iplines. Its
revelations were to him all sufficient, for having found God therein he
asked for nothing beside.

Wherein, then, is this new mysticism, or better, this new cult of the
inner life different from the old? It is not easy to answer that
question in a paragraph, though it is easy to feel the answer in any
comparison of the great classics of mysticism--which are mostly
spiritual autobiographies--and New Thought literature. To turn from St.
Augustine to Dresser, or from St. Theresa to Trine is to change
spiritual and intellectual climates. There is in the modern literature
little reflection of such spiritual struggle as fills the great
Confessions with the agony of embattled souls, nor any resolution of
such struggle into the peace of a soul "fully awake as regards God but
wholly asleep as regards things of this world and in respect of
herself." This testimony of St. Theresa is illuminating as a contrasting
background for New Thought. There the soul is very much awake, both as
regards things of this world and in respect of herself.

These new cults of the inner life are far more self-conscious than the
old and far more self-analytical. They seek to discern the laws in
answer to which they act and utilize those laws in the practical conduct
of life. They are always either appealing to underlying philosophies or
else trying to make a philosophy of their own. Mysticism made
everything of God and nothing of itself. It plotted its mystic way but
knew nothing of psychology. New Thought seeks to discover in psychology
a road to God. The centers of mysticism were emotional; the centers of
New Thought are intellectual. All these cults are far more akin to
Gnosticism than mysticism, though they are saved, yet not wholly, from
the lawlessness of Gnosticism by a pretty constant return to the
outstanding conclusions of science and philosophy.

_Spinoza's Quest_

Now if we seek to discover the real genesis of the movement and trace
its development we would better begin, so deep are the roots of things,
with Spinoza rather than Quimby. Here the deeper currents, upon the
surface of which New Thought moves, take their rise and here also we
return to Royce's phrase--"the rediscovery of the inner life"--and the
philosopher who inaugurated the philosophic quest for just this
discovery.

Spinoza was one of the last of the mystics and the first of the modern
philosophers. He shared with the mystics of an earlier time a consumi