18. Charles Kingsley.  “The great Mysticism is the belief which is becoming every day stronger with me, that all symmetrical natural objects are types of some spiritual truth or existence.  When I walk the fields, I am oppressed now and then with an innate feeling that everything I see has a meaning, if I could but understand it.  And this feeling of being surrounded with truths which I cannot grasp, amounts to indescribable awe sometimes.  Everything seems to be full of God’s reflex, if we could but see it.  Oh, how I have prayed to have the mystery unfolded, at least hereafter!  To see, if but for a moment, the whole harmony of the great system!  To hear once the music which the whole universe makes as it performs His bidding!  Oh, that heaven!  The thought of the first glance of creation from thence, when we know even as we are known.  And He, the glorious, the beautiful, the incarnate Ideal shall be justified in all His doings, and in all, and through all, and over all....  All day, glimpses from the other world, floating motes from that inner transcendental life, have been floating across me....  Have you not felt that your real soul was imperceptible to your mental vision, except at a few hallowed moments?  That in everyday life the mind, looking at itself, sees only the brute intellect, grinding and working, not the Divine particle, which is life and immortality, and on which the Spirit of God most probably works, as being most cognate to Deity” (Life, vol. i. p. 55).  Again he says:  “This earth is the next greatest fact to that of God’s existence.”

Kingsley’s review of Vaughan’s Hours with the Mystics shows that he retained his sympathy with Mysticism at a later period of his life.  It would be impossible to find any consistent idealistic philosophy in Kingsley’s writings; but the sentences above quoted are interesting as a profession of faith in Mysticism of the objective type.

19. R.L.  Nettleship.  “The cure for a wrong Mysticism is to realise the facts, not particular facts or aspects of facts, but the whole fact:  true Mysticism is the consciousness that everything that we experience is an element, and only an element, in fact; i.e. that in being what it is, it is symbolic of something more.”

The obiter dicta on Mysticism in Nettleship’s Remains are of great value.

20. Lasson.  “The essence of Mysticism is the assertion of an intuition which transcends the temporal categories of the understanding, relying on speculative reason.  Rationalism cannot conduct us to the essence of things; we therefore need intellectual vision.  But Mysticism is not content with symbolic knowledge, and aspires to see the Absolute by pure spiritual apprehension....  There is a contradiction in regarding God as the immanent Essence of all things, and yet as an abstraction transcending all things.  But it is inevitable.  Pure immanence is unthinkable,