Finally, the mystic holds these views because he has lived through an experience which has forced him to this attitude of mind.  This is his distinguishing mark, this is what differentiates him alike from the theologian, the logician, the rationalist philosopher, and the man of science, for he bases his belief, not on revelation, logic, reason, or demonstrated facts, but on feeling, on intuitive inner knowledge.

He has felt, he has seen, and he is therefore convinced; but his experience does not convince any one else.  The mystic is somewhat in the position of a man who, in a world of blind men, has suddenly been granted sight, and who, gazing at the sunrise, and overwhelmed by the glory of it, tries, however falteringly, to convey to his fellows what he sees.  They, naturally, would be sceptical about it, and would be inclined to say that he is talking foolishly and incoherently.  But the simile is not altogether parallel.  There is this difference.  The mystic is not alone; all through the ages we have the testimony of men and women to whom this vision has been granted, and the record of what they have seen is amazingly similar, considering the disparity of personality and circumstances.  And further, the world is not peopled with totally blind men.  The mystics would never hold the audience they do hold, were it not that the vast majority of people have in themselves what William James has called a “mystical germ” which makes response to their message.

James’s description of his own position in this matter, and his feeling for a “Beyond,” is one to which numberless “unmystical” people would subscribe.  He compares it to a tune that is always singing in the back of his mind, but which he can never identify nor whistle nor get rid of.  “It is,” he says, “very vague, and impossible to describe or put into words....  Especially at times of moral crisis it comes to me, as the sense of an unknown something backing me up.  It is most indefinite, to be sure, and rather faint.  And yet I know that if it should cease there would be a great hush, a great void in my life."[1]

This sensation, which many people experience vaguely and intermittently, and especially at times of emotional exaltation, would seem to be the first glimmerings of that secret power which, with the mystics, is so finely developed and sustained that it becomes their definite faculty of vision.  We have as yet no recognised name for this faculty, and it has been variously called “transcendental feeling,” “imagination,” “mystic reason,” “cosmic consciousness,” “divine sagacity,” “ecstasy,” or “vision,” all these meaning the same thing.  But although it lacks a common name, we have ample testimony to its existence, the testimony of the greatest teachers, philosophers, and poets of the world, who describe to us in strangely similar language—­