instant be born. Nor in all this is the mystic, if he be a thinker, devoid of reasons. His thought is eager to dwell: —
- “On doubts that drive the coward back,
- And keen through wordy snares to track
- Suggestion to her inmost cell.”
His doubts are exposures of the fallacies of all ordinary opinion. He thinks, to the very end that he may destroy the vanity of mere thinking. An Eckhart is amongst the most learned of trained scholastic disputants. A Spinoza is the most merciless foe of the illusions of common sense. With ideas the mystic wars against all mere ideas. With the abstract weapons of Realism he refutes Realism. At last he believes himself to have won the right, by virtue of the very breadth of his vision of finitude, to condemn, like Browning’s lover in the Last Ride Together, the whole of finitude.
Nor, after all, is the mystic’s result so unlike, in its logic, the result reached by Browning’s lover himself. I have said, more than once, that the essence of Mysticism lies not in the definition of the subject to which you attribute Being, but in the predicate Being itself. This predicate in case of Mysticism is such that, as soon as you apply it, the subject indeed loses all finite outlines, lapses into pure immediacy, quenches thought, becomes ineffable, satisfies even by turning into what ordinary Realism would call a mere naught. Now you may call this subject by any name you please: The Self of our Hindoo, or the Holy Grail, or Spinoza’s
