knowledge the
self is expanded and enriched without being left behind. The mystical
experience proper to this philosophy is the consciousness of identity,
together with the sense of universal immanence. The individual self may
be directly sensible of the absolute self, for these are one spiritual
life. Thus Emerson says:

"It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns,
that beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious
intellect he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect
doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things;
that beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there
is a great public power upon which he can draw, by unlocking,
at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal
tides to roll and circulate through him; then he is caught up
into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his
thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as
the plants and animals. The poet knows that he speaks
adequately then only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or 'with
the flower of the mind'; not with the intellect used as an
organ, but with the intellect released from all service and
suffered to take its direction from its celestial
life."[393:14]

[Sidenote: The Religion of Exuberant Spirituality.]

Sect. 194. But the distinguishing flavor and quality of this religion
arises from its spiritual hospitality. It is not, like Platonism, a
contemplation of the best; nor, like pluralistic idealisms, a moral
knight-errantry. It is neither a religion of exclusion, nor a religion
of reconstruction, but a profound willingness that things should be as
they really are. For this reason its devotees have recognized in Spinoza
their true forerunner. But idealism is not Spinozism, though it may
contain this as one of its strains. For it is not the worship of
necessity, Emerson's "beautiful necessity, which makes man brave in
believing that he cannot shun a danger that is appointed, nor incur one
that is not"; but the worship of _that which is_ necessary.

Not only must one understand that every effort, however despairing, is
an element of sense in the universal significance;

"that the whole would not be what it is were not precisely
this finite purpose left in its own uniqueness to speak
precisely its own word--a word which no other purpose can
speak in the language of the