialities of Nature (and who will prove they do 
 not ?), our race may yet conquer sickness and dis- 
 ease. It is an indisputable fact that the root idea 
 of faith-healing spreads around us in these days in a 
 very striking way. I think it is only ignorance or 
 prejudice which laughs at it. Its failures, no doubt, 
 are numerous. But are not these, in great mea- 
 sure, the results of a mistaken point of attack, and 
 a radically wrong method? Is it not selfishness 
 which generally implores its aid, selfishness under 
 one or other of its many disguises ? The invalid 
 often seeks it with an entire misconception of its
 
 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 197 
 
 plan of Cause and Effect, and finding that it asks 
 for what selfish fear of illness and death, or selfish 
 desire for the liberty and the licence of health, can 
 never bring to it, he retires disgusted, and pro- 
 nounces the system a foolish and impracticable dream. 
 But it is neither. It is the realisation of the mens 
 sana in corpore sano. That proverbial phrase has 
 been accepted by every system, it is true ; but it 
 will be granted that the application has generally 
 been somewhat that of placing the horse at the back 
 of the cart. The corpus sanum has been, as a rule, 
 the point aimed at a healthful and natural develop- 
 ment of the frame, and a love of outdoor pursuits, 
 whereby it seems to have been inferred and with 
 some show of reason that the sanity of the nuns 
 would be probably secured. 
 
 The drawback and weakness of this inverted 
 application is, however, that if the body happens 
 to be an imperfect or poor vessel, or if it falls 
 somewhat into dilapidation and conditions of in- 
 sanity, it seems to be a bad look out for the indwell- 
 ing mcns. For if the health of the body be held to 
 be perceptibly instrumental in producing a healthy 
 inward constitution, what is to be consequent on a 
 reversal of that condition ? It would seem to be the 
 safer and wiser method to secure the sanity of the 
 inward state, and believe that it is the true trans- 
 figuring power. The Latin proverb gives this order, 
 and this it is which is most surely meant. It is
 
 198 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 
 
 curious that a Christian community should ever 
 have accepted any other interpretation of the words. 
 But it has turned them upside down, and daringly 
 declared the sense still stands erect. It will at once 
 be apparent, however, that this inversion is a very 
 important one. We have thus got hold of the stick 
 by the wrong end. Mens sana in corpore sano sug- 
 gests in reality a thought which is the exact reverse 
 of its received application. It cuts at the very root 
 of many of our scholastic ideas, and alters our con- 
 ceptions of health and disease. 
 
 The pathology of disease has had a noble ideal, 
 and has worked at it nobly. But it is founded 
 more on the notion of fighting the darkness of 
 disease than of dissipating it by pouring in the 
 light. Doubtless this may be considered the crux 
 for all education and government of every kind, 
 social, physical, moral, and spiritual. It would 
 seem the wiser course to bring in the light than 
 to battle with the darkness. It is, however, notice- 
 able that more and more every year our doctors 
 emphasise nursing, congenial and befitting sur- 
 roundings, general "treatment," keeping up the 
 spirits, &c., as more important than the assimila- 
 tion of drugs. The day of the pill and the potion 
 is, we will hope, no longer at its meridian. A dis- 
 tinctly new spirit is creeping into our schools of 
 medicine. Some of the truths of faith-healing, 
 under academic names, are obtaining even with
 
 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 199 
 
 the most orthodox. Professor Charcot called faith- 
 healing " an ideal method, since it often attains its 
 ends when all other means have failed." The 
 central idea of the system is a true evangel. It 
 is as yet but little realised, but its roots are spread- 
 ing. It seems difficult at the outset for people to 
 perceive that the very essence of it lies in the 
 understanding that its results are only accorded to 
 a great and vital inward longing for sanity for its 
 own sake, and all that it means to an intense 
 desire for health, wholeness, holiness to these, 
 and to these alone ; and never for a moment to 
 any wild craving for mere personal well-being, or 
 because illness is painful and wearisome. " Health " 
 was once used as a synonym for salvation. That 
 excellent savour of meaning should be remembered. 
 Faith-healing would be understood in that memory. 
 
 Then, too, people have not yet got over the ex- 
 pectation of something miraculous, something swift 
 of operation, an easy way out of difficulties. This 
 is their conception of faith -healing. Miraculous, 
 even magical in the true sense, it is ; but only as 
 "the world is one big miracle," as birth and growth 
 are miraculous, and in the sense in which Paracelsus 
 pronounced Thought to be the only magic he knew. 
 
 It is curious that the world has so little realised 
 the idea. It is no new thing. "To be able to 
 perceive the good, to desire it, and hope for it, is 
 the means of reaching it," is a saying attributed
 
 200 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 
 
 to Hermes Trismegistus. Socrates, in the " Char- 
 mides " of Plato, tells us, " Such, Charrnides, is the 
 nature of the charm which I learned from one 
 of the physicians of the Thracian king, Zamolxis, 
 when serving with the army. He was one of those 
 who are said to give immortality. This Thracian 
 told me that in these notions of theirs, the Greek 
 physicians are quite right as far as they go ; but 
 Zamolxis, he added, our king, who is also a god, 
 says further, 'that as you ought not to attempt to 
 cure the eyes without the head, or the head without 
 the eyes, so neither ought you to attempt to cure, the 
 body without the soul; and this/ he said, 'is the 
 reason why the cure of so many diseases is un- 
 known to the physicians of Hellas, because they are 
 ignorant of the whole, which ought to be studied 
 also; for the part can never be well unless the 
 whole is well.' For all good and evil, whether in 
 the body or in human nature, originates, as he 
 declared, in the soul, and overflows from thence. 
 And therefore, if the head and body are to be 
 well, you must begin by curing the soul ; that 
 is the first thing. . . . ' For this,' he said, 'is the 
 great error of our day in the treatment of the 
 human body, that physicians separate the soul from 
 the body.' " 
 
 It would be difficult to state the case more 
 plainly. Many of the fathers of the Christian 
 Church plainly show that they held this thought
 
 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 201 
 
 as existent in the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. 
 St. Augustine says, " If we follow our Healer, we 
 must needs leave our sins and our diseases behind 
 us." This is evidently based on the words, "Who 
 forgiveth all thine iniquities and who healeth all 
 thy diseases." We cannot but note that, in Judaea 
 of old, according to the Gospel narratives, the great 
 Healer to whom St. Augustine referred, in working 
 what are called his miracles, always appeared to 
 measure the healing to be received, not by the posi- 
 tive power administered from without, but by the 
 negative operation of faith which heard the Word 
 from within. " According to your faith be it unto 
 you," and " Thy faith hath made thee whole" might 
 be taken as the formulas of the cause and of the 
 effect of all the miracles of Galilee. If the same 
 Divine sentence be passed on man as a race, his 
 faith alone need mark the limit to the sanity and 
 power he may gain and attract unto himself from 
 the infinite health and life that are symbolised to 
 us in the Name of God. 
 
 Nor should the time that has passed and is now 
 passing seem a delay that need make the heart sick. 
 For, in the true vision of time, such periods, we have 
 constantly to remind ourselves, are the thousand 
 years that are as a day. When we remember the 
 enormous cycles of evolution, we have no cause for 
 wonder if the higher evolutions be measured by a 
 calendar as great, and even greater.
 
 202 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 
 
 " We have only to reflect on the unnumbered 
 ages required for evolution, inorganic and organic, 
 to attain the present stage of development, to be 
 assured that if the super-organic evolution be in- 
 deed a continuance of that vast chain, it too will 
 be the work, not of years, nor of hundreds, nor 
 of thousands of years, but of time incalculable." l 
 Should we not rather feel joy and exultation that 
 the sign and hope of advance is in ever so slight 
 degree apparent, than depression at its slow pro- 
 gress ? Slight or great, slow or quick, are words of 
 but relative meaning. The matter is proved at the 
 first step taken. The rest is but a question of time, 
 and time is nothing in such a race. If the line can 
 be passed the door opened the word given and 
 received all else is but an after-result. The new 
 environment is there. The advance is still ours. 
 
 Ill 
 
 A thought that has taken root is like a living 
 plant, and plant-like will grow. Possibly nothing is 
 so great in its silent, unseen force. It can transform 
 and transfigure a body in a way not given to any 
 power from without. It can elevate and it can 
 degrade a man in answer to its own level. It can 
 write itself with plain yet mysterious character on 
 the countenance, and speak in the very lines and 
 
 1 E. M. Caillard, "Progressive Revelation."
 
 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 203 
 
 motions of the body. It is scarcely too much to 
 say that every man and woman is in reality a living 
 and visible thought. Sometimes the thought is dis- 
 cernible at a glance. The impress is unmistakable. 
 A base thought may occasionally forge a higher 
 thought's signature, it is true, but it is generally 
 detectable before long. Some people have a rare 
 power of perception in the matter of the incarnated 
 thought in a man or woman. They are natural 
 experts at that spirit-writing. 
 
