14. Pfleiderer.  “Mysticism is the immediate feeling of the unity of the self with God; it is nothing, therefore, but the fundamental feeling of religion, the religious life at its very heart and centre.  But what makes the mystical a special tendency inside religion, is the endeavour to fix the immediateness of the life in God as such, as abstracted from all intervening helps and channels whatever, and find a permanent abode in the abstract inwardness of the life of pious feeling.  In this God-intoxication, in which self and the world are alike forgotten, the subject knows himself to be in possession of the highest and fullest truth; but this truth is only possessed in the quite undeveloped, simple, and bare form of monotonous feeling; what truth the subject possesses is not filled up by any determination in which the simple unity might unfold itself, and it lacks therefore the clearness of knowledge, which is only attained when thought harmonises differences with unity.”

15. Professor A. Seth.  “Mysticism is a phase of thought, or rather, perhaps, of feeling, which from its very nature is hardly susceptible of exact definition.  It appears in connexion with the endeavour of the human mind to grasp the Divine essence or the ultimate reality of things, and to enjoy the blessedness of actual communion with the highest.  The first is the philosophic side of Mysticism; the second, its religious side.  The thought that is most intensely present with the mystic is that of a supreme, all-pervading, and indwelling Power, in whom all things are one.  Hence the speculative utterances of Mysticism are always more or less pantheistic in character.  On the practical side, Mysticism maintains the possibility of direct intercourse with this Being of beings.  God ceases to be an object, and becomes an experience.”

This carefully-worded statement of the essence of Mysticism is followed by a hostile criticism.  Professor Seth considers quietism the true conclusion from the mystic’s premisses.  “It is characteristic of Mysticism, that it does not distinguish between what is metaphorical and what is susceptible of a literal interpretation.  Hence it is prone to treat a relation of ethical harmony as if it were one of substantial identity or chemical fusion; and, taking the sensuous language of religious feeling literally, it bids the individual aim at nothing less than an interpenetration of essence.  And as this goal is unattainable while reason and the consciousness of self remain, the mystic begins to consider these as impediments to be thrown aside....  Hence Mysticism demands a faculty above reason, by which the subject shall be placed in immediate and complete union with the object of his desire, a union in which the consciousness of self has disappeared, and in which, therefore, subject and object are one.”  To this, I think, the mystic might answer:  “I know well that interpenetration and absorption are words which belong to the category of space, and are only