some men it arrives suddenly, for others
gradually, whilst others again practically enjoy it all their life.

It seems to me that all the phenomena are accurately describable in
these very simple general terms.[350] They allow for the divided self
and the struggle; they involve the change of personal centre and the
surrender of the lower self; they express the appearance of exteriority
of the helping power and yet account for our sense of union with
it;[351] and they fully justify our feelings of security and joy.
There is probably no autobiographic document, among all those which I
have quoted, to which the description will not well apply. One need
only add such specific details as will adapt it to various theologies
and various personal temperaments, and one will then have the various
experiences reconstructed in their individual forms.

[350] The practical difficulties are: 1, to "realize the reality" of
one's higher part; 2, to identify one's self with it exclusively; and
3, to identify it with all the rest of ideal being.

[351] "When mystical activity is at its height, we find consciousness
possessed by the sense of a being at once EXCESSIVE and IDENTICAL with
the self: great enough to be God; interior enough to be ME. The
"objectivity" of it ought in that case to be called EXCESSIVITY,
rather, or exceedingness." ReCeJac: Essai sur les fondements de la
conscience mystique, 1897, p. 46.

So far, however, as this analysis goes, the experiences are only
psychological phenomena. They possess, it is true, enormous biological
worth. Spiritual strength really increases in the subject when he has
them, a new life opens for him, and they seem to him a place of conflux
where the forces of two universes meet; and yet this may be nothing but
his subjective way of feeling things, a mood of his own fancy, in spite
of the effects produced. I now turn to my second question: What is
the objective "truth" of their content?[352]

[352] The word "truth" is here taken to mean something additional to
bare value for life, although the natural propensity of man is to
believe that whatever has great value for life is thereby certified as
true.

The part of the content concerning which the question of truth most
pertinently arises is that "MORE of the same quality" with which our
own higher self appears in the experience to come into harmonious
working relation. Is such a "more" merely our own notion, or does