 But we may all gain a good power of such read- 
 ing. It is questionable whether there is not an 
 unavoidable sentence of truthfulness passed on man 
 in this matter. Willy-nilly, he surely expresses out- 
 wardly could we but read it aright the dominat- 
 ing thought of the world within him. That the life 
 of the man is ruled thereby, no one will question. 
 The thoughts of religion must be confessed, even 
 by those who have no personal acceptance of them, 
 to be vital in their power, both creative and motive, 
 over the man in whom they are rooted : a power 
 no more to be explained away or belittled than 
 any of the great forces of the world. Could the 
 vitality, the magic, and glory of these great re- 
 ligious thoughts, then, become universally felt and 
 received, who can doubt that a certain measure of 
 transfiguration of humanity would follow, just as 
 it follows in the individual case? Alas! such a 
 possibility appears Utopian, since by some mys-
 
 204 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 
 
 terious but continuous law of the world the masses 
 of mankind have not within themselves the soil and 
 atmosphere, so to speak, in which great religious 
 ideas can alone take root and grow. 
 
 If, however in the dawning and daily advancing 
 belief that there is no real bar between matter and 
 spirit, and that all is in origin and end, spiritual 
 the vitality, the magic, and glory, which have 
 hitherto been too often supposed by the world at 
 large to be the exclusive characteristics of a certain 
 section of thought called Eeligion, should be found 
 more and more to be characteristic of all life and 
 being, from lowest to highest, it surely would follow 
 as a natural sequence that a great glory of exalta- 
 tion would dignify the soul of man, and the body 
 of man would soon begin to express the inward 
 glorification. A change in the inward structure 
 must inevitably in time express itself outwardly. 
 
 Philosophers have often recognised the illuminat- 
 ing and transforming power of holy thoughts and 
 a wide outlook into the universe. Marcus Aurelius 
 has a striking sentence on this, which sounds almost 
 modern in its scientific view of things. He says : 
 " Consider the course of the stars as if you were 
 driving through the sky with them. Let the trans- 
 mutation of the elements be frequently the subject 
 of your meditations." This reads almost like one 
 of M. Flammarion's sentences. He, too, is very 
 hopeful of what the effect on mankind would be
 
 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 205 
 
 could they but enter into what he calls the Uranian 
 life the life of Thought that opens out to one who 
 reads the starry skies as a book. He becomes pro- 
 phetic. " When men know something of the earth, 
 and understand the modest position of our planet in 
 infinity ; when they appreciate better the grandeur 
 and beauty of Nature, they will be fools no longer, 
 as coarse on the one hand as credulous on the other; 
 but they will live at peace, in the fertile study of 
 Truth, in the contemplation of the Beautiful, in 
 the practice of God, in the progressive development 
 of the reason, and the noble exercise of the higher 
 faculties of intelligence." l 
 
 This may seem to some over-hopeful: if so, we 
 may well substitute that word in which there is 
 so much virtue if for the when, and place the 
 future into the conditional. The truth involved 
 stands unaffected. The position is a logical one, 
 however unlikely its realisation may seem to ns. 
 The reception of the great truths he names would 
 surely have the effect he predicates. We perceive 
 that the truly philosophic and truly scientific, as 
 well as the truly religious mind, moves on a level 
 whereon half the thoughts and events which absorb 
 the lives and convulse the energies of other men 
 lose their power and their temptation. The Uranian 
 life is an attainable one, though it may be desired 
 and attained but by few. That its influence would 
 
 1 "The Earth in the Sky."
 
 206 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 
 
 work for the higher development of mankind, could 
 it be generally received, is but a natural supposition. 
 The astronomer I have already quoted begins one 
 of his lectures by bidding his listeners look upon 
 themselves "not as denizens of the earth, but as 
 citizens of the heavens." The invocation is certainly 
 a striking one. Such a thought, were it thoroughly 
 believed and realised by the world, must surely have 
 an ennobling effect on the mind ; and that, in due 
 time, must as surely make the body a sharer in its 
 nobility. 
 
 To the mere materialist the great messages of 
 science possibly bring but so many warrants for 
 the tenure of his position. To the conventionally 
 religious-minded man, who separates the Creator 
 from his creation, the widening of the universe 
 only takes his God farther and farther away from 
 him. But to the man who perceives in Matter and 
 Spirit one mystic Unity, every step that science 
 makes onward takes him rejoicing on his way. 
 There are words of Pythagoras which might be 
 quoted in a scientific application to-day relative 
 to the arrest of the body, and the vast environ- 
 ment of our earth which science has proclaimed : 
 "In leaving behind the gross body, thou shalt pass 
 into the free ethereal spaces, and thou shalt become 
 a demigod." The real meanings of the passage lie 
 deeper than any scientific outlook, but even read 
 thus it may have its fulfilment. The realisation
 
 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 207 
 
 of onr citizenship with the universe is an idea that 
 has often presented itself to thoughtful minds in 
 all ages, and has brought with it the bright sense 
 of enfranchisement and of companionship that must 
 be its inevitable result in a mind attuned to re- 
 ceive it. Sometimes the thought has been almost 
 humorously expressed. " You care nothing for your 
 country," was said to Anaxagoras. "I care for it 
 very much indeed," was his reply, and pointing to 
 the stars, he added, " My country is there." 
 
 Thoreau, the man who approached the personally 
 philosophic ideal more nearly than any of his con- 
 temporaries, was once asked if he did not feel lonely 
 living by himself in his hut in the woods. "Lonely ! " 
 he wrote in answer, "why should I feel lonely ? Is 
 not our planet in the Milky Way ? " A faith that is 
 deep can afford to laugh over its own profundity. 
 The companionship and social advantages of the 
 Milky Way must be owned to be a far stretch for the 
 Uranian life on earth. But in its humour there 
 lies a bright truth, and in its exaggerated phrase a 
 prophecy. Nor, as it appears to me, at least, can 
 the words of science, which might seem to depress 
 and overawe the mind, affect the uplifting and illu- 
 minating influence which this sense of universal in- 
 terest and environment opens out to our view. The 
 message of a chilling earth and a dying sun, of 
 worlds of unimaginable storm and elemental energy, 
 of a solar system that in the course of aeons will
 
 208 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 
 
 be, as it were, cast into the mighty crucible to be 
 perhaps reconstructed ad infinitum, the infinite- 
 simal littleness of one human life in the great cycles 
 of evolution and " the vastn esses of space," all these 
 things seem but a part of that majestic inheritance 
 to which the spirit lays claim. For the creature 
 Man, indeed, who is arrested in his animal course 
 upward, these messages drive home the sense of 
 doom. But 
 
 " As when one layeth 
 
 His worn-out robes away, 
 And, taking new ones, sayeth, 
 
 ' These will I wear to-day ;' 
 So putteth by the spirit 
 
 Lightly its garb of flesh, 
 And passeth to inherit 
 
 A residence afresh." 1 
 
 And for such an one, to whom the body is as a 
 garment, a garment that changes its fashion, and 
 might even be wrought into ever-richer robes, all 
 these facts are so many doors and avenues of splen- 
 dour through which he passes up and out from the 
 cramping conditions of an arrested body ; for he has 
 touched a point from which, though he 
 
 "... Shrivel at the thought of God, of Time, and Space, 
 and Death," 
 
 1 Sir Edwin Arnold's translation of the Bagavadgita.
 
 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 26$ 
 
 yet he can say : 
 
 "... I, turning, call to thee, soul, them actual me, 
 And lo ! tliou gently masterest the orbs, 
 Thou matest time, sinilest content at death, 
 And fillest, swellest full, the vastnesses of space." l 
 
 Would not the heart-whole and world- wide recep- 
 tion by mankind of such aspiring and inspiring 
 thoughts be the signal for the spiritual utterance of 
 an imperative and unchallenged word of advance ? 
 It may be foolish to dream of the probability of such 
 a reception. It would be much more foolish surely 
 to doubt its result. 
 
