Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/99

part of human nature without understanding Mysticism. The true historical importance of Mysticism lies not in the subject to which it applied the predicate real, but in the view it holds of the fundamental meaning of that very ontological predicate itself. No matter what subject the mystic seems to call real. That might be from your point of view any subject you please; yourself, or God, or the wall. The interest of Mysticism lies wholly in the predicate. Mysticism consists in asserting that to be means, simply and wholly, to be immediate, as what we call pure color, pure sound, pure emotion, are already in us partly and imperfectly immediate. Mysticism asserts that this aspect of Being, which common sense already, as we have seen, recognizes and names in the popular ontological vocabulary, must be kept quite pure, must be wholly and abstractly isolated from all other aspects, must be exclusively emphasized. And the mystic further holds that your eternal salvation depends on just such an abstract purifying of your ontological predicate. Purer than color or than music or the purest love must the absolute immediate be. Now why the mystic says this, is a matter for further study. But this is what he says. He certainly does not assert, if you are an ordinary realist, that his Absolute is real in your sense, say real as money is real. The true issue for him is whether the fundamental ontological predicate, reality, ought not itself to be altered, altered namely by a certain purification, so as to be another predicate than what ordinary metaphysic confusedly takes it to be. That the mystic is dealing with experience, and trying to get experience quite pure and then to make it the means of defining the real, is what we need to observe.