It should always be noted that the number of persons who are subject to mystical experiences—that is to say, persons who feel themselves brought into contact with an environing Presence and supplied with new energy to live by—is much larger than we usually suppose. We know only the mystics who were dowered with a literary gift and who could tell in impressive language what had come to them, but of the multitude of those who have felt and seen and who yet were unable to tell in words about their experience, of these we are ignorant. An undeveloped and uncultivated form of mystical consciousness is present, I think, in most religious souls, and whenever it is unusually awake and vivid the whole inner and outer life is intensified by such experiences, even though there may be little that can be put into explicit account in language. There are multitudes of men and women now living, often in out-of-the-way places, in remote hamlets or on isolated farms, who are the salt of the earth and the light of the world in their communities, because they have had vital experiences that revealed to them realities which their neighbors missed and that supplied them with energy to live by which the mere “church-goers” failed to find.
I am more and more convinced, as I pursue my studies on the meaning and value of mysticism, with the conviction that religion, i.e. religion when it is real, alive, vital, and transforming, is essentially and at bottom a mystical act, a direct response to an inner world of spiritual reality, an implicit relationship between the finite and infinite, between the part and the whole. The French philosopher, Émile Boutroux, has finely called this junction of finite and infinite in us, by which these mystical experiences are made possible, “the Beyond that is within”—“the Beyond,” as he says, “with which man comes in touch on the inner side of his nature.”
Whenever we go back to the fundamental mystical experience, to the soul’s first-hand testimony, we come upon a conviction that the human spirit transcends itself and is environed by a spiritual world with which it holds commerce and vital relationship. The constructive mystics, not only of the Christian communions but also those of other religions, have explored higher levels of life than those on which men usually live, and they have given impressive demonstration through the heightened dynamic quality of their lives and service that they have been drawing upon and utilizing reservoirs of vital energy. They have revealed a peculiar aptitude for correspondence with the Beyond that is within, and they have exhibited a genius for living by their inner conviction of God, “of practicing God,” as Jeremy Taylor called it.
But are we justified in making such large affirmations? Is there anything in the nature of mystical experience that warrants us in taking the leap from inner vision to existential reality? Can we legitimately get from a finite, subjective feeling to an objective and infinite God? The answer is of course obvious. There is no way to get a bridge from finite to infinite, from subject to object, from idea to that which the idea means, from human to divine, from mere man to God, if they are isolated, sundered, disparate entities to start with. No mere finite experience of a mere finite thing can be anything but finite, and no juggling can get out of the experience what is not in it. If we mean by “empirical” that which is “given” as explicit sense-content of consciousness, then the only empirical argument that could be would be the statement that we experience what we experience. We should not get beyond the consciousness of interjection—“lo!” “voila!”
In this sense of the term, of course nobody ever did or ever could “experience God.” We are shut up entirely to a stream of inner states, a seriatim consciousness, “a shower of shot,” which can give us no knowledge at all, either, in Berkeley’s words, of “the choir of heaven” or of “the furniture of earth” or of “the mighty frame of the world,” or in fact, of any permanent self within us.
Used in the narrow Humian sense there are no “empirical arguments” for the existence of God, but the misery of it is there are no arguments for anything else either! We must therefore widen out the meaning of the term “empirical” and include in it not only the actual “content” of experience, but all that is involved and implicated in experience. We cannot talk about any kind of reality until we interpret experience through its rational implications. Nobody ever perceives “a black beetle” and knows it as “a black beetle” without transcending “pure empiricism,” i.e. without using categories which are not a product of experience. All experience which has any knowledge-import, or value, possesses within itself self-transcendence, that is to say, it apprehends or takes by storm some sort of external or objective reality. Nobody is ever disturbed by the fallacy of subjectivism until he has become debauched by metaphysics. The fallacy of subjectivism is always the product of the abstract intellect, i.e. the intellect which divides experience, and takes an abstract part for a whole.
It is further true that all knowledge-experience possesses within itself finite-transcendence, i.e. it contains in itself a principle of infinity and could become absolutely rationalized only in an infinite whole of reality with which the experience is in organic unity. I agree fully with Professor Hocking that “it is doubtful whether there are any finite ideas at all.” The consciousness of the finite has working in it the reality of the whole. The finite can never be considered as self-existent; it can never be real. There is forever present in the very heart and nature of consciousness a trope, a nisus, a straining of the fragment to link itself up with the self-complete whole, and every flash of knowledge and every pursuit of the good reveals that trend. Something of the other is always in the me—and however finite I may be I am always beyond myself, and am conjunct with “the pulse beat of the whole system.” Either we must give up talking of knowledge or we must affirm that knowledge involves a self-complete and self-explanatory reality with which our consciousness has connection. We cannot think finite and contingent things, or aim at goodness however fragmentary, without rational appeal to something infinite and necessary. Human experience cannot be rationally conceived except as a fragment of a vastly more inclusive experience, always implied within the finite spirit, unifying and binding together into one whole all that is absolutely real and true. Whether we are dealing with the so-called mystical experience or any other kind of experience we are bound to postulate, or take for granted, whatever is rationally implicated in the very nature of the experience on our hands.
No type of consciousness carries the implication of self-transcendence, or finite-transcendence, more coercively than does genuine mystical experience. The central aspect of it is the fusion of the self into a larger undifferentiated whole. It is thus much more the type of æsthetic experience than it is the type of knowledge-experience. In both types—the æsthetic and the mystical—consciousness is fused into union with its object, that is to say, the usual dualistic character of consciousness is transcended, though of course not wholly obliterated. A new level of consciousness is gained in which the division of self and other is minimal. But it is by no means, in either case, an empty or a negative state. The impression which so many mystics have given of negation or passivity springs, as Von Hügel declares, from an unusually large amount of actualized energy, an energy which is now penetrating and finding expression by every pore and fiber of the soul. The whole moral and spiritual creature expands and rests, yes: but this very rest is produced by action “unperceived because so fleet,” “so near, so all fulfilling; or rather by a tissue of single acts, mental, emotional, volitional, so finely interwoven, so exceptionally stimulative and expressive of the soul’s deepest aspirations, that these acts are not perceived as single acts, indeed that their very collective presence is apt to remain unnoticed by the soul itself.”[25] Wordsworth’s account passes almost unconsciously from appreciation of beauty into joyous apprehension of God and it is a wonderful self-revelation of fused consciousness which is positively affirmative.
“Sensation, soul and form