 IV 
 
 To turn from such a contemplation to the remem- 
 brance of the present degradation and misery of the 
 world at large is for a moment to face such a fall 
 into darkness as renders the foregoing speculations 
 merely the high-flown dream of those who live in 
 the clouds and not on the substantial earth ; of those 
 who, in conjuring up a vision of an ideal man, ignore 
 the presence of the actual man who lives and moves 
 and has his being in the world to-day. It is, doubt- 
 less, a difficult thing to preserve a due balance in 
 such speculations and lines of thought. To forget 
 what Is in visions of what Might be and May be, is 
 clearly a grave mistake, all the more serious from its 
 frequency. And yet, on the other hand, to turn 
 
 1 Walt Whitman, "Passage to India."
 
 2io ARREST OR ADVANCE? 
 
 from a thought which may touch some disregarded 
 truth, because it is, or seems to be, far removed from 
 the things we call facts (which are in reality but the 
 passing phantoms of time and place), were an even 
 graver mistake. The grim and well-nigh overwhelm- 
 ing " facts " of life are neither forgotten nor despised 
 in any true thought, however transcendental ; and 
 it is indisputable that the thought which has influ- 
 enced and moulded those same " facts " of life in the 
 greatest and most lasting degree has not been that 
 of the utilitarian, the practical worker, or the man 
 of common sense, but that of the transcendentalist. 
 The seer whose vision has pierced through facts and 
 things seen to the possibilities of human nature and 
 the things unseen, is the man who has done most for 
 the world. This rule holds good even in science, 
 which professes to deal only with facts. As the 
 author of " Regeneration " well puts it, "It is the 
 imaginative strength of the scientist which renders 
 him a pioneer and a discoverer, and without it he is 
 to his science what the performer of music who can- 
 not compose is to music." We will not fear to take 
 the highest possibilities that can be announced to 
 Man, nor call them impracticable because his pre- 
 sent condition seems so far removed from them. 
 The first step out of that condition is the admission 
 that it is not final. " We are near waking when we 
 dream that we dream." 
 
 But even supposing that advance be open to Man
 
 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 211 
 
 in his bodily constitution, one may well pause to 
 ask if the present point of animal perfection which 
 is implied in the thesis of the arrest of the body 
 must be realised individually as well as typically, 
 before further advance for the race can be insti- 
 tuted ? 
 
 It is evident that although theoretically and in 
 structure the typical body of man is held to be in a 
 high state of perfection, the average number of in- 
 dividual instances are far from personal realisation 
 of that state. Is it necessary that universal perfec- 
 tion of the body as it is should be effected before the 
 onward step, granting it is open, can be made ? Such 
 a consummation, however "devoutly to be wished," 
 could hardly be entertained even in the brightest 
 dreams of hope. Nor does it seem to have been 
 thus that human evolution initiates and works itself 
 out. The Promised Land is reached by a nation 
 that is led by a great leader, an initiate of the mys- 
 teries, and a man of God. The nation itself may be 
 one of emancipated slaves, not yet wholly freed from 
 idolatry. It is the inward eye of_ their leader that 
 sees the goal ahead, aud from captivity, through the 
 deep sea and across the wilderness, leads the people 
 to their destined end and place. He descries their 
 "own country" and their true habitation far away 
 and ahead of them. The conquering army sweeps 
 on, but it is not because each man in its ranks is 
 a personal victor. The victories are planned and
 
 212 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 
 
 accomplished by the general and the captains of 
 the host. Thus the advance may be made. The 
 cycles of human evolution may be larger than we 
 realise. Each race, each sub-race, may have to climb 
 its ladder toward perfection, and then pass away, 
 leaving only those who stand on the topmost rung. 
 All these " advanced ones " may work the force that 
 in some future time amalgamates and carries on the 
 evolutionary purpose. We see indeed that on the 
 inner plane of ideas they do so. The great teachers 
 and thinkers are, and always have been, a united 
 and ever-living influence continually shaping Man. 
 " This idea of rational development, which forms a far 
 broader and safer basis than that of natural develop- 
 ment, is the vital principle in the study of the human 
 mind, quite as much, if not more than in the study 
 of Nature. A study of language, of mythology, of 
 religion, and philosophy, which does not rest on the 
 principle of development, does not deserve the name 
 of a science." l Possibly the drawing together of the 
 nations, the inter-communication, and the annihila- 
 tion of distance and difference of speech, may open 
 the way for these "elect" to make a definite ad- 
 vance on the material plane in answer to that on 
 the spiritual toward the higher developments of 
 the race. It is not necessary, it would seem, then, 
 that the typical perfection of the body should become 
 
 1 Max Miiller, translator's preface to "Kant's Critique of Pure 
 Ileason."
 
 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 213 
 
 a universal personal realisation in all its beauty and 
 health before the arrest should once more pass into 
 advance. If the great leaders of thought point that 
 way, the world will follow. 
 
 The devoted men and women who give their lives 
 to help the poor and the suffering, who toil in the 
 streets and slums of our great cities, in the cottages 
 of country labourers, and the smoke-darkened homes 
 of miners and factory "hands," the doctors and the 
 parsons who face the physical degeneration and dis- 
 ease, the spiritual atrophy and inversion of thousands 
 of their fellow-creatures, must often find it diffi- 
 cult to realise that Nature is held to have per- 
 fected her work in Man. The thought would even 
 seem sometimes to add a grim and sardonic irony to 
 the dreary and sordid imperfection, the gross and 
 humiliating degradation, seen on every side. To 
 credit Nature with such work may at the moment 
 seem to some of us to prove an indictment of mere 
 ruthless and cold indifference against her 
 
 " So careful of the type she seems, 
 So careless of the single life ! " 
 
 But any one who wishes to see truly and with real 
 sight must look deeper than all appearances. The 
 appearances, in fact, are not themselves seen truly 
 unless the vision penetrates them and sees beyond. 
 It has been the sublime mission of religion in all 
 ages to enable man to do this, and in doing it to
 
 214 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 
 
 touch the reality. No voice that the world has 
 heard has given a grander consecration to Man as 
 he is, suffering and degraded, or a grander call to 
 Man as he might be, perfect and regenerate, than 
 that of the Christ when He said, " Inasmuch as 
 ye have done it unto one of the least of these, My 
 brethren, ye have done it unto Me" Man is helped 
 on toward his Divine Ideal by showing noble offices 
 and tender charities to those who seem furthest 
 from its realisation. 
 
 But it is also to be helped on, and even more, by 
 those who remember that the same lips gave to us 
 the sublimest, the most illimitable ideal for man 
 that has ever been held up before his eyes an ideal 
 that requires courage even to listen to in its full 
 meaning, and greater courage still to repeat as a 
 permitted hope. " Be ye perfect, even as your 
 Father which is in heaven is perfect." 
 
 Science may tell us that Man is perfected, and 
 can go no further. We refuse to believe it, even 
 for the body. He may have adapted himself to the 
 utmost to the environment that science has taken 
 count of ; but his environment is far greater and 
 vaster than that of the physical and material world. 
 If the great words of Jesus of Nazareth are true, 
 true on all planes, as such words of such a speaker 
 must ever be, an ideal for the whole entity of man is 
 proclaimed in them, nothing short of perfection. 
 The crisis which science sees in the arrest of the
 
 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 215 
 
 body can be no bar to this advance. It must be a 
 step toward it the recognition of the point where 
 the physical becomes the psychical the nativity 
 which can make the Son of Man the Son of God. 
 The environment which lies open to this man re- 
 generate is as vast as the ideal that lies before him. 
 This environment is not a " spiritual " matter merely, 
 but universal ; not of the " soul " alone, but of body, 
 mind, soul, and spirit ; not of " heaven" only, but of 
 earth as well ; not of " eternity " and a beyond, but 
 of time and here. 
 
 Are there then any signs of the perception of this 
 line of advance for man in the world around us, 
 apart from the received aspirations and too little 
 realised teaching of religion? The existence of a 
 possibility is nothing, so to speak, without the will 
 to work it. "Will is the immanent principle of 
 the universe." l If man once realises his present 
 state, and has faith in what the great ones of the 
 world have told him, and will put it into action, the 
 advance surely lies before him. In the past and 
 most of all in the far past there seem to have been 
 individual cases of the faith received and the will 
 exercised into triumphant expression. But a large 
 section of the modern world not wholly omitting a 
 certain section of the religious world also gazes 
 with questioning eyes on the record of these in- 
 dividual cases, and passes them by in silence or 
 
 1 C. E. Plumptre on Schopenhauer, "History of Pantheism."
 
 216 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 
 
 annotates the record with discrediting words. But 
 if the cases were true, then the possibility they repre- 
 sent is a real one and lies open to all. The words 
 that ring through the ages attest that possibility. 
 Is the world listening more and more to the words ? 
 Is the interest in such questions, the sense of ex- 
 pectancy, the strange pulse of spiritual thought 
 around us, a sign of reawakening consciousness? 
 Is "the longing of a soul the prophecy of its ful- 
 filment " ? l After the night of the Dark Ages, and 
 that darkest hour before the dawn, the reign of 
 materialism and denial, are there any signs of the 
 coining light ? 
 
 The dawn may be so slight that it may seem but 
 a lessening of the darkness. The first signs of life 
 are very minute, often undiscernible, or, if discernible, 
 undistinguished by any adequate seal or sign of its des- 
 tiny and heritage. Perhaps at present it is only in 
 material and everyday things that the signs, if any, 
 are shadowed. But we must not, therefore, despise 
 them. The world has always wondered that the 
 teacher comes from its Nazareth, and was born 
 amongst the animals. The voices which may be taken 
 as preluding the possible advance for man come, as 
 has been pointed out, from hard material science on 
 the one hand, and on the other from disregarded, and 
 often disapproved of, subjects of inquiry, and lines 
 of thought that are open to the charge of leading 
 
 1 Emerson.
 
 ARREST OR ADVANCE? 217 
 
 to regions of fancy rather than that of fact. But 
 to some of us the voices have a harmony. Even in 
 the very fact that science recognises a physical 
 arrest of the body there is hope. 
 
