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MYSTICISM.1

BY W. S. LILLY.

I PROPOSE in this article to tell you a little about Mysticism. Many people in the world, perhaps most, would regard this as equivalent to an announcement that I am going to talk nonsense. Mr. Carlyle has somewhere remarked that when a man speaks to us about a matter which is foreign to our usual thoughts, we are apt, in self-defence as it were, to label him a mystic, by which we mean privately-even if we are too polite to say so openly-a dunce. Should there be any here who, at the outset, are inclined to regard me with this sort of suspicion, let me beg of them to be patient awhile. I shall hope to show them before I have done that Mysticism, so far from being nonsense, is the highest and best sense.

Now, we English like to go by the facts. To do so, we are assured on all hands, is the one path of safety. I am not disposed to deny that; only I claim to take in all the facts, and not one class only arbitrarily selected. Let us go by experience by all means. But we must take the totality of experience. Let us consider, then, a little the facts of life-of everyday life—as we all lead it. I remember some verses of Matthew Arnold-they come from his very beautiful poem Rugby Chapel-which give a striking picture of that everyday life :

"What is the course of the life
Of mortal men on the earth?

Most men eddy about

Here and there eat and drink,
Chatter and love and hate,

Gather and squander, are raised
Aloft, are hurled in the dust,
Striving blindly, achieving
Nothing; and then they die-
Perish and no one asks
Who or what they have been ;
More than he asks what waves
In the moonlit solitude wild

Of the midmost ocean have swelled,
Foamed for a moment, and gone."

1 When I was asked to address the South Place Institute on Mysticism, I was not aware that it was intended to publish my words, and so I did not reduce to writing what I proposed to say. The following pages, dictated from memory subsequently to the delivery of my lecture, give, I believe, a tolerably close account of it. I ought to remark that ĺ employ the term Mysticism, not in the proper theological sense, but in the popular sense -put upon it, as I suppose, by those who invited me to speak-the sense, namely, of supersensuous knowledge. No one can regret more than I the confusion of tongues which prevails here, as elsewhere, in the terminology of the present day. A feeling of the Infinite is one thing; a cognition is another.

How true a picture it is of the lives of most! How true, in different degrees, of the lives of all! What "a poor play," as another poet of a different order has told us, life is, if we look upon it in its merely material aspects! "Doth not our life consist of the four elements ?" asks Sir Toby, in Twelfth Night. "Nay," replies Sir Andrew Aguecheek, "I think it consists rather of eating and drinking." This witness is true. Deeply corporealized, imprisoned by the senses, we resemble those unhappy men of whom Plato tells us in his famous apologue, which I dare say many of you remember. There they sit, and have sat since childhood, those miserable captives, in their underground cavernous prison, with no opening save one above towards the light, fast bound in misery and iron, not able so much as to turn their heads round, and so seeing nothing but what is straight before them. At a distance above and behind them, a bright fire burns, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way, with a low wall built along it, like the screens which the marionette players in ancient Greece put up in front of their audiences, and above which they were wont to display their puppets. Behind this wall, walk a number of persons bearing vessels and images of wood and stone and various other materials, talking as they go; and the captives, sitting without the power of turning their heads, see their own shadows-which is all they see of themselves and each other—and the shadows cast by these objects upon the part of the cavern facing them, and hear the voices thence reverberated, for there is an echo in their prison-house. And they refer these voices, not to the unseen passers-by, of whom they have no knowledge, but to the passing shadows, which they take for realities. Strange and weird conception! But how true an image of human life until we are enfranchised from the chains of sense. Yes; Emerson has well said, in words which may fitly serve as the interpretation of this Platonic parable: "Indeed, we are but shadows, we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream, till the heart be touched. That touch creates us then we begin to be; thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of Eternity." "Until the heart be touched." It is that touch that sets us free; which rids us of illusions about the make and matter of the phenomenal world; which reveals to us what I may call the ideal the real being of a thing which causes it to be what it is.

Now this touch of the heart may come to us in many ways. I remember vividly how, in an autumn which seems as I speak to rise before me across the gulf of years, in all its sadness and sweetness, nature was first revealed to me as a living reality; a spirit speaking to my spirit; "a presence that is not to be put by." I can see now those magnificent woods through which I wandered, finding for the first time "tongues in the trees, books in the running brooks"; hearing for the first time in the moaning of the winds the elegy of the dying year-nay, the burial hymn of the world; reading for the first time the high moralities, the "thoughts that do lie too deep for tears" inscribed on the falling leaves and the fading flowers.

I dare say many in this room can remember a like awakening of their own inner life; and can enter into what Amiel has expressed in a very fine passage, which came into my mind as I was sitting this morning in my library, thinking about what I should say to you this afternoon. Writing at Lancy, in the early spring of 1852, he exclaims: "How are all things transfigured at a moment like this! The world is an allegory; the ideal is more real than any fact. Fairy tales and legends are as true as natural history; nay, truer, for as emblems they are more transparent. The only substance is the soul. What are all other things? Shadow, pretence, figure, symbol, and dream. Consciousness alone is immortal, objective, utterly real. The world is but a pyrotechnic display, a sublime panorama, intended to delight and educate the soul. Consciousness is a universe of which the soul is love."

Let me in this connection turn to a great English poet-great not only in his inspiration, but in his sobriety—who, more perhaps than any other poet, has realized the occult sympathy between the human soul and external nature. There is a fine passage in his "Excursion," which I must take leave to quote :

"Such was the boy--but for the growing youth
What soul was his, when, from the naked top
Of some bold headland, he beheld the sun

Rise up, and bathe the world in light! He looked-
Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth

And ocean's liquid mass, in gladness lay

Beneath him.-Far and wide the clouds were touched,
And in their silent faces could he read
Unutterable love. Sound needed none,
Nor any voice of joy; his spirit drank
The spectacle: sensation, soul, and form,
All melted into him; they swallowed up
His animal being; in them did he live,
And by them did he live; they were his life.
In such access of mind, in such high hour
Of visitation from the living God,

Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired.

