metaphors or symbols of the relation of the soul to God; but separateness, impenetrability, and isolation, which you affirm of the ego, belong to the same category, and are no whit less metaphorical.  The question is, which of the two sets of words best expresses the relation of the ransomed soul to its Redeemer?  In my opinion, your phrase ‘ethical harmony’ is altogether inadequate, while the New Testament expressions, ‘membership,’ ‘union,’ ‘indwelling,’ are as adequate as words can be.”  The rest of the criticism is directed against the “negative road,” which I have no wish to defend, since I cannot admit that it follows logically from the first principles of Mysticism.

16. Recejac.  “Mysticism is the tendency to approach the Absolute morally, and by means of symbols.”

Recejac’s very interesting Essai sur les Fondements de la Connaissance mystique has the great merit of emphasising the symbolic character of all mystical phenomena, and of putting all such experiences in their true place, as neither hallucinations nor invasions of the natural order, but symbols of a higher reality.  “Les apparitions et autres phenomenes mystiques n’existent que dans l’esprit du voyant, et ne perdent rien pour cela de leur prix ni de leur verite....  Et alors n’y a-t-il pas au fond des symboles autant d’etre que sous les phenomenes?  Bien plus encore:  car l’etre phenomenal, le reel, se pose dans la conscience par un enchainement de faits tellement successif que nous ne tenons jamais ‘le meme’; tandis que sous les symboles, si nous tenons quelque chose, c’est l’identique et le permanent.”  Recejac also insists with great force that the motive power of Mysticism is neither curiosity nor self-interest, but love:  the intrusion of alien motives is at once fatal to it.  “Its logic consists in having confidence in the rationality of the moral consciousness and its desires.”  This agrees with what I have said—­that Reason is, or should be, the logic of our entire personality, and that if Reason is so defined, it does not come into conflict with Mysticism.  Recejac also has much to say upon Free Will and Determinism.  He says that Mysticism is an alliance between the Practical Reason (which he identifies with “la Liberte”) and Imagination.  “Determinism is the opposite, not of ‘Liberty,’ but of ‘indifference.’  Liberty, as Fouillee says, is only a higher form of Determinism.”  “The modern idea of liberty, and the mystical conception of Divine will, may be reconciled in the same way as inspiration and reason, on condition that both are discovered in the same fact interior to us, and that, far from being opposed to each other, they are fused and distinguished together dans quelque implicite reellement present a la conscience.”  Recejac throughout appeals to Kant instead of to Hegel as his chief philosophical authority, in this differing from the majority of those who are in sympathy with Mysticism.

17. Bonchitte.  “Mysticism consists in giving to the spontaneity of the intelligence a larger part than to the other faculties.”