face to face with the Divine Presence; that mighty, healing,
loving, Fatherly life which is nearer to us than we are to ourselves.
There is soul contact with the Parent- Soul, and an influx of life,
love, virtue, health, and happiness from the Inexhaustible
Fountain."[63]

[63] HENRY Wood: Ideal suggestion through Mental Photography, pp. 51,
70 (abridged).

When we reach the subject of mysticism, you will undergo so deep an
immersion into these exalted states of consciousness as to be wet all
over, if I may so express myself; and the cold shiver of doubt with
which this little sprinkling may affect you will have long since passed
away-- doubt, I mean, as to whether all such writing be not mere
abstract talk and rhetoric set down pour encourager les autres. You
will then be convinced, I trust, that these states of consciousness of
"union" form a perfectly definite class of experiences, of which the
soul may occasionally partake, and which certain persons may live by in
a deeper sense than they live by anything else with which they have
acquaintance. This brings me to a general philosophical reflection
with which I should like to pass from the subject of
healthy-mindedness, and close a topic which I fear is already only too
long drawn out. It concerns the relation of all this systematized
healthy-mindedness and mind-cure religion to scientific method and the
scientific life.

In a later lecture I shall have to treat explicitly of the relation of
religion to science on the one hand, and to primeval savage thought on
the other. There are plenty of persons to-day--"scientists" or
"positivists," they are fond of calling themselves--who will tell you
that religious thought is a mere survival, an atavistic reversion to a
type of consciousness which humanity in its more enlightened examples
has long since left behind and out-grown. If you ask them to explain
themselves more fully, they will probably say that for primitive
thought everything is conceived of under the form of personality. The
savage thinks that things operate by personal forces, and for the sake
of individual ends. For him, even external nature obeys individual
needs and claims, just as if these were so many elementary powers. Now
science, on the other hand, these positivists say, has proved that
personality, so far from being an elementary force in nature, is but a
passive resultant of the really elementary forces, physical, chemical,
physiologi