if we are to maintain distinctions in things....  Strict ‘immanence’ doctrine tends towards the monopsychism of Averroes....  Mysticism is often associated with pantheism, but the religious character of Mysticism views everything from the standpoint of teleology, while pantheism generally stops at causality....  Mysticism, again, is often allied with rationalism, but their ground-principles are different, for rationalism is deistic, and rests on this earth, being based on the understanding [as opposed to the higher faculty, the reason]....  Nothing can be more perverse than to accuse Mysticism of vagueness.  Its danger is rather an overvaluing of reason and knowledge....  Mysticism is only religious so long as it remembers that we can here only see through a glass darkly; when it tries to represent the eternal adequately, it falls into a new and dangerous retranslation of thought into images, or into bare negation....  Religion is a relation of person to person, a life, which in its form is an analogy to the earthly, while its content is pure relation to the eternal.  Dogmatic is the skeleton, Mysticism the life-blood, of the Christian body....  Since the Reformation, philosophy has taken over most of the work which the speculative mystics performed in the Middle Ages” (Essay on the Essence and Value of Mysticism).

21. Nordau.  “The word Mysticism describes a state of mind in which the subject imagines that he perceives or divines unknown and inexplicable relations among phenomena, discerns in things hints at mysteries, and regards them as symbols by which a dark power seeks to unveil, or at least to indicate, all sorts of marvels....  It is always connected with strong emotional excitement....  Nearly all our perceptions, ideas, and conceptions are connected more or less closely through the association of ideas.  But to make the association of ideas fulfil its function, one more thing must be added—­attention, which is the faculty to suppress one part of the memory-images and maintain another part.”  We must select the strongest and most direct images, those directly connected with the afferent nerves; “this Ribot calls adaptation of the whole organism to a predominant idea....  Attention presupposes strength of will.  Unrestricted play of association, the result of an exhausted or degenerate brain, gives rise to Mysticism.  Since the mystic cannot express his cloudy thoughts in ordinary language, he loves mutually exclusive expressions.  Mysticism blurs outlines, and makes the transparent opaque.”

The Germans have two words for what we call Mysticism—­Mystik and Mysticismus, the latter being generally dyslogistic.  The long chapter in Nordau’s Degeneration, entitled “Mysticism,” treats it throughout as a morbid state.  It will be observed that the last sentence quoted flatly contradicts one of the statements copied from Lasson’s essay.  But Nordau is not attacking religious Mysticism, so