 "... wind, 
 If winter comes, can spring be far behind?"
 
 THE 
 LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD
 
 "Losses are comparative : only imagination makes them of 
 any moment." PASCAL. 
 
 " Full many a gem of purest ray serene, 
 
 The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear : 
 Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, 
 And waste its sweetness on the desert air. " GRAY. 
 
 " Le grand secret de la vie est la permanence des forces et la 
 mutation de la matiere." FLOUKENS. 
 
 " And I will cause the music of thy songs to cease : and the 
 sound of thy harps shall be no more heard. And I will make 
 thee like the top of a rock ; thou shalt be a place to spread nets 
 upon." EZEKIEL xxvi. 13.
 
 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 
 
 THE historian, searching the records of the past, 
 must surely find few chronicles that are more stir- 
 ring to the imagination than those which tell of the 
 loss of riches which the world has amassed, be they 
 riches of art, of thought, or of mere wealth. The 
 mind regards all such tales with a wistful and ques- 
 tioning interest. The thought instantly suggests 
 itself that for every such record there must be an 
 unwritten page of unrecorded loss. "The world 
 knows nothing of its greatest men," says Sir Henry 
 Taylor's Van Artevcldc. Perhaps it is equally true 
 that the world knows nothing of its greatest losses. 
 Civilisation has been called a vast palimpsest. The 
 written character we read to-day is but inscribed 
 on and over a dozen layers of hieroglyph, dimly 
 deciphered, faded clean away, or erased to make 
 the parchment clear for the present legend. The 
 crowded and illimitable retrospect, the penetrating
 
 222 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 
 
 pathos, the strange indifference of life and nature, 
 opened out to us in the thought of the lost riches of 
 the world, rise to a picturesqueness so manifold and 
 a drama so imperative, that, even to the most com- 
 monplace and unimaginative mind, the pictures are 
 vivid and the poem is obvious. One need but point 
 in silence. The gorgeous tragedy unrolls itself at 
 once to eye and ear. 
 
 Imagination stretches the record of loss beyond 
 the pages of accredited history, and we feel that its 
 voice is true and just when it whispers to us of the 
 passing away, in decay or violence, of civilisations 
 whereof we catch but the dimmest shadows, of 
 wisdom and riches and beauty in the mythic dawn of 
 our race, all lost and forgotten before the world began 
 to tread what are now, to us, the remotest vistas 
 of the past. What was that sunken continent, the 
 lost Atlantis, with its unknown wisdom and too pre- 
 sumptuous pride of glory ? What were the kingdoms 
 and riches of the Pre-Adamite Soldans ? Whence 
 came the lovely tales and legends of a golden age 
 floating echoes of an Edenic state which haunt the 
 world ? Man never yet invented a story, it is said. 
 All such legends far-off myths must have a 
 nucleus of reality. In such a field of thought ima- 
 gination has a right of way, and he whose mind is 
 most richly stored with the records of known history 
 will surely (unless he be of the dry-as-dust school) 
 most readily grant that imagination is not likely to 
 outstep probability.
 
 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 223 
 
 The lost riches of the world ! Even the tales 
 known to every schoolboy are full of suggestion and 
 wonder. The very names of the great cities of old 
 seem to hold secrets of splendour and pageantry, 
 wisdom and drama. We long for an evocation to 
 make them yield up what they could tell of riches 
 lost in the crumbling ruin of time. 
 
 " Where is Thebes, in all her glory with her gates of beaten 
 
 gold? 
 Where Syene, and that marvel, Heliopolis of old ? " 1 
 
 "Where are the cities of the plain? 
 
 And where the shrine of rapt Bethel ? 
 And Culah, built of Tubal Cain ? 
 And Shinar, whence King Amraphel 
 Came out in arms, and fought and fell ? 
 
 And where is Karnac, that great fane 
 
 With granite wrought, a miracle ? 
 And Luxor, smooth, without a stain, 
 
 Whose graven scriptures now we spell ? 
 
 Where are the cities of old time ? " ~ 
 Babylon the great, Nineveh, Tyre and Sidon, 
 Athens, Persepolis, Carthage, Palmyra, 
 Jerusalem : " How are the mighty fallen ! " The 
 pictures rise one over the other and pass quickly 
 before us. Then, what mean those monuments of 
 lost civilisations ? The Nagkon-Wat in Cambodia : 
 who built it ? And those stately ruins in Central 
 America, the temples at Palenque and Uximal, ruins 
 of a race that had perished before the Aztec rose to 
 power : no one knows their origin or their builders. 
 
 1 Matilda Blind. 2 Edmund Gosse.
 
 224 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 
 
 The history of Borne alone gives us page after 
 page of treasure destroyed and lost. Part of the 
 Nibelungen hoard that was amassed there was 
 indeed carried away, diverted into other channels, 
 and doubtless enriches the world to-day. But much 
 was lost. Fire and flood had their way of it : the 
 earth buried it deep, with shattered column and 
 fallen architrave : statues, jewels, gold more plen- 
 tiful than Solomon drew from the unknown Ophir 
 of the south ; spoil brought to Rome in many a 
 triumph ; wealth gathered by her strong hands of 
 dominion from every corner of the then known 
 world. Heaps of treasure, it is said, were thrown 
 into the "yellow Tiber," to be washed out to sea, 
 or drowned deep in its silt and mud. The seven- 
 branched candlestick and the golden table brought 
 by Titus from Jerusalem (if indeed they were 
 veritable parts of the sacred furniture of the 
 Temple *) were borne off by Genseric to Carthage 
 
 1 It has been considered to be scarcely probable that the golden 
 candlestick brought by Titus from Jerusalem was the veritable 
 seven-branched candlestick from the Temple. The Jews, zealously 
 reverent of everything connected with the sacred precincts, would 
 surely not have left it to be looted by the victorious army. From 
 pictures we know that marine monsters were represented in the 
 ornamentation of the candlestick brought to Rome ; and such sym- 
 bolism would seem to prove that it could not have been in the 
 Jewish sanctuary. The tradition that it was flung into the Tiber 
 is unsupported by any historic record. Procopius, an authority 
 often quoted by Gibbon, tells us that after the candlestick was 
 placed at Constantinople, Justinian regarded it with dread as a, 
 desecration, and sent it to the Christian Church at Jerusalem. 
 That seems to be the latest record of its fate, as far as I can 
 ascertain.
 
 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 225 
 
 (A.D. 455), only to be brought back by Belisarius 
 (A.D. 535) when Carthage was recovered from the 
 Vandals, and placed subsequently in a church at 
 Byzantium. Tradition and history differ in the 
 accounts given of their fate, but both alike attest 
 their loss. Masterpieces of Praxiteles and Skopas l 
 which were brought to adorn Rome fell a prey to 
 its flames during the reigns of Claudius, 2 Nero, 
 and Titus, or were mutilated and destroyed when 
 Caligula 3 wore the purple. The historic sea must 
 hide vast store of wealth beneath its waters. It 
 has seen nations and empires come and go, and pass 
 away on tides more fluctuating than any it knows. 
 Priceless cargoes surely lie there " full six fathoms 
 
 1 " In Bithynia was originally one of Skopas' great works, which 
 was taken to Rome about B.C. 30." MITCHELL'S History of Ancient 
 Sculpture. 
 
 " Of an Aries, removed from Asia Minor to Rome about B.C. 
 133, we only know that the God of War . . . occupied the same 
 temple as a nude Aphrodite by the same master (Skopas)." Ibid. 
 
 "Skopas' famous Apollo was placed by Augustus in the Pala- 
 tine temple. . . . His Achilles group stood in the Domitian shrine 
 in the Flaminian Circus. In a temple of Apollo at Rome was the 
 group representing the slaughter of the daughters of Niobe, ascribed 
 to both Praxiteles and Skopas." PERRY'S Greek and Roman Sculp- 
 ture. 
 
 2 " Of a bronze Aphrodite ... we only know that, with other 
 works of Praxiteles, it was consumed by fire in Claudius' reign." 
 MITCHELL'S History of Ancient Sculpture. 
 
 " A famous statue of Eros by Praxiteles was placed by Nero in 
 the portico of Octavia in Rome. During the reign of Titus it fell, 
 with the portico, a prey to the flames." Ibid. 
 
 3 "Countless gems (of sculpture) were mutilated and destroyed 
 in the reigns of Caligula and Nero." PERRY'S Greek and Roman 
 Sculpture. 
 
