But this cannot be said of the leaders.  Christian Mysticism appears in history largely as an intellectual movement, the foster-child of Platonic idealism; and if ever, for a time, it forgot its early history, men were soon found to bring it back to “its old loving nurse the Platonic philosophy.”  It will be my task, in the third and fourth Lectures of this course, to show how speculative Christian Mysticism grew out of Neoplatonism; but we shall not be allowed to forget the Platonists even in the later Lectures.  “The fire still burns on the altars of Plotinus,” as Eunapius said.

Mysticism is not itself a philosophy, any more than it is itself a religion.  On its intellectual side it has been called “formless speculation.[35]” But until speculations or intuitions have entered into the forms of our thought, they are not current coin even for the thinker.  The part played by Mysticism in philosophy is parallel to the part played by it in religion.  As in religion it appears in revolt against dry formalism and cold rationalism, so in philosophy it takes the field against materialism and scepticism.[36] It is thus possible to speak of speculative Mysticism, and even to indicate certain idealistic lines of thought, which may without entire falsity be called the philosophy of Mysticism.  In this introductory Lecture I can, of course, only hint at these in the barest and most summary manner.  And it must be remembered that I have undertaken to-day to delineate the general characteristics of Mysticism, not of Christian Mysticism.  I am trying, moreover, in this Lecture to confine myself to those developments which I consider normal and genuine, excluding the numerous aberrant types which we shall encounter in the course of our survey.

The real world, according to thinkers of this school, is created by the thought and will of God, and exists in His mind.  It is therefore spiritual, and above space and time, which are only the forms under which reality is set out as a process.

When we try to represent to our minds the highest reality, the spiritual world, as distinguished from the world of appearance, we are obliged to form images; and we can hardly avoid choosing one of the following three images.  We may regard the spiritual world as endless duration opposed to transitoriness, as infinite extension opposed to limitation in space, or as substance opposed to shadow.  All these are, strictly speaking, symbols or metaphors,[37] for we cannot regard any of them as literally true statements about the nature of reality; but they are as near the truth as we can get in words.  But when we think of time as a piece cut off from the beginning of eternity, so that eternity is only in the future and not in the present; when we think of heaven as a place somewhere else, and therefore not here; when we think of an upper ideal world which has sucked all the life out of this, so that we now walk in a vain shadow,—­then we are paying the penalty