tists, Fenelon, Madame Guyon, and Antoinette Bourignon.

When, however, he was about forty-six (c. 1733), he came across the
writings of the seer who set his whole nature aglow with spiritual
fervour, so that when he first read his works they put him into "a
perfect sweat." Jacob Boehme--or Behmen, as he has usually been called
in England--(1575-1624), the illiterate and untrained peasant shoemaker
of Goerlitz, is one of the most amazing phenomena in the history of
mysticism, a history which does not lack wonders. His work has so much
influenced later mystical thought and philosophy that a little space
must be devoted to him here. He lived outwardly the quiet, hard-working
life of a simple German peasant, but inwardly--like his fellow-seer
Blake--he lived in a glory of illumination, which by flashes revealed to
him the mysteries and splendours he tries in broken and faltering words
to record. He saw with the eye of his mind into the heart of things, and
he wrote down as much of it as he could express.

The older mystics--eastern and western alike--had laid stress on unity
as seen in the nature of God and all things. No one more fully believed
in ultimate unity than did Boehme, but he lays peculiar stress on the
duality, or more accurately, the trinity in unity; and the central point
of his philosophy is the fundamental postulate that all manifestation
necessitates opposition. He asserted the uniformity of law throughout
all existence, physical and spiritual, and this law, which applies all
through nature, divine and human alike, is that nothing can reveal
itself without resistance, good can only be known through evil, and
weakness through strength, just as light is only visible when reflected
by a dark body.

Thus when God, the Triune Principle, or _Will_ under three aspects,
desires to become manifest, He divides the Will into two, the "yes" and
the "no," and so founds an eternal contrast to Himself out of His own
hidden Nature, in order to enter into struggle with it, and finally to
discipline and assimilate it. The object of all manifested nature is the
transforming of the will which says "No" into the will which says "Yes,"
and this is brought about by seven organising spirits or forms. The
first three of these bring nature out of the dark element to the point
where contact with the light is possible. Boehme calls them harshness,
attraction, and anguish, which in modern terms are contraction,
expansion, and rotati