 P
 
 226 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 
 
 deep." The illustrious and beautiful cities whose 
 feet have been set high on its rocky shores, or have 
 been washed by its blue waves, must have be- 
 queathed some of their riches to its deep keeping. 
 
 "... Old palaces and towers 
 Quivering within the waves' intenser day, 
 All overgrown with azure moss and flowers." . . . 
 
 Who can now tell all the glories and pomp of Dido's 
 Carthage? Cleopatra found her Egypt possessing 
 but a tithe of its ancient magnificence under the 
 Pharaohs and the Hyksos ; yet Shakespeare sings 
 her splendour in his most sumptuous phrase. When 
 Alaric the Goth died, his wild Northmen turned 
 a river from its course ; they set their hero-king 
 upright on his horse in the dried river-bed; they 
 surrounded him with slain slaves and heaped-up 
 treasure, that he might enter Valhalla worthily 
 and with befitting state ; and then they turned the 
 river back again into its proper channel. Where 
 are all the wonderful things found in the Gothic 
 palace at Narbonne "tables of solid emerald, the 
 missorium, a dish 2500 Ibs. weight, covered with all 
 the gems of India " ? l Sarcophagus and sepulchre, 
 Egyptian pyramid and Etruscan urn, may have 
 been the receptacles of rich regalias. The dead hand 
 has not always left its hoarded wealth for others to 
 use. The discrowned brow has sometimes taken its 
 
 1 Charles Kingsley, "The Roman and the Teuton."
 
 227 
 
 diadem with it, at least into the world of darkness 
 and oblivion. From Alexandria the flames of the 
 burning of the great library seem to wave a beacon 
 that is answered later on by the flames of the holo- 
 causts lit by Savonarola in the streets of Florence. 
 The soil of onr own land may still cover hidden 
 treasure. When the 
 
 " Conquerors from the eastward, 
 Lords by land and sea," 
 
 poured into Britain after the Roman occupation, 
 there must have been a wild time of loss and de- 
 struction. Shattered pavements of Roman villas 
 and pots of coins have been found, to speak of the 
 scenes that marked that period of devastation. In 
 the Fen country, the rich Abbey of the Golden 
 Borough was sacked and burnt by the Danes and 
 Northmen. The Reformation and the great Civil 
 War doubtless added to the store of buried plate 
 and jewels. It is perhaps scarcely to be expected 
 that England would care to listen to the plain and 
 unvarnished tale of the destruction of valuable and 
 beautiful things that has gone on since Europe 
 began to loot the treasure-houses of the East. 
 Royal and sacred gems and jewels were found and 
 taken, and a hundred hands have no doubt made 
 themselves rich with unscrupulous seizure of the 
 wealth of the conquered races. But how much 
 must have been lost, concealed, practically de-
 
 228 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 
 
 stroyed, both in wanton triumph by the victors and 
 in fierce defiance by the vanquished. 
 
 Then the whole story of the Spanish conquis- 
 tadores in the New World, does it not read like 
 one long tale of romance Mexico and Peru 
 the blood-stained Aztec teocallis, and the glitter- 
 ing stainless Temples of the Sun under the Incns ? 
 The fabled wonders of the golden city of Manoa 
 scarcely surpassed the veritable marvels seen by 
 the grim soldiers of Cortez and Pizarro. Vast 
 treasure is said to have been buried or hidden by 
 the priests. Many of the rich galleons bearing the 
 spoil of the Indies and the Spanish Main jewels 
 and ingots of precious metals to enrich the coffers 
 of the Most Catholic King, never reached port, but 
 yielded up their treasure on the high seas as toll 
 paid to war, to wind and wave. Are they all tales of 
 romance ? Yes ; but a romance that history does 
 not deny a romance that takes us captive at once 
 with its living and varied picturesqueness. 
 
 Perhaps there are few places wherein the thought 
 of the lost riches of the world haunts us more per- 
 sistently than in the galleries and crypts of a great 
 museum such as that wherein the Venus of Milo 
 stands supreme, or where 
 
 " the kind of light 
 Which London takes the day to be " 
 
 falls on the relics of Greece and Nineveh. Between
 
 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 229 
 
 the Hues of the official catalogue we discern another 
 and undecipherable list of works of art and beauty 
 and interest lost in oblivion. The prized and price- 
 less things we see around us seem, after all, and 
 at their best, to be but sticks and stones, rags and 
 shreds, saved from a general ruin. For each object 
 we see, a hundred unseen shadows loom ghostlike 
 011 the inner sight. One seems almost to hear the 
 beat and song of the waves which have flung up all 
 this costly wreckage on the shore. 
 
 But the world has had losses greater than any 
 such material treasure. He who walks through a 
 museum with thoughtful mind, or muses on the 
 walls or through the streets of some historic city, is 
 tempted to remember but the visible and tangible 
 glories that have passed away, the vanished beauty 
 and splendour of palace and temple. But there are 
 lost riches, perhaps of greater worth, and certainly 
 harder to appraise. The world takes little count 
 of them, yet are they not in truth its truest 
 losses ? 
 
 First amongst them we may surely count the 
 treasures of thought and the results of science 
 which, in stormy and dark hours of man's history, 
 must have been swept and thrown away. " 'Tis 
 frivolous to fix pedantically the date of any par- 
 ticular inventions," says Emerson ; " they have all 
 been invented over and over fifty times." Such a 
 thought implies that for each fresh nascent period
 
 230 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 
 
 of an invention there has been one of forerun- 
 ning dissolution. "No one can read the history of 
 astronomy," he continues, " without perceiving that 
 Copernicus, Newton, Laplace, are not new men, or 
 a new kind of men, but that Thales, Anaximenes, 
 Hipparchus, Empedocles, Aristarchus, Pythagoras, 
 ^Enipodes, had anticipated them." An unpreju- 
 diced reader cannot study astronomy without realis- 
 ing this. 
 
 In spite of the foolishly patronising tone the 
 modern man of science too often adopts in speaking 
 of the ancients, it is evident to the impartial reader 
 that these same ancients knew a great deal that has 
 been accredited first-hand to modern discovery. Of 
 this I speak in other pages, so I must not repeat 
 the instances; but it must be admitted that we 
 have not even yet got much beyond the truth 
 Pythagoras enunciated when he said that "God 
 worked everywhere by geometry." We cannot 
 honestly doubt that much of the learning and some 
 of the practical resources of science at the command 
 of the builders of the pyramids, and even of the 
 star-gazers of Chaldea and "the plains of Shinar," 
 were lost to the world for centuries. Majestic monu- 
 ments of immemorial antiquity, built in ways which 
 suggest the possession of means we are apt to think 
 the result of modern thought and skill ; the revela- 
 tions of Egyptian papyrus rolls, and Assyrian and 
 Accadian cylinders, all point to the probability of
 
 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 231 
 
 knowledge which was subsequently lost, to be re- 
 discovered ages afterwards. There is a proverb 
 that tells us that lost time is never found again. 
 We may hope it is but a half-truth, and that 
 there certainly is a point where it ceases to be true ; 
 but certainly the lost time of the Dark Ages seems 
 sad to contemplate, when one thinks what advance 
 might have been made by this time had science and 
 thought in all directions advanced from Alexandria 
 on without a break, instead of meeting that blank 
 dark period of loss during the iron reign of the 
 Middle Ages. " Nearly two thousand years (were) to 
 intervene between Archimedes and Newton, nearly 
 seven hundred between Hipparchus and Kepler. A 
 dismal interval of almost twenty centuries parts 
 Hero, whose first steam-engine revolved in the 
 Serapion, from James Watt, who has revolutionised 
 the industry of the world." l This seems a loss of 
 time in truth, and one it is almost impossible at 
 first sight not to regret. We see, too, how hard it 
 is to name what Emerson calls "the indisputable 
 inventor." He goes far afield in suggesting that 
 truth is of immemorial age, and that our names 
 and eras of origin are in reality but names and eras 
 of development. " 'Tis hard," he says, " to find the 
 right Homer, Zoroaster, or Menu ; harder still to 
 find the Tubal Cain, or Yulcan, or Cadmus." Such 
 names are but an x an unknown human quantity. 
 1 C. E. Plumptre, " The History of Pantheism."
 
 232 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 
 
 It is pretty certain there have been losses in the 
 world of science, discovery, invention ; some of them 
 temporary perhaps, but some of them not yet 
 recovered. 
 
