Introductory. Impossibility of completely abstracting from the theoretical form in the study of the experimental matter

Chapter XIV. The Two Final Problems: Mysticism and Pantheism. The Immanence of God, and Spiritual Personality, Human and Divine

We now come to the last two of our final difficulties and problems—the supposed or real relations between Inclusive or Exclusive Mysticism and Pantheism; and the question concerning the Immanence of God and Spiritual Personality, Human and Divine.

(1) A preliminary difficulty in this, our deepest, task arises from the fact that, whereas the evidences of a predominantly individual, personal, directly experimental kind, furnished by every at all deeply religious soul, have hitherto been all but completely overlooked by trained historical investigators, in favour of the study of the theological concepts and formulations accepted and transmitted by such souls, now the opposite extreme is tending to predominate, as in Prof. William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902, or in Prof. Weinel’s interesting study, The Effects of the Spirit and of the Spirits in the Sub-Apostolic Age, 1899. For here, as Prof. Bousset points out in connection with the latter book, we get an all but complete overlooking of the fact that, even in the most individual experience, there is always some intellectual framework or conception, some more or less traditional form, which had previously found lodgment in, and had been more or less accepted by, that soul; so that, though the experience itself, where at all deep, is never the mere precipitate of a conventionally accepted traditional intellectual form, it is nevertheless, even when more or less in conflict with this form, never completely independent of it.—Yet though we cannot discriminate in full detail, we can show certain peculiarities in the traditional Jewish, Mohammedan, Christian Mysticism to be not intrinsic to the Mystical apprehensions as such, but to come from the then prevalent philosophies which deflected those apprehensions in those particular ways.

(2) In view then of this inevitable inter-relation between the experimental, personal matter and the theoretical, traditional form, I shall first consider the Aristotelian and Neo-Platonist conceptions concerning the relations between the General and the Particular, between God and Individual Things, as being the two, partly rival yet largely similar, systems that, between them, have most profoundly influenced the intellectual starting-point, analysis, and formulation of those experiences; and shall try to show the special attraction and danger of these conceptions for the mystically religious temperament. I shall next discuss the conceptions as to the relations between God and the individual personality,—the Noûs, the Spirit, and the Soul,—which, still largely Aristotelian and Neo-Platonist, have even more profoundly commended themselves to those Mystics, since these conceptions so largely met some of those Mystics’ requirements, and indeed remain still, in part, the best analysis procurable. I shall, thirdly, face the question as to any intrinsic tendency to Pantheism in Mysticism as such, and as to the significance and the possible utility of any such tendency, keeping all fuller description of the right check upon it for my last chapter. And finally, I shall consider what degree and form of the Divine Immanence in the human soul, of direct Experience or Knowledge of God on the part of man, and of “Personality” in God, appear to result from the most careful analysis of the deepest religious consciousness, and from the requirements of the Sciences and of Life.