were either drunk or mad.* It is the third method of divine inspiration, that of ecstatic intuition, which alone has vitality now among educated persons in civilized countries.

What, then, is the real nature of ecstatic intuition? Is it a clear and sure means of acquiring truths of the spiritual world, a genuinely divine illumination, and the means by which alone it is vouchsafed to man to learn them? At the outset, we have to take note of the fact that it is a state which is not peculiar to any one people, or to the disciples of any one religion. Brahmins and Mahometans, as well as Buddhists and Christians, indeed the votaries of all sorts and conditions of religion, have discovered and used the methods of inducing the abnormal state of the nervous system; all alike have perceived the necessity of abstracting the mind from the body, in order to enter into direct communion with God. The mode of the operation is in this wise: by intense and prolonged concentration of thought into one channel, the concentration being aided by fixing the gaze intently for some time on a particular spot-whether it be an external object such as a crucifix, or a particular part of the body such as the pit of the stomach-the suitably disposed mind is thrown eventually into an ecstasy in which sense and reason are suspended,

* "These men are filled with new wine" (Acts ii. 13).

conscious individuality lost in a transport which is felt as an absorption into the divine being, and ineffable truths revealed to the merged and enraptured soul, not by slow steps of discursive reason, but by immediate and instant intuition.*

Here we perceive plainly and may fitly note how great has been the progress of refinement in the means of supernatural intercourse; formerly it was thought that the god appeared visibly to the person and talked face to face with him, or that he took violent possession of his body, shaking it into convulsions and delirious ravings, which were the agitated utterances of his overwhelming inspiration; now it is only alleged that the mind rises during the ecstatic transport of the nervous system to such a state of exaltation and detachment, such an intense spiritualization of being, that a divine influx streams directly into it from on high, sanctifying and illuminating with celestial grace and light. It is not a state of definite thought or speech with God that is induced; it is a vague, diffusive state of blissful consciousness -the sweet fruition of God. However, the fundamental postulate is essentially the same in both cases: that certain extraordinary states of the nervous system,

* Usually the Brahmin devotee keeps on murmuring to himself or inaudibly pronouncing the mystical "Om," his mind concentrated the while on the deity, until at last even thinking is extinct, personal individuality lost, and the soul merged into the universal soul.

which cannot always be distinguished from morbid states, are the special occasions and conduits of a stream of divine influx into man.

essence, the spiritual ecstasy in

Whatever its inner

which a person is

carried out of himself by divine action has all the outward and visible characters of the ecstasy in which he is beside himself through morbid action.

It results naturally from the employment of the method of ecstatic intuition by the votaries of diverse religions that the revelations differ as the religions differ. The reason-transcending truths obtained in that way are Christian truths when Christians operate, and quite different truths when a holy dervish or Brahmin throws himself into a similar state of inspired trance. And the same thing is true of its use by two Christians of different habits of thought and feeling: St. Theresa's visions of God, for example, do not agree with the visions which Swedenborg had of Him, being indeed in some respects, especially in respect of the Trinity, quite contradictory; and the pious Unitarian's intuition of God lacks necessarily the Godhead of Christ. It is, indeed, the misfortune of the method that it is inevitably vitiated by the subjectivity of the individual, and thus fails to yield uniform results when used by the followers of different religions and the differently thinking followers of the same religion; however pure the divine stream which

T

flows into the medium, it does not flow out of him clear and unpolluted; each subject of supernatural illumination projects into it, from within, his particular system of the supernatural. And there is no possibility of eliminating the personal channel of infection and of getting directly at the pure fountain of inspiration. The result is that the doctrine of inspiration holds its ground as a vague theory, but is lost in morasses of contradictions and perplexities so soon as it is translated from its lofty and misty heights into the inspiration of particular dogmas.

Plotinus, the eminent founder of the school, if not of the principles, of Neoplatonism, enjoys high credit and reputation as an authority on the method of ecstatic perception. He, perhaps, was the first in Europe definitely to formularize it as a means of knowing the infinite, which, as he maintained justly, reason never can know, since reason cannot go beyond the finite; it being clearly not possible for a finite person to know the infinite without the finite becoming infinite. The infinite can be known only, then, by transcending the limitations of personality—that is, by the separation of the soul from its individual consciousness and its absorption into the infinite intelligence from which it emanated; and the extraordinary faculty by which the soul has the singular fortune to be able thus to escape from its personality and to

become identified temporarily with the infinite is ecstasy. This is not, like reason, a faculty of which the individual is always possessed; it is an occasional and passing state of mind springing out of a strong enthusiasm a sort of evanescent gleam of transcendental rapture; and its true significance is a temporary escape of the soul from the thrall of the body, a brief period of union of the divine spark within man with its infinite source.* Very fortunate, too, it is that the soul does not fail, when it comes back to its personality or self, to remember, in its finite capacity, the infinite which it could not know in that capacity; else how could Plotinus ever have known, and been able to describe to others, the trial and success of his method? For that which he was unable to know as an individual, he was able, as an individual, to recount his knowledge of; notwithstanding the obvious difficulty of the natural man to comprehend how an experience which was only possible to him when his soul was separated from its consciousness, and he was infinite, could have been other than as good as nonexistent to him as an experience, and as information to others, when he was again conscious and finite.

Of this unique and mysterious method of obtaining

* "Il n'y a qu'une chose nécessaire: posséder Dieu. . . . Il faut savoir se détacher de tout ce qu'on peut perdre, ne s'attacher absolument qu'à l'éternel et à l'absolu et savourer le reste comme un prêt, un usufruit." (Henri Frédéric Amiel, vol. i. p. 3.)