he marks of the slow accumulations of
spiritual experience, and they reveal the rich and penetrative
influence of the social group in which the mystic's inner life formed
and ripened. They have a history as all ideas do.

The real fact of the matter is, that the great mystics are religious
geniuses. They make their contribution to religion in ways similar to
those in which the geniuses in other fields raise the level of human
attainments and achievements. They swiftly seize upon and appreciate
the specific achievements of the race behind them; they are profoundly
sensitive to the aspirations of their time and to the deep-lying
currents of their age; they are suggestible in an acute degree, through
heightened interest, to certain ideas or truths or principles which
they synthesise by such leaps of insight that slow-footed logic seems
to be transcended. Then these unifying and intensifying experiences to
which they are subject give them irresistible conviction, "a surge of
certainty," a faith of the mountain-moving order, and an increasing
{xxv} dynamic of life which, in the best cases, is manifest in thoughts
and words and deeds. Their mystical experience seldom supplies them
with a new intellectual content which they communicate, but their
experience enables them rather to _see_ what they know, to get
possession of themselves, and to fuse their truth with the heat of
conviction. The mystical experience is thus a way of heightening life
and of increasing its dynamic quality rather than a way to new
knowledge.

The _negative way_, which has been such a prominent and prevailing
characteristic of historical mysticism that many writers have made it
the distinct and sufficient differentia of mysticism, has often
produced intensity and depth, but it is, nevertheless, a mark of the
limitation of this type of religion. The indescribable and
undifferentiated character of mystical experience is no doubt partly
responsible for the emphatic place which negation has held in
mysticism. The experience itself, which seems like "a flight of the
alone to the Alone," can be told in no words except those of negation.
"The mortal limit of the self" seems loosed, and the soul seems merged
into that which it forever seeks but which having found it cannot
utter. But the type of metaphysics through which most of the great
mystics of history have done their thinking and have made their
formulations is still further responsible for the