Pure immanence is unthinkable, if we are to maintain
distinctions in things.... Strict 'immanence' doctrine tends towards
the monopsychism of Averroes.... Mysticism is often associated with
pantheism, but the religious character of Mysticism views everything
from the standpoint of teleology, while pantheism generally stops at
causality.... Mysticism, again, is often allied with rationalism, but
their ground-principles are different, for rationalism is deistic, and
rests on this earth, being based on the understanding [as opposed to
the higher faculty, the reason].... Nothing can be more perverse than
to accuse Mysticism of _vagueness_. Its danger is rather an
overvaluing of reason and knowledge.... Mysticism is only religious so
long as it remembers that we can here only see through a glass darkly;
when it tries to represent the eternal _adequately_, it falls into a
new and dangerous retranslation of thought into images, or into bare
negation.... Religion is a relation of person to person, a life, which
in its form is an analogy to the earthly, while its content is pure
relation to the eternal. Dogmatic is the skeleton, Mysticism the
life-blood, of the Christian body.... Since the Reformation,
philosophy has taken over most of the work which the speculative
mystics performed in the Middle Ages" (_Essay on the Essence and Value
of Mysticism_).

21. _Nordau_. "The word Mysticism describes a state of mind in which
the subject imagines that he perceives or divines unknown and
inexplicable relations among phenomena, discerns in things hints at
mysteries, and regards them as symbols by which a dark power seeks to
unveil, or at least to indicate, all sorts of marvels.... It is always
connected with strong emotional excitement.... Nearly all our
perceptions, ideas, and conceptions are connected more or less closely
through the association of ideas. But to make the association of ideas
fulfil its function, one more thing must be added--_attention_, which
is the faculty to suppress one part of the memory-images and maintain
another part." We must select the strongest and most direct images,
those directly connected with the afferent nerves; "this Ribot calls
adaptation of the whole organism to a predominant idea.... Attention
presupposes strength of will. Unrestricted play of association, the
result of an exhausted or degenerate brain, gives rise to Mysticism.
Since the mystic cannot express his cloudy thoughts in ordinary
langu