tement. It does not follow that every
hysterical person has the artistic temperament; for nervous instability
may be the outcome of nervous disease, epilepsy, insanity, or even simple
neuroticism in the parents. But so powerful is the influence of the
imagination over the body, that the vivid imagination connoted by the
artistic temperament controls the nervous system, and when it reaches a
certain intensity expresses itself in some abnormal way. And it is the
abnormal psychical condition that is of so much significance in
literature and philosophy.

This psychical condition is far commoner in the East than in the West.
Indeed in India, training in mystical insight goes by the name of Yoga.
{151a} The passive, contemplative temperament of the Oriental favours
this ecstatic condition.

"The science of the Sufis," says a Persian philosopher of the
eleventh century, {151b} "aims at detaching the heart from all that
is not God, and at giving to it for sole occupation the meditation of
the divine being. . . . Just as the understanding is a stage of
human life in which an eye opens to discuss various intellectual
objects uncomprehended by sensation; just so in the prophetic the
sight is illumined by a light which uncovers hidden things and
objects which the intellect fails to reach. The chief properties of
prophetism are perceptible only during the transport by those who
embrace the Sufi life. The prophet is endowed with qualities to
which you possess nothing analogous, and which consequently you
cannot possibly understand. How should you know their true
nature?--what one can comprehend? But the transport which one
attains by the method of the Sufis is like an immediate perception,
as if one touched the objects with one's hand."

It is worthy of note how that every ecstatic condition is marked by the
same characteristics; and in the confession of Jefferies, the admissions
of Tennyson, and in the utterance of religious mystics of every kind, two
factors detach themselves. The vision or state of mind is one of
expectant wonder. Something that cannot be communicated in words thrills
the entire being. That is one characteristic. The other is that this
exaltation, this revelation to the senses, is one that appeals wholly to
sensation. It can be felt; it cannot be apprehended by any intellectual
formulae. It can never be reduced to logical shape. And the