They have
been a good deal discussed of late by psychologists. See, for example,
Bernard-Leroy: L'Illusion de Fausse Reconnaissance, Paris, 1898.

Somewhat deeper plunges into mystical consciousness are met with in yet
other dreamy states. Such feelings as these which Charles Kingsley
describes are surely far from being uncommon, especially in youth:--

"When I walk the fields, I am oppressed now and then with an innate
feeling that everything I see has a meaning, if I could but understand
it. And this feeling of being surrounded with truths which I cannot
grasp amounts to indescribable awe sometimes.... Have you not felt
that your real soul was imperceptible to your mental vision, except in
a few hallowed moments?"[230]

[230] Charles Kingsley's Life, i. 55, quoted by Inge: Christian
Mysticism, London, 1899, p. 341.

A much more extreme state of mystical consciousness is described by J.
A. Symonds; and probably more persons than we suspect could give
parallels to it from their own experience.

"Suddenly," writes Symonds, "at church, or in company, or when I was
reading, and always, I think, when my muscles were at rest, I felt the
approach of the mood. Irresistibly it took possession of my mind and
will, lasted what seemed an eternity, and disappeared in a series of
rapid sensations which resembled the awakening from anaesthetic
influence. One reason why I disliked this kind of trance was that I
could not describe it to myself. I cannot even now find words to render
it intelligible. It consisted in a gradual but swiftly progressive
obliteration of space, time, sensation, and the multitudinous factors
of experience which seem to qualify what we are pleased to call our
Self. In proportion as these conditions of ordinary consciousness were
subtracted, the sense of an underlying or essential consciousness
acquired intensity. At last nothing remained but a pure, absolute,
abstract Self. The universe became without form and void of content.
But Self persisted, formidable in its vivid keenness, feeling the most
poignant doubt about reality, ready, as it seemed, to find existence
break as breaks a bubble round about it. And what then? The
apprehension of a coming dissolution, the grim conviction that this
state was the last state of the conscious Self, the sense that I had
followed the last thread of being to the verge of the abyss, and had
arrived at demonstration of eternal Maya or illusion, stirre