eeped in
mystic ardour, and it possesses a charm, a melody of rhythm, and an
imaginative quality rarely to be found in his earlier work. It should be
read by those who would see Law under a little known aspect, and who do
not realise that we have an English mystic who expresses, with a
strength and beauty which Plotinus himself has rarely surpassed, the
longing of the soul for union with the Divine.

Burke, Coleridge, and Carlyle are three very different writers who are
alike in the mystical foundations of their belief, and who, through
their writings, for over a hundred years in England carry on the
mystical attitude and diffuse much mystical thought.

Burke, the greatest and most philosophic of English statesmen, was so
largely because of his mystic spirit and imagination. Much of the
greatness of his political pamphlets and speeches and of their enduring
value is owing to the fact that his arguments are based on a sense of
oneness and continuity, of oneness in the social organism and of
continuity in the spirit which animates it. He believes in a life in the
Universe, in a divine order, mysterious and inscrutable in origins and
in ends, of which man and society are a part.

This society is linked together in mutual service from the lowest to the
highest. "Society is indeed a contract," he says in a memorable passage,

It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a
partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of
such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it
becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but
between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are
to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause
in the great primaeval contract of eternal society, linking the
lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible
world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable
oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their
appointed place.

These are strange words for an English statesman to address to the
English public in the year 1790; the thought they embody seems more in
keeping with its surroundings when we hear it thundered out anew forty
years later by the raw Scotch preacher-philosopher in the chapter he
calls "Organic Filaments" in his odd but strangely stirring mystical
rhapsody, _Sartor Resartus_.

It is