 Then we must count another kind of loss in the 
 world, which is even more inscrutable and strange. 
 George Eliot had this in her mind when she put 
 into the mouth of the old musician in " Armgart " 
 
 the pathetic words : 
 
 " Much good seed 
 Is wasted in tins world. Why not my handful ? " 
 
 In such waste there seems a callous loss, hard to 
 understand. There is a transparent shallowness of 
 experience and thought in the belief that good work 
 will find its recognition and reward, and that a rude 
 and ready justice rules the world, which does not 
 permit valuable work to be lost. The final justice 
 of life is, doubtless, as perfect as every other law 
 which works out with minute or with immeasurable 
 order the evolution of the universe. This it were 
 a folly to doubt. " 'Tis true the working of the 
 gods is slow, but it is sure and strong," was the 
 judgment of the ancient world, and the modern 
 age repeats the sentence : 
 
 " Though the mills of God grind slowly, 
 
 Yet they grind exceeding small ; 
 Though He sit and wait in patience, 
 With exactness grinds He all." 
 
 But the perception of this supreme and exact
 
 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 233 
 
 justice demands a larger area of sight, as its devel- 
 opment demands a larger field of action than we 
 can claim in our human environment, or in the 
 slender span of years that go to make up the tale 
 of one human life. Schiller's dictum may be true, 
 and few will doubt it "Die Weltgescldchtc ist das 
 Wdtgcricht" but the acceptance of such a justice 
 as this as of all Divine laws is a matter more of 
 prescience than of science, and of faith more than 
 sight. It enters a supernatural and superhuman 
 region where time and place do not exist. Such a 
 star of justice as this gives us no parallax whereby 
 we may measure its distance from our present point 
 of view, though we may truly see it shining with 
 our mortal eyes. But this is a widely-different idea 
 of the matter to that homely and easy-going view of 
 justice which accepts the theory that good work 
 generally receives now and here its due recognition. 
 There is a complacency about this idea which one 
 instinctively distrusts. Then, too, even the most 
 sanguine of its believers must allow that there are 
 exceptions to the rule. It is impossible not to re- 
 gard attentively those exceptions. What of them ? 
 Where did that handful of good seed go ? It is to 
 be feared the exceptions are numerous. Most of us 
 must know of one such case, if not more. Some- 
 times the reason why the good work is lost is appa- 
 rent to the onlookers. There is some reason some 
 " screw loose " some impracticability of temper ; we
 
 234 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 
 
 perceive that the worker in himself supplies the rea- 
 son why his work fails. But even then the work in 
 itself, apart from the worker, is none the less good, 
 and none the less lost. Justice, then, is a greater 
 and more impartial thing than can be determined 
 by the mere appraisement of work, of any one fac- 
 tor in any case ; and the worth of work done, it may 
 be, represents but one consideration in a cause that 
 may have many sides to be considered before per- 
 fect justice can be worked out. The parable of the 
 Sower is not without its analogy here. Justice 
 ruled the fate of the seed just as much when it 
 was burnt up of the sun in stony places or devoured 
 by the fowls of the air, as when it fell on good 
 ground and brought forth fruit. But it is not said 
 that the seed was lost or wasted. "Waste" is in- 
 deed a word of but partial sight, and more than 
 partial ignorance. Yet it is representative of the 
 thought of the world on this point ; and none can 
 deny, in this sense, that " much good seed is wasted 
 in this world." 
 
 But there is another and even less computable 
 loss in the regions of thought and art. It lies in 
 those cases wherein we see talent, even genius, 
 sometimes of a very rare and exquisite kind, defeated 
 and broken, as it were, by the lack of a due power of 
 expression, or by a want of physical or mental sta- 
 mina. There seems no capacity for accepting and 
 making the best of the conditions and possibilities
 
 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 235 
 
 of life and daily living. Sometimes no doubt the 
 thought is lost because, fine and beautiful as it is, 
 it is not matured ; but in other instances it would 
 seem that the thought is not immature, but is too 
 delicate for the materialism of the world it touches. 
 Browning, in his " Rabbi Ben Ezra," well describes 
 such losses, both of immaturity and of over-fineness: 
 
 " But all, the world's coarse thumb 
 
 And finger failed to plumb, 
 So passed in making up the main account ; 
 All instincts immature, 
 All purposes unsure, 
 
 That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's 
 amount. 
 
 Thoughts hardly to be packed 
 
 Into a narrow act ; 
 Fancies that broke through language and escaped ; 
 
 All I could never be, 
 
 All, men ignored in me, 
 
 This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher 
 shaped." 
 
 Such losses may, indeed, seem fantastic and unreal 
 to some, but surely they are nearer to true loss, as 
 far as this world goes, than many of the material 
 things that have been swept from man's possession. 
 To think, even for a moment, of the innumerable 
 books of all sorts and conditions which are published 
 and poured on the world to-day, makes one almost 
 feel grateful to the inexorable law of loss. The 
 endless making of books might else become a second
 
 236 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 
 
 tower of Babel. That prolific growth of the modern 
 world, the novel, is almost alarming to contemplate 
 in its amazing fecundity. Work perhaps is never 
 a waste, and is never really lost ; nor is the average 
 novel, even in the aggregate of its yearly thousands, 
 so valuable as to justify any serious claim it might 
 advance to be considered as one of the riches of the 
 world. But one is not sorry to believe that the law 
 which preserves the great averages of life will exer- 
 cise its beneficent if ruthless force on the miles 
 of " copy " and printed page (" I also am under 
 authority ! ") which are reeled out in every direction 
 around us. But with a different and a graver mind 
 do we turn our eyes to the past, and note the list of 
 lost riches the world chronicles in the great field of 
 literature. There seems a grim irony of fate in the 
 fact that the great conqueror, who, in a drunken 
 frolic, burnt the library of Avestic writings and 
 books at Persepolis, should establish a city whose 
 name to the world at large is connected with no 
 event more intimately than with the burning of its 
 own priceless library. 
 
 The volume written by Hermippos on the lost 
 books of Zoroaster is in its turn lost to us, and 
 its name, " On the Magi," alone remains, as quoted 
 by other writers Diogenes, Plutarch, and Pliny. 
 These names in their turn suggest new losses, and 
 take us into a region of classic literature wherein 
 we know that what we possess is but the jetsam and
 
 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 237 
 
 flotsam of rich cargoes lost. "^Eschylus is said to 
 have composed ninety plays. We possess MSS. of 
 seven only. And what has become of the works of 
 Berosus, Manetho, Sanchoniathon ? What of the 
 complete MSS. of Polybius, Diodorus Siculus, 
 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Dio Cassius? What 
 of Livy and Tacitus ? " l In India students tell us 
 that the Buddhists constantly speak of and refer 
 to lost books. " In the Old Testament we have the 
 well-known allusions to the Book of Jasher (2 Sam. 
 i. 1 8), and the Wars of God (Num. xxi. 14), the 
 Chronicles of David, and the Acts of Solomon, which 
 prove the former existence, if not of books, at least of 
 popular songs and legends under those titles. And 
 with regard to the New Testament also, not only 
 does St. Luke tell us that ' many had taken in hand 
 to draw up a narrative concerning those matters 
 which have been fulfilled among us, even as they 
 delivered them unto us, which from the beginning 
 were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word,' but 
 we know that there existed in the early centuries 
 other Gospels and other Epistles which have either 
 been lost or have been declared apocryphal by later 
 authorities." 2 It is impossible to count up the 
 losses the world has sustained in literature alone. 
 
 1 Prof. Max Miiller, "Theosophy and Psychical Religion." 
 2 Ibid.
 
 238 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 
 
 II 
 
 From the contemplation of this long category of 
 loss in which I have, as far as possible, given re- 
 ferences and quoted authors whose words have 
 authority we may well turn to the light that lies 
 shining behind the thought of loss for those who 
 care to see it. 
 
 Loss, we find, is unknown in the physical universe. 
 What is called loss is in reality but change, evolu- 
 tion, correlation. No atom can be lost. However 
 it may change its form and association, it can always 
 be brought back to its original form. The thought 
 of the lost riches of the world gains a new aspect in 
 the light of this truth. What we think is lost has 
 in fact assumed other forms. The same living idea 
 may be expressed in many incorporations. Such a 
 theory necessitates that one form should pass away 
 that the new form may be presented : 
 
 " The old order yieldeth, giving place to new ; 
 And God fulfils Himself in many ways, 
 Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." 
 
 Possibly the form of a certain Beauty once known 
 to and treasured by the world the form it regrets 
 and mourns to-day as " lost " was not the first by 
 many of the forms assumed by that Beauty, and 
 through which it bad spoken to the world. It may 
 even be that the idea, living and working anew 
 into expression, has animated many embodiments
 
 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 239 
 
 since the day when history records its " loss " ; and 
 we, who mourn it as " lost," may be in possession 
 of its new expression, though we know it not. 
 " The genius that created it now creates somewhat 
 else." 1 Lost, it cannot be. 
 
 " There can never be one lost good." 
 
