in that literal and realist sense in which they seem at first sight to have been written.  The first duty of a scholar who sets before himself to investigate the phenomena of “Mysticism” so called, should be to answer these questions:  Can there be a direct communication, above and beyond sense or consciousness, between the human spirit and God the Spirit?  And if so, what are its conditions, where its limits, to transcend which is to fall into “mysticism”?

And it is just this which Mr. Vaughan fails in doing.  In his sketch, for instance, of the Mysticism of India, he gives us a very clear and (save in two points) sound summary of that “round of notions, occurring to minds of similar make under similar circumstances,” which is “common to Mystics in ancient India and in modern Christendom.”

Summarily, I would say this Hindoo mysticism—­

(1) Lays claim to disinterested love as opposed to a mercenary religion;

(2) Reacts against the ceremonial prescription and pedantic literalism of the Vedas;

(3) Identifies, in its pantheism, subject and object, worshipper and worshipped;

(4) Aims at ultimate absorption in the Infinite;

(5) Inculcates, as the way to this dissolution, absolute passivity, withdrawal into the inmost self, cessation of all the powers:  giving recipes for procuring this beatific torpor or trance;

(6) Believes that eternity may thus be realised in time;

(7) Has its mythical miraculous pretensions, i.e. its theurgic department;

(8) And, finally, advises the learner in this kind of religion to submit himself implicitly to a spiritual guide—­his Guru.

Against the two latter articles we except.  The theurgic department of Mysticism—­unfortunately but too common—­seems to us always to have been (as it certainly was in neo-Platonism) the despairing return to that ceremonialism which it had begun by shaking off, when it was disappointed in reaching its high aim by its proper method.  The use of the Guru, or Father Confessor (which Mr. Vaughan confesses to be inconsistent with Mysticism), is to be explained in the same way—­he is a last refuge after disappointment.

But as for the first six counts.  Is the Hindoo mystic a worse or a better man for holding them?  Are they on the whole right or wrong?  Is not disinterested love nobler than a mercenary religion?  Is it not right to protest against ceremonial prescriptions, and to say, with the later prophets and psalmists of the Jews:  “Thinkest thou that He will eat bull’s flesh, and drink the blood of goats.  Sacrifice and burnt-offering Thou wouldst not . . .  I come to do thy will, O God!” What is, even, if he will look calmly into it, the “pantheistic identification of subject and object, worshipper and worshipped,” but the clumsy yet honest effort of the human mind to say to itself:  “Doing God’s will is the real end and aim of man?”