The mind of man is by his reason swayed,
And reason says you are the worthier maid.
Gower. Now you come to Shakspeare, I must cap your quotation with another: I fit those mystics Atherton speaks of as using reason up to a certain point and then having done with it, with a motto from the Winter’s Tale—much at their service. They answer, with young enamoured Florizel, when Reason, like a grave Camillo, bids them ‘be advised’—
I am; and by my fancy: if my reason
Will thereto be obedient, I have reason;
If not, my senses better pleased with madness
Do bid it welcome.
Atherton. To classify the mystics adequately, we should have a terminology of dreams rich as that of Homer, and distinguish, as he does, the dream-image of complete illusion from the half-conscious dream between sleeping and waking;—ὄναρ from ὔπαρ. How unanimous, by the way, would the mystics be in deriving ὄνειρον from ὄνειαρ—dream from enjoyment.
Willoughby. To return from the poets to business; was not all the science of the Middle Age theosophic rather than philosophic? Both to mystical schoolmen and scholastic mystics the Bible was a book of symbols and propositions, from which all the knowable was somehow to be deduced.
Atherton. Most certainly. The mystical interpretation of Scripture was their measuring-reed for the temple of the universe. The difference, however, between them and Behmen would be this—that, while both essayed to read the book of nature by the light of grace, Behmen claimed a special revelation, a divine mission for unfolding these mysteries in a new fashion; schoolmen, like Richard of St. Victor, professed to do so only by the supernatural aid of the Spirit illuminating the data afforded by the Church. And again, Behmen differs from Schelling and modern theosophy in studying nature through the medium of an external revelation mystically understood, while they interpret it by the unwritten inward revelation of Intellectual Intuition. I speak only of the difference of principle, not of result. But no one will dispute that nearly every scientific enquiry of the Middle Age was conducted on mystical principles, whether as regarded our source of knowing or its method.