IABOLICAL mysticism, a sort
of religious mysticism turned upside down. The same sense of ineffable
importance in the smallest events, the same texts and words coming with
new meanings, the same voices and visions and leadings and missions,
the same controlling by extraneous powers; only this time the emotion
is pessimistic: instead of consolations we have desolations; the
meanings are dreadful; and the powers are enemies to life. It is
evident that from the point of view of their psychological mechanism,
the classic mysticism and these lower mysticisms spring from the same
mental level, from that great subliminal or transmarginal region of
which science is beginning to admit the existence, but of which so
little is really known. That region contains every kind of matter:
"seraph and snake" abide there side by side. To come from thence is no
infallible credential. What comes must be sifted and tested, and run
the gauntlet of confrontation with the total context of experience,
just like what comes from the outer world of sense. Its value must be
ascertained by empirical methods, so long as we are not mystics
ourselves.

Once more, then, I repeat that non-mystics are under no obligation to
acknowledge in mystical states a superior authority conferred on them
by their intrinsic nature.[286]

[286] In chapter i. of book ii. of his work Degeneration, "Max Nordau"
seeks to undermine all mysticism by exposing the weakness of the lower
kinds. Mysticism for him means any sudden perception of hidden
significance in things. He explains such perception by the abundant
uncompleted associations which experiences may arouse in a degenerate
brain. These give to him who has the experience a vague and vast sense
of its leading further, yet they awaken no definite or useful
consequent in his thought. The explanation is a plausible one for
certain sorts of feeling of significance, and other alienists
(Wernicke, for example, in his Grundriss der Psychiatrie, Theil ii.,
Leipzig, 1896) have explained "paranoiac" conditions by a laming of the
association-organ. But the higher mystical flights, with their
positiveness and abruptness, are surely products of no such merely
negative condition. It seems far more reasonable to ascribe them to
inroads from the subconscious life, of the cerebral activity
correlative to which we as yet know nothing.

3.

Yet, I repeat once more, the existence of mystical states absolutely
overthrows