No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request ;
Rapt into still communion that transcends
The imperfect offices of prayer and praise,
His mind was a thanksgiving to the power

That made him: it was blessedness and love!"

So much for External Nature as an instrument potent to touch the heart, as a revealing agency, as a path into the transcendental, as a means through which the Deity who works unseen behind it, pours trust and love which transform our own capabilities into realities." And now let us turn to Art, for which I claim the same high function. We rightly talk of artistic inspiration. The true artist is a seer. He is the man whose eyes are opened. The aim of the artist is to body forth, whatever be the instrument with which he works-be it the brush, the chisel, "the concord of sweet sounds," or "ordered words "-to body forth something which he discerns in the "high reason of his fancies" more clearly than other men.

I do not know who has better brought out this truth than Schopenhauerone of the finest and subtlest thinkers of the age, however much his system, as a whole, may repel us. The function of Art he considers is the deliverance of men from the chain of vulgar realities which binds us to the phenomenal world, by presenting the things that have veritable being, the permanent essential forms, immutable, and ever true. Thus do I account of Art in general, and of its high function in the life of man. I can s but glance at the subject and pass on. But let me, before I do pass on, read to you the august words in which the greatest living master of our language has expressed this view about one of the Arts-Music:

"Let us take another instance," says Cardinal Newman, "of an outward and earthly form, or economy, under which great wonders unknown seem to be typified; I mean musical sounds, as they are exhibited most perfectly in instrumental harmony. There are seven notes in the scale: make them fourteen, yet what a slender outfit for so vast an enterprise What science brings so much out of so little? Out of what poor elements does some great master in it create his new world! Shall we say that all this exuberant inventiveness is a mere ingenuity or trick of art, like some game or fashion of the day, without reality and without meaning? We may do so. To many men the very names which the science employs are utterly incomprehensible. To speak of an idea or a subject seems to be fanciful or trifling, to speak of the views which it opens upon us to be childish extravagance; yet is it possible that that inexhaustible evolution and disposition of notes, so rich yet so simple, so intricate yet so regulated, so various yet so majestic, should be a mere sound, which is gone, and perishes? "Can it be that those mysterious stirrings of heart. and keen emotions, and strange yearnings after we know not what, and awful impressions from we know not whence, should be wrought in us by what is unsubstantial, and comes and goes, and begins and ends, in itself? It is not so; it cannot be. No, they have escaped from some higher sphere; they are the outpourings of eternal harmony in the medium of created sound; they are echoes from our home; they are the voice of angels, or the Magnificat of saints, or the living laws of Divine governance, or the Divine attributes; something are they besides themselves which we cannot compass, which we cannot utter."

I go on to another instrument of our emancipation - Philosophy. Now the very object of all Philosophy worthy of that august name is the supersensuous. A mere system of speculative physics-like, let me say, Mr. Herbert Spencer's-however ingenious and interesting, I cannot account of as Philosophy at all. Philosophy is a theory of being, or speculative thought: its proper object to contemplate the world as a manifestation of spirit. As Hartmann truly says, it is essentially con cerned with the one feeling only to be mystically apprehended, namely, the relation of the individual with the Absolute. Its very function

is to raise man above the self of the senses and animal nature to approximate him to the Divine. Hence Aristotle, in speaking the praises of the life philosophic, is led to say: "If the gods in any way concern themselves with human affairs, as is indeed held to be the case, it is but reasonable to suppose that they should take pleasure in that which is of all things the highest and the most akin to the Divine nature; that is to say, the reason; and that to those who give all their love to this, and hold it in the highest honour, they should make some return of kindness, upon the ground that such men bestow their care upon that which they themselves hold dear, and that they act rightly herein and nobly. Now that it is of the philosopher that all this is pre-eminently true is almost self-evident."

I must not dwell further upon this high matter. Let me go on to another portal into the transcendental: those Emotions and Sentiments of Human Nature which are really symbols of something deeper; according to that fine saying of St. Bernard, "The more I know of myself, the more I know of God." Take the passion of love, for example, the most masterful and the most universal of all. I do not speak of that merely animal impulse which man has in common with moths and mollusca; but of love, as it actually exists among civilized men and women, transformed, in a greater or less degree, by the imaginative faculty. Well, what an instrument of emancipation from the senses love is!

for indeed I know

Of no more subtle master under heaven
Than is the maiden passion for a maid;
Not only to keep down the base in man,
But teach high thoughts and amiable words,
And love of truth, and all that makes a man.”

"To keep down the base, to teach high thoughts." Yes. Love lifts us above self. It opens for us the gates of the transcendental world. And so of other human emotions. Terror, like love, lets us into infinity. The effect of tragedy, the Greek philosophers held, was thus to work an intellectual purgation. "The dramatist shows us some elemental force of humanity, stripped of the accidents of time and place, working itself out in free conflict with other forces, and finally breaking itself against the eternal fact that no man can gain the world without losing himself. It is this catastrophe which makes the real tragedy of life; it is this that the tragic poet has the eye to see and the words to portray; and in proportion as we follow him in imagination, we come away from the spectacle with our hearts broken and purged, strengthened to face the fact and obey the law." I may affirm the same even more strongly of sorrow: ""Tis said that sorrow makes us wise." It is a great sacrament: the outward visible sign of an inward spiritual grace whereby we are taken-if but for a moment-beyond the veil. When we are led to submit our will to the Divine Goodness, trusting it in the dark, we break through into