[Footnote 28:  Some of my readers may find satisfaction in the following passage of Jeremy Taylor:  “Indeed, when persons have long been softened with the continual droppings of religion, and their spirits made timorous and apt for impression by the assiduity of prayer, and the continual dyings of mortification—­the fancy, which is a very great instrument of devotion, is kept continually warm, and in a disposition and aptitude to take fire, and to flame out in great ascents; and when they suffer transportations beyond the burdens and support of reason, they suffer they know not what, and call it what they please.”  Henry More, too, says that those who would “make their whole nature desolate of all animal figurations whatever,” find only “a waste, silent solitude, and one uniform parchedness and vacuity.  And yet, while a man fancies himself thus wholly Divine, he is not aware how he is even then held down by his animal nature; and that it is nothing but the stillness and fixedness of melancholy that thus abuses him, instead of the true Divine principle.”]

[Footnote 29:  Plato, Phaedrus, 244, 245; Ion, 534.]

[Footnote 30:  Lacordaire, Conferences, xxxvii.]

[Footnote 31:  Compare, too, the vigorous words of Henry More, the most mystical of the group:  “He that misbelieves and lays aside clear and cautious reason in things that fall under the discussion of reason, upon the pretence of hankering after some higher principle (which, a thousand to one, proves but the infatuation of melancholy, and a superstitious hallucination), is as ridiculous as if he would not use his natural eyes about their proper object till the presence of some supernatural light, or till he had got a pair of spectacles made of the crystalline heaven, or of the caelum empyreum, to hang upon his nose for him to look through.”]

[Footnote 32:  There is, of course, a sense in which any strong feeling lifts us “above reason.”  But this is using “reason” in a loose manner.]

[Footnote 33:  [Greek:  ho nous basileus], says Plotinus.]

[Footnote 34:  Roman Catholic writers can assert that “la plupart des contemplatifs etaient depourvus de toute culture litteraire.”  But their notion of “contemplation” is the passive reception of “supernatural favours,”—­on which subject more will be said in Lectures IV. and VII.]

[Footnote 35:  “Die Mystik ist formlose Speculation,” Noack, Christliche Mystik, p. 18.]

[Footnote 36:  The Atomists, from Epicurus downwards, have been especially odious to the mystics.]

[Footnote 37:  The theory that time is real, but not space, leads us into grave difficulties.  It is the root of the least satisfactory kind of evolutionary optimism, which forgets, in the first place, that the idea of perpetual progress in time is hopelessly at variance with what we know of the destiny of the world; and, in the second place, that a mere progressus is meaningless.  Every created thing has its fixed goal in the realisation of the idea which was immanent in it from the first.]