ose who honestly expect to see miracles
will generally see them, without detriment either to their
truthfulness or sanity in other matters.

The mystic, then, is not, as such, a visionary; nor has he any interest
in appealing to a faculty "above reason," if reason is used in its
proper sense, as the logic of the whole personality. The desire to find
for our highest intuitions an authority wholly external to reason and
independent of it,--a "purely supernatural" revelation,--has, as
Recejac says, "been the cause of the longest and the most dangerous of
the aberrations from which Mysticism has suffered." This kind of
supernaturalism is destructive of _unity_ in our ideas of God, the
world, and ourselves; and it casts a slur on the faculties which are the
appointed organs of communication between God and man. A revelation
absolutely transcending reason is an absurdity: no such revelation could
ever be made. In the striking phrase of Macarius, "the human mind is the
throne of the Godhead." The supremacy of the reason is the favourite
theme of the Cambridge Platonists, two of whom, Whichcote and Culverwel,
are never tired of quoting the text, "The spirit of man is the candle of
the Lord." "Sir, I oppose not rational to spiritual," writes Whichcote
to Tuckney, "for spiritual is most rational." And again, "Reason is the
Divine governor of man's life: it is the very voice of God.[31]" What we
can and must transcend, if we would make any progress in Divine
knowledge, is not reason, but that shallow rationalism which regards the
data on which we can reason as a fixed quantity, known to all, and which
bases itself on a formal logic, utterly unsuited to a spiritual view of
things. Language can only furnish us with poor, misleading, and wholly
inadequate images of spiritual facts; it supplies us with abstractions
and metaphors, which do not really represent what we know or believe
about God and human personality. St. Paul calls attention to this
inadequacy by a series of formal contradictions: "I live, yet not I";
"dying, and behold we live"; "when I am weak, then I am strong," and so
forth; and we find exactly the same expedient in Plotinus, who is very
fond of thus showing his contempt for the logic of identity. When,
therefore, Harnack says that "Mysticism is nothing else than rationalism
applied to a sphere above reason," he would have done better to say that
it is "reason applied to a sphere above rationalism.[32]"

For Reason