much as that unwholesome development of symbolic “science, falsely so called,” which has usurped the name in modern France.  Those who are interested in Mysticism should certainly study the pathological symptoms which counterfeit mystical states, and from this point of view the essay in Degeneration is valuable.  The observations of Nordau and other alienists must lead us to suspect very strongly the following kinds of symbolical representation, whether the symbols are borrowed from the external world, or created by the imagination:—­(a) All those which include images of a sexual character.  It is unnecessary to illustrate this.  The visions of monks and nuns are often, as we might expect, unconsciously tinged with a morbid element of this kind. (b) Those which depend on mere verbal resemblances or other fortuitous correspondences.  Nordau shows that the diseased brain is very ready to follow these false trains of association. (c) Those which are connected with the sense of smell, which seems to be morbidly developed in this kind of degeneracy. (d) Those which in any way minister to pride or self-sufficiency.

22. Harnack.  “Mysticism is rationalism applied to a sphere above reason.”

I have criticised this definition in my first Lecture, and have suggested that the words “rationalism” and “reason” ought to be transposed.  Elsewhere Harnack says that the distinctions between “Scholastic, Roman, German, Catholic, Evangelical, and Pantheistic Mysticism” are at best superficial, and in particular that it is a mistake to contrast “Scholasticism and Mysticism” as opposing forces in the Middle Ages.  “Mysticism,” he proceeds, “is Catholic piety in general, so far as this piety is not merely ecclesiastical obedience, that is, fides implicita.  The Reformation element which is ascribed to it lies simply in this, that Mysticism, when developed in a particular direction, is led to discern the inherent responsibility of the soul, of which no authority can again deprive it.”  The conflicts between Mysticism and Church authority, he thinks, in no way militate against both being Catholic ideals, just as asceticism and world-supremacy are both Catholic ideals, though contradictory.  The German mystics he disparages.  “I give no extracts from their writings,” he says, “because I do not wish even to seem to countenance the error that they expressed anything that one cannot read in Origen, Plotinus, the Areopagite, Augustine, Erigena, Bernard, and Thomas, or that they represented religious progress.”  “It will never be possible to make Mysticism Protestant without flying in the face of history and Catholicism.”  “A mystic who does not become a Catholic is a dilettante.”

Before considering these statements, I will quote from another attack upon Mysticism by a writer whose general views are very similar to those of Harnack.