,
however rare, follow perfectly definite psychological types.

[258] Saint Teresa discriminates between pain in which the body has a
part and pure spiritual pain (Interior Castle, 6th Abode, ch. xi.). As
for the bodily part in these celestial joys, she speaks of it as
"penetrating to the marrow of the bones, whilst earthly pleasures
affect only the surface of the senses. I think," she adds, "that this
is a just description, and I cannot make it better." Ibid., 5th
Abode, ch. i.

[259] Vie, p. 198.

To the medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested and
imitated hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and
a corporeal one of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these
pathological conditions have existed in many and possibly in all the
cases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of
the consciousness which they induce. To pass a spiritual judgment upon
these states, we must not content ourselves with superficial medical
talk, but inquire into their fruits for life.

Their fruits appear to have been various. Stupefaction, for one thing,
seems not to have been altogether absent as a result. You may remember
the helplessness in the kitchen and schoolroom of poor Margaret Mary
Alacoque. Many other ecstatics would have perished but for the care
taken of them by admiring followers. The "other-worldliness"
encouraged by the mystical consciousness makes this over-abstraction
from practical life peculiarly liable to befall mystics in whom the
character is naturally passive and the intellect feeble; but in
natively strong minds and characters we find quite opposite results.
The great Spanish mystics, who carried the habit of ecstasy as far as
it has often been carried, appear for the most part to have shown
indomitable spirit and energy, and all the more so for the trances in
which they indulged.

Saint Ignatius was a mystic, but his mysticism made him assuredly one
of the most powerfully practical human engines that ever lived. Saint
John of the Cross, writing of the intuitions and "touches" by which God
reaches the substance of the soul, tells us that--

"They enrich it marvelously. A single one of them may be sufficient to
abolish at a stroke certain imperfections of which the soul during its
whole life had vainly tried to rid itself, and to leave it adorned with
virtues and loaded with supernatural gifts. A single one of these
intoxicating consola