say. Yet God has brought
prophetism near to men in giving them all a state analogous to it in
its principal characters. This state is sleep. If you were to tell a
man who was himself without experience of such a phenomenon that there
are people who at times swoon away so as to resemble dead men, and who
[in dreams] yet perceive things that are hidden, he would deny it [and
give his reasons]. Nevertheless, his arguments would be refuted by
actual experience. Wherefore, just as the understanding is a stage of
human life in which an eye opens to discern various intellectual
objects uncomprehended by sensation; just so in the prophetic the sight
is illumined by a light which uncovers hidden things and objects which
the intellect fails to reach. The chief properties of prophetism are
perceptible only during the transport, by those who embrace the Sufi
life. The prophet is endowed with qualities to which you possess
nothing analogous, and which consequently you cannot possibly
understand.

How should you know their true nature, since one knows only what one
can comprehend? But the transport which one attains by the method of
the Sufis is like an immediate perception, as if one touched the
objects with one's hand."[249]

[249] A. Schmolders: Essai sur les ecoles philosophiques chez les
Arabes, Paris, 1842, pp. 54-68, abridged.

This incommunicableness of the transport is the keynote of all
mysticism. Mystical truth exists for the individual who has the
transport, but for no one else. In this, as I have said, it resembles
the knowledge given to us in sensations more than that given by
conceptual thought. Thought, with its remoteness and abstractness, has
often enough in the history of philosophy been contrasted unfavorably
with sensation.

It is a commonplace of metaphysics that God's knowledge cannot be
discursive but must be intuitive, that is, must be constructed more
after the pattern of what in ourselves is called immediate feeling,
than after that of proposition and judgment. But our immediate
feelings have no content but what the five senses supply; and we have
seen and shall see again that mystics may emphatically deny that the
senses play any part in the very highest type of knowledge which their
transports yield.

In the Christian church there have always been mystics. Although many
of them have been viewed with suspicion, some have gained favor in the
eyes of the authorities. The experiences o