the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and
ultimate dictators of what we may believe. As a rule, mystical states
merely add a supersensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of
consciousness. They are excitements like the emotions of love or
ambition, gifts to our spirit by means of which facts already
objectively before us fall into a new expressiveness and make a new
connection with our active life. They do not contradict these facts as
such, or deny anything that our senses have immediately seized.[287] It
is the rationalistic critic rather who plays the part of denier in the
controversy, and his denials have no strength, for there never can be a
state of facts to which new meaning may not truthfully be added,
provided the mind ascend to a more enveloping point of view. It must
always remain an open question whether mystical states may not possibly
be such superior points of view, windows through which the mind looks
out upon a more extensive and inclusive world. The difference of the
views seen from the different mystical windows need not prevent us from
entertaining this supposition. The wider world would in that case
prove to have a mixed constitution like that of this world, that is
all. It would have its celestial and its infernal regions, its
tempting and its saving moments, its valid experiences and its
counterfeit ones, just as our world has them; but it would be a wider
world all the same. We should have to use its experiences by selecting
and subordinating and substituting just as is our custom in this
ordinary naturalistic world; we should be liable to error just as we
are now; yet the counting in of that wider world of meanings, and the
serious dealing with it, might, in spite of all the perplexity, be
indispensable stages in our approach to the final fullness of the truth.

[287] They sometimes add subjective audita et visa to the facts, but as
these are usually interpreted as transmundane, they oblige no
alteration in the facts of sense.

In this shape, I think, we have to leave the subject. Mystical states
indeed wield no authority due simply to their being mystical states.
But the higher ones among them point in directions to which the
religious sentiments even of non- mystical men incline. They tell of
the supremacy of the ideal, of vastness, of union, of safety, and of
rest. They offer us HYPOTHESES, hypotheses which we may voluntarily
ignore, but which as thinkers we