Hours with the Mystics: A Contribution to the History of Religious Opinion

by Robert Alfred Vaughan

Atherton. You quoted Coleridge a minute since. He first, and after him Carlyle, familiarized England with the German distinction between reason and understanding. In fact, what the Epicureans and the Stoics were to Plotinus in his day, that were Priestley and Paley to Coleridge. The spiritualist is the sworn foe of your rationalist and pleasures-of-virtue man. Romance must loathe utilitarianism, enthusiasm scorn expediency. Hence the reaction which gives us Schelling as the Plotinus of Berlin, and Coleridge as the Schelling of Highgate. The understanding had been over-tasked—set to work unanimated and unaided by the conscience and the heart. The result was pitiable—lifeless orthodoxy and sneering scepticism. Christianity was elaborately defended on its external evidences; the internal evidence of its own nature overlooked.

What was needful at such a juncture? Surely that both should be employed in healthful alliance—the understanding and the conscience—the faculty which distinguishes and judges, and the faculty which presides over our moral nature, deciding about right and wrong. These are adequate to recognise the claims of Revelation. The intellectual faculty can deal with the historic evidence, the moral can pronounce concerning the tendency of the book, righteous or unrighteous. In those features of it unexplained and inexplicable to the understanding, if we repose on faith, we do so on grounds which the understanding shows to be sound. Hence the reception given to Christianity is altogether reasonable.

But no such moderate ground as this would satisfy the ardour which essayed reform; the understanding, because it could not do everything—could not be the whole mind, but only a part—because it was proved unequal to accomplish alone the work of all our faculties together, was summarily cashiered. We must have for religion a new, a higher faculty. Instead of reinforcing the old power, a novel nomenclature is devised which seems to endow man with a loftier attribute. This faculty is the intuition of Plotinus, the Intellectuelle Anschauung of Schelling; the Intuitive Reason, Source of Ideas and Absolute Truths, the Organ of Philosophy and Theology, as Coleridge styles it. It is a direct beholding, which, according to Plotinus, rises in some moments of exaltation to ecstasy. It is, according to Schelling, a realization of the identity of subject and object in the individual, which blends him with that identity of subject and object called God; so that, carried out of himself, he does, in a manner, think divine thoughts—views all things from their highest point of view—mind and matter from the centre of their identity.[^[23]] He becomes recipient, according to Emerson, of the Soul of the world. He loses, according to Coleridge, the particular in the universal reason; finds that ideas appear within him from an internal source supplied by the Logos or Eternal Word of God—an infallible utterance from the divine original of man’s highest nature.[^[24]]

Willoughby. One aim in all—to escape the surface varieties of our individual (or more properly dividual) being, and penetrate to the universal truth—the absolute certainty everywhere the same:—a shaft-sinking operation—a descent into our original selves—digging down, in one case from a garden, in another from a waste, here from the heart of a town, there from a meadow, but all the miners are to find at the bottom a common ground—the primæval granite—the basis of the eternal truth-pillars. This I take to be the object of the self-simplification Plotinus inculcates—to get beneath the finite superficial accretions of our nature.

Atherton. And what comes of it after all? After denuding ourselves of all results of experience, conditioned distinctions, &c., we are landed in a void, we find only hollow silence, if we may accept a whisper or two, saying that ingratitude, treachery, fraud, and similar crimes, are very wrong.

Gower. And even these dictates are those of our moral sense, not of an intellectual power of insight. For surely to call conscience practical Reason, as Kant does, is only to confound our moral and intellectual nature together.

Atherton. Very well, then. Seclude and simplify yourself thoroughly, and you do not find data within you equal to your need—equal to show you what God is, has done, should do, &c.

Willoughby. But all these intuitionalists profess to evolve from their depths very much more than those simplest ethical perceptions.

Atherton. By carrying down with them into those depths the results of the understanding, of experience, of external culture, and then bringing them up to light again as though they had newly emerged from the recesses of the Infinite. This intuitional metal, in its native state, is mere fluent, formless quicksilver; to make it definite and serviceable you must fix it by an alloy; but then, alas! it is pure Reason no longer, and, so far from being universal truth, receives a countless variety of shapes, according to the temperament, culture, or philosophic party, of the individual thinker. So that, in the end, the result is merely a dogmatical investiture of a man’s own notions with a sort of divine authority. You dispute with Schelling, and he waves you away as a profane and intuitionless laic. What is this but the sacerdotalism of the philosopher? The fanatical mystic who believes himself called on to enforce the fantasies of his special revelation upon other men, does not more utterly contemn argument than does the theosophist, when he bids you kick your understanding back into its kennel, and hearken in reverend awe to his intuitions.

Willoughby. Telling you, too, that if your inward witness does not agree with his, you are, philosophically speaking, in the gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity.