on with an alleged
supersensible reality. That is, we are to achieve by a mental discipline
what the savage or the medieval monk achieved by coarser and more
obvious methods. To withdraw the mind from the normal influence of
everyday life is to expose it to the play of hallucination and delusion.
There is really no vital difference between unhealthy, solitary brooding
on a given subject and drugging the mind with hashish. This class of
modern mystic is one with the savage in an inability to recognise that
the illumination is the product of the discipline, not the mere
condition of its possession. Between the drug of the savage, the fasting
and self-torture of the medieval monk and the prayerful meditation of
the modern mystic, the difference is only that of changed times and
altered conditions. The method is the same throughout.

The truth of this has been well put by Tylor:--

"The religious beliefs of the lower races are in no small measure based
on the evidence of visions and dreams, regarded as actual intercourse
with spiritual being. From the earliest stages of culture we find
religion in close alliance with ecstatic physical conditions. These are
brought on by various means of interference with the healthy action of
body and mind, and it is scarcely needful to remind the reader that,
according to philosophic theories antecedent to those of modern
medicine, such morbid disturbances are explained as symptoms of divine
visitation, or at least of superhuman spirituality. Among the strongest
means of disturbing the functions of the mind so as to produce ecstatic
vision, is fasting, accompanied, as it usually is, with other
privations, and with prolonged solitary contemplation in the desert or
in the forest. Among the ordinary vicissitudes of savage life, the wild
hunter has many a time to try involuntarily the effects of such a life
for days together, and under these circumstances he soon comes to see
and talk with phantoms which are to him invisible spirits. The secret of
spiritual intercourse thus learnt, he has thence-forth but to reproduce
the cause in order to renew the effects."[22]

As a means, then, of strengthening and perpetuating a consciousness of
intercourse with the spiritual world, we have to reckon with, not merely
the accidental occurrence of abnormal nervous conditions, but with their
deliberate cultivation. The practice is world-wide, and persists in some
form or other in all ages. Thus we find the