CHAPTER VIII
THE HIDDEN WISDOM REVEALED
As we have previously observed, there is what may be termed a religious mysticism and a scientific mysticism. When viewed from the standpoint of the unprejudiced seeker, who finds the truth that is in everything, these two phases of mysticism are but photographs of the same subject taken from different points of view. So, too, mysticism itself is, in the final analysis, nothing more than a long-distance view of science.
Like the proverbial pot and kettle, which we are told made much noise over calling each other black, we find the scientist frequently disdains the mystic, and the mystic may retaliate with equal disapproval of the scientist's position. Both are right, each from his point of view. Each is looking at life from an opposite end of the same pole. The scientist looks at the effect and the mystic at the cause. In their final calculations they arrive at the same conclusion, although they call it by different names.
The scientist says that everything proceeds from the one eternal energy. The mystic perceives the spiritual co-existent with the external. Religious mysticism calls it "God's word made manifest." In reference to this definition of religious mysticism, perhaps the phraseology used by William Ralph Inge, in his "Christian Mysticism," is the best possible exposition of the position of the religious mystic, if we may separate the two phases. Inge says: "Religious mysticism may be defined as the attempt to realize the presence of the living God in the soul and in nature, or more generally as the attempt to realize in thought and in feeling the imminence of the temporal in the eternal, and the eternal in the temporal."
Which is to say exactly what the scientific mystic says, using other terminology; and likewise what the physicist says or will ultimately say, as his researches lead him into the finer and finer realms of discovery.
The scientific mystic, like Archimedes, believes that in order to measure the purpose of external creation, he must "base his fulcrum somewhere beyond."
The scientific mystic, therefore, starts from the center of the Circle; from the crux of creation; and he finds the X, which is the hypothetical base of algebraical science—the unknown quantity of which sex is the symbol. Reasoning from effect back to cause and from cause forward to effect the mystic finds the equation complete, perfect, and likewise simple; but it is simple only after we have deciphered it. Like the prize puzzles which are designed to exercise the inductive faculties, mysticism, when we have not the key, is a most tantalizing enigma. Most "practical" persons dismiss it with the same superficial idea that they entertain in regard to puzzles, saying "it is only a puzzle"—utterly ignoring the value of exercising the inductive reasoning faculties.