schools, is much less unanimous than I have allowed. It has been both
ascetic and antinomianly self-indulgent within the Christian
church.[283] It is dualistic in Sankhya, and monistic in Vedanta
philosophy. I called it pantheistic; but the great Spanish mystics are
anything but pantheists. They are with few exceptions non-metaphysical
minds, for whom "the category of personality" is absolute. The "union"
of man with God is for them much more like an occasional miracle than
like an original identity.[284] How different again, apart from the
happiness common to all, is the mysticism of Walt Whitman, Edward
Carpenter, Richard Jefferies, and other naturalistic pantheists, from
the more distinctively Christian sort.[285] The fact is that the
mystical feeling of enlargement, union, and emancipation has no
specific intellectual content whatever of its own. It is capable of
forming matrimonial alliances with material furnished by the most
diverse philosophies and theologies, provided only they can find a
place in their framework for its peculiar emotional mood. We have no
right, therefore, to invoke its prestige as distinctively in favor of
any special belief, such as that in absolute idealism, or in the
absolute monistic identity, or in the absolute goodness, of the world.
It is only relatively in favor of all these things--it passes out of
common human consciousness in the direction in which they lie.

[283] Ruysbroeck, in the work which Maeterlinck has translated, has a
chapter against the antinomianism of disciples. H. Delacroix's book
(Essai sur le mysticisme speculatif en Allemagne au XIVme Siecle,
Paris, 1900) is full of antinomian material. compare also A. Jundt:
Les Amis de Dieu au XIV Siecle, These de Strasbourg, 1879.

[284] Compare Paul Rousselot: Les Mystiques Espagnols, Paris, 1869,
ch. xii.

[285] see Carpenter's Towards Democracy, especially the latter parts,
and Jefferies's wonderful and splendid mystic rhapsody, The Story of my
Heart.

So much for religious mysticism proper. But more remains to be told,
for religious mysticism is only one half of mysticism. The other half
has no accumulated traditions except those which the text-books on
insanity supply. Open any one of these, and you will find abundant
cases in which "mystical ideas" are cited as characteristic symptoms of
enfeebled or deluded states of mind. In delusional insanity, paranoia,
as they sometimes call it, we may have a D