 Our term of life, short as it is, is sufficiently 
 long, and our outlook on the world, narrow as it 
 may be, is sufficiently wide, for us to see in the 
 fading of the seasonable flowers of the year, in the 
 passing glories of morning, noon, and evening, and 
 in the coming and going of summer and winter, 
 seed-time and harvest, no loss of each special 
 beauty, but only a perpetual change and renewal, a 
 Divine order of Nature which we love, and whereby 
 we live and our earth maintains her life. Can we 
 not, therefore, conceive an answering-point of view 
 not so far beyond and above us but that we may 
 have rare and gracious glimpses of it from time to 
 time, wherefrom what we call loss and destruction 
 may seem but as processes of Nature, as absolutely 
 lovely in themselves as they are beneficent in their 
 action ? From such a point of view what are the 
 lost riches of the world, and how are we to regard 
 them ? Seeing what some of the things were which 
 the world has counted as its riches, the fading and 
 passing away of them may, to this higher vision, 
 
 1 Emerson.
 
 240 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 
 
 be of incomparably less value and note than the 
 fading and passing away of the field-flowers or the 
 fugitive glories of a sunset. None of them were 
 ever, and at best, more than appearances and phe- 
 nomena of the time and place. 
 
 Nay, in our own lives we realise the changing 
 points of view which growth brings to us ; and if 
 we would but follow out the lines of this experience 
 to their logical issue, we should find that they would 
 sap much of the pain and mystery of loss, chang- 
 ing its frowns and tears into a tender smile. Are 
 any losses in all our after-lives more acute in char- 
 acter than those of infancy? Who cannot recall 
 the absolute, almost black despair he felt over some 
 broken or lost toy or plaything, some sharp childish 
 disappointment, the destruction of something of no 
 value to others, but of untold value to us ? Such 
 pain is of its kind, and, for its time of duration, 
 complete in its absorption of the whole nature and 
 environment. In our childhood even to contem- 
 plate the prospective losses which we are told must 
 come to us is heart-breaking. Our elders tell us 
 we shall have to give up toys and playthings, and 
 such and such childish pursuits ; and we ask our- 
 selves how shall we be able to endure life under 
 such starved and incomplete conditions ? We look 
 at the grave, tiresome, grown-up people, and their 
 lives seem barren to us, and empty of the joys we 
 know. How shall we bear to be like them ? It
 
 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 241 
 
 will be stupid, it will be terrible. But no ! time 
 answers and arranges it all. We are unconscious 
 of the losses we dreaded. We simply change. We 
 care no more for childish things. We do not lose, 
 nor resign ; we go beyond. Yet in after-life it 
 seldom occurs to us to remember this fact, to keep 
 it before us as one of the finest explanations for 
 life, and perhaps for death, that we possess. We 
 take our life, after youth, so deadly seriously. 
 
 Seldom do we seem relieved and sustained by any 
 suspicion that its troubles, and losses, and heart- 
 breaks, its sense of what is important and vital, 
 all its joys, and successes, and undertakings, are 
 perhaps by no means final, and that there may 
 be may we even say, there must be? a point of 
 view, only a little way beyond us, wherefrom they 
 too will all be changed, put aside as childish things. 
 If such a point were reached, all the mature and 
 serious, and, as we now think, important years of 
 our manhood would appear even as our childhood 
 appears to us when we have attained maturity : a 
 part of us still, most truly, vital, germinal, and in 
 a sense imperishable ; but transitory also a time 
 not of loss, but of change. That partly amused, 
 partly pathetic, and wholly tender memory with 
 which we regard the things we thought so all-im- 
 portant in infancy should be one of the most preg- 
 nant parables life speaks to us. It is not loss, 
 but progress. It is not the touch of death, but the
 
 242 THE LOST RICHES OP THE WORLD 
 
 sign of life. And it is no very great stretch of the 
 imagination to see that all this, in some way we 
 cannot yet comprehend, may be wrought out in 
 the life of the planet, and man's history thereon, 
 making the lost riches of the world appear but as 
 the toys of childhood to the gaze of maturity. 
 
 Amongst the many ideas that are passed about 
 the world in these days half-humorously, half- 
 earnestly is that of the existence of an "Astral 
 World." There is no need to enter, more than 
 superficially, into what is really meant by the 
 words. As an idea it is but little understood, and 
 as an expression it is generally misused. It is 
 enough for the present purpose to point out that 
 the idea is one which opens a wide door of hope 
 in such a subject as the lost riches of the world. 
 Mr. Sinnett, in an article on the astral world in 
 the Nineteenth Century for August 1894, tells 
 us that " The astral plane is, to begin with, a 
 phase of Nature as extensive, as richly furnished, 
 as densely populous, as the physical earth. It is 
 in one sense a - counterpart presentment of that 
 physical earth under different conditions. There 
 is no natural feature of the earth no tree, or 
 mountain, or river there is no artificially con- 
 structed feature of the physical earth no build- 
 ing or mauufactured thing of any kind but has 
 its astral counterpart as certainly as any morsel of 
 magnetised iron has its two poles ; and the astral
 
 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 243 
 
 counterparts of physical objects are often far more 
 persistent in their character than the physical ob- 
 jects themselves, so that when these last may have 
 passed away in the process of decay altogether, 
 the pictures they leave behind them on the astral 
 light (the pervading medium of the astral plane) will 
 remain there for immeasurable periods of time." 
 
 In this article we are told that in this astral world 
 is to be found an exact double, so to speak, of every- 
 thing that is, or that ever has been, or ever can be, 
 in this world of ours it being at once an exemplar 
 and a shadow. In this mysterious but real world, 
 therefore, can be found all that has been lost in 
 this world a world certainly as mysterious as it is 
 real. Nor is this idea of a second world inter- 
 penetrating ours limited to what is called occult 
 science. Hints of it are to be found in the writ- 
 ings of most poetic and deep thinkers. Indeed it is 
 very curious to notice how often such ideas receive 
 attestation and support from, outside witnesses. I 
 will not quote here the deepest, and most striking 
 words that can be put forward to support the idea 
 of this astral world ; but it will be at once recog- 
 nised how often the thought is traceable in great 
 writers. We may take one instance in the world 
 of well-known fiction. It seems improbable that 
 Charles Dickens was a conscious believer in the 
 astral world. The association seems humorous in 
 its unlikelihood. The expression itself is, I take
 
 244 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 
 
 it, a revival since his day. Yet it would be difficult 
 to find a more perfect description of the astral plane 
 than is given in "A Christmas Carol." Scrooge 
 therein revisits, under the guidance of the spirit 
 of Christmas Past, his own childhood. He sees its 
 scenes in their minutest details. He lives again 
 in its forgotten world. He meets his old school- 
 boy companions, and breathes the very atmosphere 
 of a certain winter morning which is recalled to 
 him by his ghostly guide. " These are but shadows 
 of things that were," says the spirit ; " they have no 
 consciousness of us." Had Charles Dickens been 
 an ardent and confessed believer in the Astral Plane 
 he could not have given a more perfect descrip- 
 tion of it. Mr. George Du Maurier, in his very 
 beautiful story of " Peter Ibbetson," works out 
 cleverly, though perhaps quite unintentionally, the 
 same thought in a development of dreaming and 
 the possibilities of dreamland. The conception 
 seems to have always floated through the imagina- 
 tion of the world. 
 
 It is said to explain many strange tales of magic- 
 mirror and of trance ; many instances of psychical 
 experience and of unaccountable knowledge; many 
 ghost stories and records of "coming events " which 
 have "cast their shadow before." I name this, 
 however, but by the way, merely to show how wide- 
 spread is the idea, in some form or other, or at least 
 how much of what is supposed to be mysterious
 
 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 245 
 
 might be explained by such a thought. I do not 
 wish to argue for or against the truth of the theory ; 
 but of course it holds, for those who receive it, a 
 very distinct hope and light for the dark mystery 
 of loss. 
 
 And it is worthy of note that science is not with- 
 out an answering line of thought in the existence 
 of what one may call an imperishable memory, not 
 only in the unseen realm of mental phenomena, but 
 actually in the material phenomena of the universe. 
 Experiments in hypnotism have brought to our 
 knowledge the most surprising proofs of the im- 
 perishable nature of memory. It would appear that 
 the most trivial and insignificant details of life, and 
 the scenes around us, nay, even things unnoticed at 
 the time, and words heard but not listened to, pos- 
 sibly words not even understood, can be exactly and 
 succinctly reproduced at any moment by a sufficiently 
 recreating force or suggestion. 
 
 Man has the right to centre his universe, so to 
 speak, in his own consciousness. It exists for him 
 but in and through himself. "His own soul," we 
 are told, is a measure which, for him, outweighs the 
 world. His individuality is his highest gain and 
 only true possession. It is impossible, therefore, 
 for him sometimes not to count the bright hours of 
 his infancy and youth, the wonderful bequeathments 
 which the past has given him in the inward and the 
 outward life, as his greatest lost riches of the world.
 
