[70]. It is scarcely necessary to remark that if we choose to give to “mysticism” a definition incompatible with “science,” the opposition cannot be removed. This is, for example, done by Croce, who yet recognises as highly important a process of “conversion” which is nothing else but mysticism as here understood. (See, e.g., Piccoli, Benedetto Croce, p. 184.) Only he has left himself no name to apply to it.
[71]. “The endeavour of the human mind to enjoy the blessedness of actual communion with the highest,” which is Pringle Pattison’s widely accepted definition of mysticism, I prefer not to use because it is ambiguous. The “endeavour,” while it indicates that we are concerned with an art, also suggests its strained pathological forms, while “actual communion” lends itself to ontological interpretations.
[72]. The Threshold of Religion (1914), p. 48.
[73]. Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse (1911), p. 272.
[74]. Golden Bough, “Balder the Beautiful,” vol. II, pp. 304-05.
[75]. Farnell even asserts (in his Greek Hero Cults) that “it is impossible to quote a single example of any one of the higher world-religions working in harmony with the development of physical science.” He finds a “special and unique” exception in the cult of Asclepios at Cos and Epidauros and Pergamon, where, after the fourth century B.C., were physicians, practising a rational medical science, who were also official priests of the Asclepios temples.
[76]. Sir Oliver Lodge, Reason and Belief, p. 19.
[77]. It is scarcely necessary to point out that a differentiation of function has to be made sooner or later, and sometimes it is made soon. This was so among the Todas of India. “Certain Todas,” says Dr. Rivers (The Todas, 1906, p. 249), “have the power of divination, others are sorcerers, and others again have the power of curing diseases by means of spells and rites, while all three functions are quite separate from those of the priest or sharman. The Todas have advanced some way towards civilisation of function in this respect, and have as separate members of the community their prophets, their magicians, and their medicine-men in addition to their priests.”
[78]. Joël, Ursprung der Naturphilosophie aus dem Geiste der Romantik (1903); Nietzsche und die Romantik (1905). But I am here quoting from Professor Joël’s account of his own philosophical development in Die Deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart, vol. I (1921).
[79]. In connection with this scheme, it may be interesting to note, I prepared, in 1879, a questionnaire on “conversion,” on the lines of the investigations which some years later began to be so fruitfully carried out by the psychologists of religion in America.