connections, fit perhaps to illustrate or enforce the truth in question, but lacking in relation to it that inward vital oneness whereby certain things that to man seem below him may become symbolic to him of others that he beholds as within or above him.
Exposition by analysis has been reckoned to be characteristic of the Schoolmen rather than of the Mystics,[1] though surely a mystical sight may be served by an analytical process, and to see God in a part before or while He is seen in the whole is effected not without analysis of the subtlest kind. So we find analysis in Julian's sight (Rev. iii.): "I saw God in a point"; and in her conclusions from this: "By which sight I saw that He is in all things"; and in her immediate raising, from this conclusion, of the question: "What is sin?" and throughout her treatment of the problem in the scheme of her book. Even for the merely formal task of distinguishing by number, Julian, we see, will set briskly forward (though we may not feel much inclined to follow) and often she begins her careful dissections with: "In this I see"—four, five, or six things, as the case may be. Her speech of spiritual Revelations is, however, helped out less by numbers than by living and homely things of sight: the mother and the children and the nurse; lords and servants, kings and their subjects (with echoes of the language of Court and
- ↑ In reference to introspection M. Maeterlinck speaks of Ruysbroeck as "the one analytical mystic." Ruysbroeck and the Mystics, p. 19.
