This definition, with which should be compared the passage from J.P.  Ritcher, quoted in Lecture I., assumes that Mysticism may be treated as a branch of experimental psychology.  Du Prel attaches great importance to somnambulism and other kindred psychical phenomena, which (he thinks) give us glimpses of the inner world of our Ego, in many ways different from our waking consciousness.  “As the moon turns to us only half its orb, so our Ego.”  He distinguishes between the Ego and the subject.  The former will perish at death.  It arises from the free act of the subject, which enters the time-process as a discipline.  “The self-conscious Ego is a projection of the transcendental subject, and resembles it.”  “We should regard this earthly existence as a transitory phenomenal form in correspondence with our transcendental interest.”  “Conscience is transcendental nature.” (This last sentence suggests thoughts of great interest.) Du Prel shows how Schopenhauer’s pessimism may be made the basis of a higher optimism.  “The path of biological advance leads to the merging of the Ego in the subject.”  “The biological aim for the race coincides with the transcendental aim for the individual.”  “The whole content of Ethics is that the Ego must subserve the Subject.”  The disillusions of experience show that earthly life has no value for its own sake, and is only a means to an end; it follows that to make pleasure our end is the one fatal mistake in life.  These thoughts are mixed with speculations of much less value; for I cannot agree with Du Prel that we shall learn much about higher and deeper modes of life by studying abnormal and pathological states of the consciousness.

10. Goethe.  “Mysticism is the scholastic of the heart, the dialectic of the feelings.”

11. Noack.  “Mysticism is formless speculation.”

Noack’s definition is, perhaps, not very happily phrased, for the essence of Mysticism is not speculation but intuition; and when it begins to speculate, it is obliged at once to take to itself “forms.”  Even the ultimate goal of the via negativa is apprehended as “a kind of form of formlessness.”  Goethe’s definition regards Mysticism as a system of religion or philosophy, and from this point of view describes it accurately.

12. Ewald.  “Mystical theology begins by maintaining that man is fallen away from God, and craves to be again united with Him.”

13. Canon Overton.  “That we bear the image of God is the starting-point, one might almost say the postulate, of all Mysticism.  The complete union of the soul with God is the goal of all Mysticism.”