Our own position, however, is the same, let our theory or our hope, concerning others, be what it may. Whatever it may be possible (under the constitution of our nature) for the Spirit of God to make known inwardly to that man who is shut out from external teaching, it is quite certain that we shall receive no inward communications of gracious influence, while we neglect those outward means which are of divine appointment.
Note to page 300.
The full title of the work referred to runs as follows: The Improvement of Human Reason, exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokhdan: written in Arabick about 500 years ago, by Abn Jaafer Ebn Tophail. In which is demonstrated by what methods one may, by the mere Light of Nature, attain the knowledge of things Natural and supernatural; more particularly the knowledge of God and the affairs of another Life. Newly translated from the original Arabick by Simon Ockley, &c. 1708.
Ockley adds an Appendix, to guard the book from abuse by the Quakers, wherein he proposes to examine ‘the fundamental error’ of his author—viz. that ‘God has given such a power or faculty to man whereby he may, without any external means, attain to the knowledge of all things necessary to salvation, and even to the Beatifick Vision itself, whilst in the state.’
The following is a specimen of the mystical progress which our Arabian Defoe describes his Crusoe as making,—precisely that with which Ebn Tophail was well acquainted, but which no real solitary Ebn Yokhdan could ever have struck out for himself.
‘He began, therefore, to strip himself of all bodily properties, which he had made some progress in before, during the time of the former exercise, when he was employed in the imitation of the heavenly bodies; but there still remained a great many relicks, as his circular motion (motion being one of the most proper attributes of body), and his care of animals and plants, compassion upon them, and industry in removing whatever inconvenienced them. Now, all these things belong to corporeal attributes, for he could not see these things at first, but by corporeal faculties; and he was obliged to make use of the same faculties in preserving them. Therefore he began to reject and remove all those things from himself, as being in nowise consistent with that state which he was now in search of. So he continued, after confining himself to rest in the bottom of his cave, with his head bowed down and his eyes shut, and turning himself altogether from all sensible things and the corporeal faculties, and bending all his thoughts and meditations upon the necessarily self-existent Being, without admitting anything else besides him; and if any other object presented itself to his imagination, he rejected it with his utmost force; and exercised himself in this, and persisted in it to that degree, that sometimes he did neither eat nor stir for a great many days together. And whilst he was thus earnestly taken up in contemplation, sometimes all manner of beings whatsoever would be quite out of his mind and thoughts, except his own being only.
‘But he found that his own being was not excluded from his thoughts; no, not at such times when he was most deeply immersed in the contemplation of the first, true, necessarily self-existent Being; which concerned him very much,—for he knew that even this was a mixture in this simple vision, and the admission of an extraneous object in that contemplation. Upon which he endeavoured to disappear from himself, and be wholly taken up in the vision of that true Being; till at last he attained it; and then both the heavens and the earth, and whatsoever is between them, and all spiritual forms, and corporeal faculties, and all those powers which are separate from matter, and all those beings which know the necessarily self-existent Being, all disappeared and vanished, and were as if they had never been; and amongst these his own being disappeared too, and there remained nothing but this one, true, perpetually self-existent Being, who spoke thus in that saying of his (which is not a notion superadded to his essence):—“To whom now belongs the kingdom? To this One, Almighty God.”[[382]] Which words of his Hai Ebn Yokhdan understood and heard his voice; nor was his being unacquainted with words, and not being able to speak, any hindrance at all to the understanding him. Wherefore he deeply immersed himself into this state, and witnessed that which neither eye hath seen nor ear heard, nor hath it ever entered into the heart of man to conceive.’—§§ 83, 84.
CHAPTER II.
And to such Enthusiasm as is but the triumph of the soul of man, inebriated, as it were, with the delicious sense of the divine life, that blessed Root, and Original of all holy wisdom and virtue, I am as much a friend as I am to the vulgar fanatical Enthusiasm a professed enemy.—Henry More.
Willoughby. There is no mysticism in the doctrine of an immediate influence exercised by the Spirit of God on the spirit of man.