 246 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 
 
 Are there not moments in the experience of us all 
 when the sense of the loss of "the days that are no 
 more" is almost more than we can bear? Memory 
 can perhaps stab us with her smile more poignantly 
 than with her reproach. Tennyson's beautiful lines 
 express the thought of many : 
 
 " Dear as remembered kisses after death. 
 And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned 
 On lips that are for others ; deep as love, 
 Deep as first love, and wild with all regret, 
 Death in Life ! the days that are no more ! " 
 
 A death in life, indeed, such memories are to most 
 people. The threnody sung over that death goes 
 up from the world unceasingly, for the memories 
 are of hours that are accounted dead gone passed 
 away never to return. The penetrating pathos of 
 Memory to the world lies in its hopelessness. Reli- 
 gious trust and "the philosophic mind" may teach 
 a man to view calmly, and perhaps not without a 
 certain hope, the shadowy retrospects of memory. 
 But, even so, the sense of loss remains. People in 
 sorrow have a jealous reverence for their own secret 
 bitterness, and guard themselves oftentimes, as 
 with a certain delicacy, from any intrusion, even of 
 thought. They shrink from the proffer of attempted 
 consolation or problematic compensation. 
 
 But surely in the discovery of the ineffaceable 
 character of memory, the possibility of its living 
 renewal, the gospel of its absolute resurrection from
 
 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 247 
 
 the tomb of the past, there is a strange, almost an 
 unspeakable hope. Thus there is opened to us a 
 door of unexpected issue, the possible recovery of 
 riches we had indeed accounted lost. There is 
 beauty and comfort, and there is terror and shame 
 in the thought. Through its shadowy portals we 
 discern the possible dawn of a Day of Judgment we 
 may scarcely have reckoned with, and of which we 
 had not dreamed. But there is also dimly discerned 
 a Day of Restitution, an eternal Now, in which what 
 we have called past, present, and future are but 
 one. The parables of Nature are deep and true. 
 In that mysterious world which we call Memory, 
 even as in the mysterious world in which we live, it 
 would appear there is no loss. 
 
 The idea carries us on still further. If we in- 
 terrogate the material universe, we are given the 
 same answer there is no loss. This message is not 
 limited to such scientific principles as the Inde- 
 structibility of Matter, the Correlation of Force, the 
 Conservation of Energy, and all the rest of the old 
 truths under new names. No, it comes to us also 
 from the air we breathe and from the stars we see, 
 and tells us that Nature never forgets, and that, 
 whilst she loses no atom of matter, she also records 
 every event of life. The theory of the Astral World 
 is no whit more wonderful than the theories that are 
 propounded by those who patiently investigate the 
 natural phenomena of the universe and the myste-
 
 248 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 
 
 rious arcana of Nature. Professor Denton, in his 
 most interesting work, " The Soul of Things," has 
 this statement : " Not a leaf waves, not an insect 
 crawls, not a ripple moves, but each motion is re- 
 corded by a thousand faithful scribes and in infallible 
 and indelible scripture. This is just as true of all 
 past time. . . . From the dawn of life upon this 
 infant globe, when round its cradle the steamy cur- 
 tains hung, to this moment Nature has been busy 
 photographing everything. What a picture-gallery 
 is hers ! " 
 
 Speaking of light and its use in the modern de- 
 velopment of photography, Professor E. Hitchcock 
 says : " It seems that the photographing influence 
 pervades all Nature, nor can we say where it stops. 
 ... It may be, too, that there are tests by which 
 Nature, more skilful than any photographer, can 
 bring out and fix these portraits, so that acuter 
 senses than ours shall see them as on a vast canvas 
 spread over the material universe." On a part of 
 the subject such as this it is best simply to quote 
 those who speak with authority, and let their words 
 carry the line of thought I wish to present. So I 
 will take two passages which bear exactly on the 
 point, and with rare brilliance. The first is from 
 Dans le del ct sur la Terrc, by Camille Flammarion. 
 It is cast in the form of a conversation, and the 
 subject is treated with that lightness of touch which 
 the French savant is never afraid to use a touch
 
 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 249 
 
 that is welcome after the more cautious gravity of 
 the English school. 
 
 The astronomer and his friend are walking in a 
 garden, and in the course of conversation he says 
 to her : 
 
 " That beautiful star in (the constellation of) the 
 Crown, which our meteor but now appeared to touch, 
 has no sensible parallax. One can believe that the 
 luminous ray which reaches us to-day has been tra- 
 velling since the commencement of our era. Per- 
 haps it started at the moment when the battle of 
 Actium was raging between the fleets of Octavius 
 and Antony to decide the empire of the world. 
 We really see this star, not as it is in our days, but 
 as it was at the departure of the luminous courier 
 which reaches us. If, from there, some transcend- 
 ent spirits can distinguish our little earth, they are 
 nineteen centuries behindhand with our history, and 
 can see at this moment Cleopatra reclining amidst 
 the purples of her ship drawing in to the shore, still 
 dazzled by the last glory of the setting sun. In 
 thirty years they might be present at the tragedy of 
 Golgotha, and nineteen centuries hence, if we were 
 ourselves transported to the constellation of the 
 Crown, above all, were we possessed of sufficient 
 perceptive faculty, we should have beneath our 
 eyes the earth of to-day, this Europe, this France, 
 these valleys, these woods, and seeing what really 
 exists on this earth, we should in consequence re-see
 
 250 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 
 
 ourselves, living our real life . . . Yes ! we could 
 see ourselves again, without anything intervening, 
 and could follow the whole course of our existence, 
 from the first games of our infancy to our last years. 
 Without doubt for such an experience we must 
 suppose ourselves endowed with an unimaginable 
 power of vision : but do we know all the forces of 
 Nature ? After the telegraph, the telephone, spec- 
 trum analysis, terrestrial magnetism and human 
 somnambulism, have we the right to close the doer 
 on the unknown ? Who knows what is slumbering 
 in the problems of the future ? Who knows with 
 what senses extra-terrestrial beings may be en- 
 dowed ? The earth is only a floating island in the 
 great celestial archipelago. In the calendar of the 
 universe its whole life will only have lasted a day. 
 Astronomy has killed Death. It is Life, eternal Life, 
 which surrounds us." The second passage is, in 
 essence, but a repetition of this, but in some ways it 
 puts the thought more forcibly and more in sym- 
 pathy with the subject for which I quote it. It is 
 from Uranie. " The light which emanates from all 
 the suns which people immensity, the light reflected 
 into space by all the worlds enlightened by these 
 suns, carries across the infinite heaven the photo- 
 graphs of all the centuries, of all the days, of all the 
 moments. In looking at a star, you see it as it was 
 at the moment when the photograph left which you 
 now receive, in the same way as in listening to a bell
 
 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 251 
 
 you receive the sound after it has left, and just 
 as long after as you happen to be far away. It 
 follows from this that the history of all the worlds 
 is actually travelling in space without ever abso- 
 lutely disappearing, and that all past events are 
 present and indestructible in the bosom of the 
 Infinite." 
 
 In such a region of thought as is presented to 
 us in these passages, loss is a word that has no 
 meaning. 
 
 To any one who perceives and feels the mystery 
 and sorrow of the world, there is perhaps no line 
 of thought so depressing and questionable as a 
 persistent and imperturbable optimism. Leibnitz's 
 famous statement that this is the best of all possible 
 worlds, must seem to many noble people the speech 
 of one who shuts himself up in his study or labora- 
 tory, and simply looks at the stars when he walks 
 through the wretched streets of our cities. 
 
 There is something measurelessly provoking in 
 having every obvious shadow of natural regret and 
 sorrow explained away with a bland smile and a 
 pit-pat argument. It is, however, in a spirit far 
 removed from this alert and conspicuous confidence 
 that such suggestions as those I have enumerated 
 can be received and accepted. The orbits in which 
 such ideas move are too vast for prospect of imme- 
 diate circulation or present accomplishment. In- 
 deed, the cycles involved might seem to many almost
 
 252 THE LOST RICHES OF THE WORLD 
 
 more hopeless in their superhuman compass than 
 the unavailing regret which encompasses the ordi- 
 nary acceptance of loss. The darkness of a mystery 
 may be dissipated by a revelation whose light may 
 be more impenetrable than the forerunning gloom. 
 Yet the difference is none the less beneficent or 
 welcome ; for the mystery has become one of light 
 and reason, where aforetime it was one of darkness 
 and hopelessness. The thoughts which can be re- 
 ceived and made to brighten the contemplation of 
 the lost riches of the world, and to take the keen 
 regret from all thought of loss, are of no suave and 
 pert complacency, nor do they repeat any trite com- 
 monplaces about all being " for the best " ; but there 
 is in them something real and cosmic something 
 which seems to fit in with the great order of Crea- 
 tion and the great scripture of Nature ; something 
 which enters our thought-atmosphere with the 
 light and energy of the Sunshine. 
 
 THE END 
 
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