Atherton. They have. The dazzling splendour of a superhuman knowledge or a superhuman fervour, has often distorted the common rule of right and wrong,——
Gower. As they say the Northern Lights disturb the direction of the needle.
Kate. Yet those glimmers and flashes are of service in the arctic night,—better than total darkness.
Lowestoffe. Right, Miss Merivale. I fully admit the plea.
Willoughby. I think we must allow the substantial justice of Mr. Lowestoffe’s complaint. There is a sameness in these mystics. Each one starts, to so large an extent, on his own account, with the same bias and the same materials. He reiterates, after his manner, the same protest, and the same exaggeration. The same negations, the same incoherence, the same metaphors, have attempted in every age the utterance of the unutterable.
Atherton. So science began to make steady progress as soon as it confined itself within the limits of the knowable, and ceased to publish fancy maps of the terra incognita. Theosophy was perpetually transgressing those limits, and hence its waste of ingenuity in vain gyrations.
Gower. There is one point, Atherton, on which I could wish you had dwelt more at large in your letter. Do we not find, the most prolific source of mysticism in the idea that there is a special faculty for the discernment of spiritual truth,—that there is a kind of soul within the soul which may unite with God, leaving behind it all the ordinary powers of the mind,—a potency, in fact, altogether independent of knowledge, understanding, judgment, imagination, &c., and never amenable to any of them? We have encountered this doctrine over and over again, sometimes in a qualified, sometimes in an uncontrollable form. Hugo’s ‘Eye of Contemplation’ is such a faculty. Tauler adopts the principle when he separates the Ground of the Soul from all its acts and powers. It lies at the root of the inexpressible experiences so precious to the Spanish mystics, when every function of the soul underwent divine suspension. It appears again in the divorce declared (by Coleridge, for example) between the Understanding—the reasoning faculty, which deliberates and judges, and the Intuitive Reason, which discerns religious and philosophic truth directly.
Atherton. You make out a strong case, certainly. Declare intuition absolute, with an undivided irresponsible prerogative of this kind, and what check is provided against any possible vagary of mysticism?
Mrs. Atherton. I do not clearly understand the question at issue. Pray explain before you go farther.
Gower. Allow me to make the attempt. I am afraid we are growing prosy—speaking for myself, at least. Old travellers used to report that the Danube, near its conjunction with the Drave, flowed in a stream quite separate from its tributary, though the same banks confined them both. The two currents were said to be perfectly distinct in colour, and their waters of quality so opposite, that the fish caught in the one were never to be found in the other. Now the question is, whether Reason and Understanding in the mind of man, do, in a similar way, reciprocally exclude each other.