egins when thought ceases, _to our consciousness_,
to proceed from ourselves. It differs from dreaming, because the
subject is awake. It differs from hallucination, because there is no
organic disturbance: it is, or claims to be, a temporary enhancement,
not a partial disintegration, of the mental faculties. Lastly, it
differs from poetical inspiration, because the imagination is passive.

That perfectly sane people often experience such visions there is no
manner of doubt. St. Paul fell into a trance at his conversion, and
again at a later period, when he seemed to be caught up into the third
heaven. The most sober and practical of the mediaeval mystics speak of
them as common phenomena. And in modern times two of the sanest of our
poets have recorded their experiences in words which may be worth
quoting.

Wordsworth, in his well-known "Lines composed above Tintern Abbey,"
speaks of--

"That serene and blessed mood,
In which ... the breath of this corporeal frame,
And even the motion of our human blood,
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things."

And Tennyson says,[24] "A kind of waking trance I have often had,
quite from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally
come upon me through repeating my own name two or three times to
myself silently, till all at once, out of the intensity of the
consciousness of individuality, the individual itself seemed to
dissolve and fade away into boundless being: and this not a confused
state, but the clearest of the clearest, and the surest of the surest,
the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was an
almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it
were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life."

Admitting, then, that these psychical phenomena actually occur, we
have to consider whether ecstasy and kindred states are an integral
part of Mysticism. In attempting to answer this question, we shall
find it convenient to distinguish between the Neoplatonic vision of
the super-essential One, the Absolute, which Plotinus enjoyed several
times, and Porphyry only once, and the visions and "locutions" which
are reported in all times and places, especially where people have not
been trained in scientific habits of thought and observation. The
former was