ower
of despising.

And now we pass to the third and most intangible region of the spirit,
the region that I will call the mystical region. This is in a sense
akin to the aesthetic region, because it partly consists in the
appreciation of beauty in ethical things. Here the danger of the vivid
personality is to let his preferences be his guide, and to contemn
certain types of character, certain qualities, certain modes of
thought, certain points of view. Here again one's duty is plain. It is
the resolute avoidance of the critical attitude, the attempt to
disentangle the golden thread, the nobility, the purity, the strength,
the intensity, that may underlie characters and views that do not
superficially appeal to oneself. The philosopher need not seek the
society of uncongenial persons: such a practice is a useless
expenditure of time and energy; but no one can avoid a certain contact
with dissimilar natures, and the aim of the philosopher must be to try
and do sympathetic justice to them, to seek earnestly for points of
contact, rather than to attempt to emphasize differences. For instance,
if the philosopher is thrown into the society of a man who can talk
nothing but motor jargon or golfing shop--I select the instances of the
conversation that is personally to me the dreariest--he need not
attempt to talk of golf or motors, and he is equally bound not to
discourse of his own chosen intellectual interests; but he ought to
endeavour to find a common region, in which he can meet the golfer or
the motorist without mutual dreariness.

Perhaps it may be thought that I have drifted out of the mystical
region, but it is not so, for the relations of human beings with each
other appear to me to belong to this region. The strange affinities and
hostilities of temperament, the inexplicable and undeniable thing
called charm, the attraction and repulsion of character--all this is in
the mystical region of the spirit, the region of intuition and
instinct, which is a far stronger, more vital, and more general region
than the intellectual or the artistic. And further, there comes the
deepest intuition of all, the relation of the human spirit to its
Maker, its originating cause. Whether this relation can be a direct one
is a matter for each person to decide from his own experience; but
perhaps the only two things of which a human being can be said to be
absolutely conscious are his own identity, and the existence of a
controlling Pow