enomena which claim no special
religious significance, and end with those of which the religious
pretensions are extreme.

The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that
deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which
occasionally sweeps over one. "I've heard that said all my life," we
exclaim, "but I never realized its full meaning until now." "When a
fellow-monk," said Luther, "one day repeated the words of the Creed:
'I believe in the forgiveness of sins,' I saw the Scripture in an
entirely new light; and straightway I felt as if I were born anew. It
was as if I had found the door of paradise thrown wide open."[226] This
sense of deeper significance is not confined to rational propositions.
Single words,[227] and conjunctions of words, effects of light on land
and sea, odors and musical sounds, all bring it when the mind is tuned
aright. Most of us can remember the strangely moving power of passages
in certain poems read when we were young, irrational doorways as they
were through which the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of
life, stole into our hearts and thrilled them. The words have now
perhaps become mere polished surfaces for us; but lyric poetry and
music are alive and significant only in proportion as they fetch these
vague vistas of a life continuous with our own, beckoning and inviting,
yet ever eluding our pursuit. We are alive or dead to the eternal
inner message of the arts according as we have kept or lost this
mystical susceptibility.

[226] Newman's Securus judicat orbis terrarum is another instance.

[227] "Mesopotamia" is the stock comic instance.--An excellent Old
German lady, who had done some traveling in her day, used to describe
to me her Sehnsucht that she might yet visit "Philadelphia," whose
wondrous name had always haunted her imagination. Of John Foster it is
said that "single words (as chalcedony), or the names of ancient
heroes, had a mighty fascination over him. 'At any time the word
hermit was enough to transport him.' The words woods and forests would
produce the most powerful emotion." Foster's Life, by Ryland, New
York, 1846, p. 3.

A more pronounced step forward on the mystical ladder is found in an
extremely frequent phenomenon, that sudden feeling, namely, which
sometimes sweeps over us, of having "been here before," as if at some
indefinite past time, in just this place, with just these people, we
were already saying